Update

07/15/15: Review Revamp

I've made some major edits to my review of Mewtwo Strikes Back. Mostly it's just stylistic changes, because the writing of these reviews is really making me cringe these days; large chunks of it have been rewritten from scratch, and the rest has been fiddled with to a somewhat lesser degree. This also included updating it to be more in line with the later reviews in terms of keeping the synopsis as a synopsis and not going off on rants about things as they happen, instead leaving that for the Good and Bad sections at the end.

I'm planning to do some similar editing for the other reviews, or at least the earlier ones, in the coming days.

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Comments

My own messages will be signed as Butterfree, with the Admin label below my name. If someone signs as Butterfree without that label, it's probably not me.

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 07-15-15

Eh, to each his own. Personally I thought the old version was repetitive, overly wordy and unfocused.

[03/08/2015 19:18:35]

545
Commenting on: 07-15-15

This paragraph was much more powerful in the old version:

Though Mewtwo is the antagonist and gets regretfully little development during the actual film, his character is really quite compelling. He wants to believe he's equal to other living creatures, but feels inferior because he's an experiment, a creation of humans rather than of God, if you will. Since the only thing he is confident in (really, the only thing he truly knows about himself) is his powers, he latches on to this concept of strength as a meaningful measure of his worth as a living creature; this is also reinforced by what Giovanni taught him in the time he spent with Team Rocket. To prove himself, he decides he must show he is stronger than the original he was created from, thus vindicating his own existence: if the clone is more powerful than the original, the clone has to be at least as deserving of life. With this deranged worldview, he creates more clones, partly so that he won't be alone in being a clone and partly so that they can also show themselves to be stronger than the originals and strengthen the idea of clones in general being superior.

I feel the newer version of that diminished the point, whereas the old one drove it home succinctly.

[01/08/2015 15:19:26]

Shadow
Commenting on: 07-15-15

You make a good point about the purpose of a synopsis. And I understand wanting to revise - I'm always updating my own writing.

In any case, it's the Good and Bad sections that are my favorite part, and hey, I shouldn't really be complaining about someone else's projects. Thanks for posting reviews!

[22/07/2015 22:52:58]

Butterfree
Admin
Website: The Cave of Dragonflies
Commenting on: 07-15-15

Shadow: Well, if you don't think there's a lot of reason for you to read the synopsis, you can skip it! That's kind of the point - to not make people who remember the movie just fine have to read a synopsis of the whole thing in order to see a significant part of the commentary. As far as I'm concerned, making the synopsis more skippable (for people who aren't interested in the actual synopsis part) is a good thing.

I don't think I removed anything terribly interesting, anyway - the synopsis does still contain extensive interpretations of why Mewtwo does what he does throughout the film, and what I did take out completely was mostly stuff I now think was kind of inane or irrelevant. (Some was just moved into the more extensive good/bad sections, which is a better place to go into stuff like why the crying scene doesn't work.)

But I get it; I've been unhappy when people change things I liked just fine before. There's always archive.org if you want to read writing that I find too embarrassing.

[22/07/2015 22:11:59]

Shadow
Commenting on: 07-15-15

Aww, I liked the synopsis with all of the comments within it. I've seen the movie a million times, so I don't have a lot of reason to read the synopsis unless it also has opinions; it was fun to read your opinions on details that weren't quite big enough to make it into the Good and Bad sections.

[21/07/2015 22:25:49]

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