In a rare censorship reversal, Chinese streamer Tencent Video has undone its mangled cuts to the conclusion of David Fincher's 1999 cult classic.

This created lots of media attention and I think this might be worth mentioning, article itself is not that good.

    • ghost_laptop
      42·
      3 years ago

      To be fair there’s a difference when the adaptation is not true to the original and the same product being modified to adapt to a narrative.

      As a good example A Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone is an adaptation of Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa; they are totally different films that deal with totally different topics from totally different points of view, yet both are good. There are things that could have been improved in Fincher’s adaptation but I think at the same time it achieves a lot of other things.

      What there’s truly of hypocrite here is that the media is making China look like the devil in red, whereas in reality the amount of countries that modify, censor or ban films or other types of media is pretty common.

        • ghost_laptop
          13·
          3 years ago

          If they would have added a scene with real actors instead of a black screen and text they would have totally improved the film.

          • pingveno
            21·
            3 years ago

            No matter how much it could hypothetically be fleshed out, that ending is basically the equivalent of a poorly written “fix it” fan fic made by someone who gets upset when the government isn’t the hero.

    • pingveno
      21·
      3 years ago

      He only said that it coincidentally was somewhat closer to the ending he wrote. The Chinese censored version is just a bad ending. There’s a reason that Chinese people got upset when this was done. As for the author, he has said in other interviews like this one that he prefers the movie ending.

        • pingveno
          1·
          3 years ago

          Problem is, the Hollywood Reporter interview doesn’t actually endorse mangling the ending. It’s merely noting a superficial resemblance to the book. He never says that it’s closer to his vision. The movie was constructed to lead up to the original ending, not to the mangled version presented by Tencent.

          It’s worth noting that the Chinese censors reversed their decision not because Westerners were laughing at them, but because their own customers in China were outraged. There’s no need to justify Chinese censorship when it was so egregiously bad that they reversed themselves. It’s not fighting on behalf of the Chinese people, since they clearly weren’t happy with the decision.

            • pingveno
              1·
              3 years ago

              You seem to handwave the bias created in people’s minds since 1999, which is 22 years. So if something has been wrong since decades, should that wrong thing continue to happen? Is this your logic?

              It’s not wrong. It just has a different ending. One that worked visually much better than the original one did. This happens all the time in adaptations. Movies, TV, books, etc. have different strengths and weaknesses, so the plot has to be adjusted to fit. And you seem to be making the argument that this “fixed” the ending, when it really only bears a passing resemblance.

              I think you just hate China because it is cool among Western world.

              Why would I hate China for this? It doesn’t affect me or harm people substantially. For me, it’s just funny for how bad it is, in the same way as The Room is funny.

              If you want to bat back at the West, maybe echo a point he actually made in the interview: Fight Club has been banned in many places in the US, so China’s reaction isn’t that out of the norm.