movieguru

I'm not sure how to word this, but have you ever watched a movie that has a long sequence, maybe half an hour or more that feels somewhat disconnected from the movie as a whole that they could build an entirely different movie around it?

I was watching Superman the movie a while back and felt this way. There's a good 30-40 minute sequence where Jeff East plays a young Clark Kent. For the most part, this sequence is played pretty straight with a more dramatic and serious tone to it. Then, at the end of the scene where he is in the Fortress of Solitude, the tone of the movie completely shifts and it becomes campy like it's part of a different movie altogether. If you look at the scene where Pa Kent dies and his funeral and contrast it with the scene where Lois Lane dies, their reactions are entirely different towards losing a loved one. Jeff East had a more realistic reaction like how you would see someone react in real life as opposed to Christopher Reeve's over-the-top reaction.

I feel like they could take the all the Jeff East scenes as young Clark Kent and film a whole new movie around it that has a more serious in tone and it would still fit perfectly. Something more like a more down to Earth Superman, like in the George Reeve's version where he is less powerful and fights more realistic villains.

davidh777

The Bond movies had a lot of these.

milo bloom

The casino scene in The Last Jedi is so jarring. Yes, I've read all the discussions about it's symbolism, but it just doesn't fit the story being told in the rest of the movie.

fujishig

Man of Steel also has sequences that feel like they could have been a different movie. Like the original Superman, the Pa Kent scenes could have been a different movie, I mean at least flesh out why Superman turns out different from the somewhat fearful, reclusive figure Pa was turning him into. And then the Jor El scenes on Krypton.

Ash Ketchum

Not quite the same thing, but when I saw BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997), it seemed to me that all of the major stars behaved like they were acting in completely different movies.

fujishig

This might just be me thinking about it too much after something like Cloverfield showed the carnage from the ground only, but I feel like all the recent Godzilla movies have sideplots involving humans that I care nothing about and I just want to get back to the kaiju action. Godzilla (2014) is probably the worst of them because they basically change main characters halfway through the film for reasons and it feels like an entirely different, and worse, film after that.

edited to add: I should probably clarify the American cast ones, since I haven't seen Minus One and it is apparently awesome so maybe it doesn't fall into this.

Decker

The Vietnam segment of Forrest Gump is so different from the rest of the film that it feels like an entirely different movie.
I guess you could say Oppenheimer after the Trinity Test, especially the Black and White segments.

tanman

You could say that about the entire movie and the rest of the series.

tanman

I feel like the best kaiju movies don't skimp on the plot for the humans. The better the story is for the humans the more vested I am in the kaiju and therefore the overall movie.

For G-1 I didn't miss it at all when G wasn't on screen. The human plot added that much more gravitas when he did show up.

tanman

From Dusk til Dawn. I didn't know anything about the movie. I don't think I even knew what movie I was watching. It was just on the movie channel in college. And wow did it take a left turn at the end. I guess it's less of a separate sequence as it two movies in one.

story

Has anyone else ever noticed that Psycho follows one main character for a while, but then completely switches to other characters? I may have just discovered this for everyone!

maxfisher

The Empty Man does this, but in a way I really enjoyed. The first 15-20 minutes feel like a completely different movie than the rest. Totally underrated and horribly marketed film.

Runaway

Orion and the Dark starts out as a pretty sophisticated movie about anxiety disorder, made for a younger audience and turns into a weird adventure with a message more or less saying, if you face your fears you can achieve anything, which is total bullshit for people facing an anxiety disorder. It's like saying depressed people should smile more often.

milo bloom

I didn't want to totally derail the thread, but yes, The Last Jedi is so tonally different from the rest of the saga it honest to goodness feels out of place for that issue alone, much less the actual story issues.

And the thing is, I'm sure there's a parallel universe out there where TLJ is considered the "Citizen Kane" of, not just the Star Wars franchise, but of science fiction films as a whole.

But it sure ain't the timeline we're living in.

d2cheer

Yeah just watched this one...Fear is the Key

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068576/


The beginning had me baffled and going WTF??? This is not what I thought it was.

Great movie overall and highly recommended.

cultshock

It seemed like most of the old Toho Godzilla films were like that. I'd be watching them on TV as a kid thinking "Who cares about these boring people, get back to the monsters fighting!" Gamera films were even worse, side plots with annoying, stupid kids.

Man, I'm jealous, I really wish I had first seen that film cold having no idea what was going to happen, that would have been awesome.

Mondo Kane

I'd say that the opening stanza of Eureka (1983) qualifies. It's a fast-paced, brutal, hellish nightmare with dizzying camerawork and graphic violence.......And the rest of the film, very quietly, takes place inside a suite.

Decker

Does the Will Farrell/ Mattel executives part of Barbie qualify? It sure seemed long.

Toby Dramit

The French Plantation sequence in Apocalypse Now (Redux).

tanman

It was pretty crazy. I thought well this is a pretty cool heist movie.
Holy Salma Hayek....
then:
.....W.....T.......actual....F......is going on????

milo bloom

I’ve mentioned before around these parts that I’m a fan of the Star Trek Kelvin trilogy, warts and all, but the opening sequence of (2009) * is legitimately one of the best sequences in the entire franchise. The rest of the movie is fun, but never hits that same level of intensity.




* I really wish JJ had given it a proper subtitle.

Count Dooku

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the time spent with Rick on set for the TV western fits this bill.

Plot-wise, this part of the movie is completely unnecessary, except that it keeps Rick busy for an entire day so that Cliff has the time to go visit the Manson family at the Spahn ranch. So all they had to establish was that Rick had an acting job. Everything Tarantino showed us with Rick on the set was just self-indulgence. [I love Tarantino's self-indulgences.] But we did not learn anything about Rick that was really necessary to the plot. Everything Marvin Schwarz told Rick about his career at the beginning was true, so Rick had the motivation to go to Italy, which was necessary for the time jump at the end.

I guarantee that if Tarantino was forced to deal with studio mandates, they would have insisted that part be almost entirely cut out. But then Leonardo probably would not have taken the part, as without that part of the movie, it really reduced Rick to a supporting character.

Bluelitespecial

The Gecko Brothers in the Crime World and the Vampires of the Titty Twister could have been two separate stories written around them.

cultshock

I'm trying to remember what spoiled it for me, as I saw this in the theater opening weekend (as I was already a huge Tarantino and Rodriguez fan at that point). The advertising campaign or some magazine article? I honestly can't recall, but I knew going in that there was going to be vampires at some point.

GoldenJCJ

I recall Entertainment Tonight spoiling it by doing a long piece on George Clooney breaking out of TV and into movies with this new vampire flick by the director of Pulp Fiction.

That’s just one reason I despise ET with a passion!