If The Bourne Ultimatum and all its nausea-inducing hyper dicing has done anything for Hollywood, besides polarizing those who like chop socky in the cutting room and those who prefer more care and consideration from editors (can you tell where I stand?), then it has brought new attention to the art of editing, one of the film world's most underappreciated arts.And just look at the movies: more and more of them are picking a side of the great editing divide to stand on because most movies use too many cuts or too few cuts, and they do it not by accident but as conscious editing choices. Just last week I questioned some of the editing of the new Star Trek movie, which goes a little nutso with with some action sequences. Before Bourne I doubt it would have been an issue noteworthy enough to even mention. And fans for each side have noticed, too: some loved what Bourne editor Christopher Rouse did by breaking up his film into a million little pieces, while others preferred comprehension to style.
Now, switching gears (literally), I want to comment briefly on this Top Gear video that's been circulating around on car sites. I think it's fairly old, but every time I see it it gets me amped. The video features one of Top Gear's car experts, James May, test driving the Bugatti Veyron, supposedly the world's fastest production car. The supercar, which lists (not in your Auto Trader, mind you) at $1.5 million, hits a top speed at 253 mph, faster than most Formula 1 cars — or maybe all Formula 1 cars, I forget. It has 1,001 horsepower, 10 radiators to cool off those horses, 15 minutes worth of top-speed driving on its tires, and 12 minutes of fuel during that top-speed driving. May, who's authentically jazzed to be driving the rocket for the feature, takes it out on some secret test road and floors the pedal. Cameras on the track and in the car record the test, which ends with May covering a football field every second in the car that you'd swear is a hair away from a sonic boom.
I mention this 10-minute clip because the editing on it is superb — perfect even. The piece starts out light enough: May introduces the car, the engine, the various features, and he shows us how a special key unlocks the Veyron's higher speeds. Then he gets on the track and warms up — at 150 mph. As the car hunkers down to the road and begins chugging gasoline by the gallon, the opera-like orchestration starts building, the editing speeds up with the car, the pace quickens. By the time May, decked out in a driver's suit and helmet, is closing in on 253 mph, exhilaration in its purest form — speed, unadulterated speed — begins to take over. And when he finally does hit the magic number the music quiets, the car fades into the distance and for eight beautiful seconds time simply stops. It as if we're allowed to ponder this feat in silence. Then, in an act of celebration, the music slams down, the editing goes berserk, and May seems ready to keel over right there in the seat of this sonic machine from sheer disbelief.I'm not a big car guy (read my Fast & Furious review) but I couldn't help but feel chills as this bloke blasts a hole in the road-time continuum. But was it really the car or May that gave me the chills? Kinda, but not really. It was the editing. A good editor can take anything and make it this exhilarating. That is what editing is all about. It's about assembling a series of images together so they deliver the impact that's desired, or maybe required, for the moment. This moment — 253 moments to be precise — needed this titanic climax to build up to, and the editors hit it perfectly note-for-note all the way up. I saw a lot of movies, and I see probably more Web-based videos, and not in a long time has editing made me this excited about the composition of a work.
Let me close on a strange admission: I don't know what side of the Bourne fence this video stands on. It definitely uses a lot of cuts and if any other subject used this many cuts I would have called it out as being overly sliced and diced by its editors. Yet here I loved the effect, and can't imagine even a single frame being taken out without harming the careful excitement that's been crafted between the Veyron and its driver. So maybe what I'm admitting is that I've found a case where Bourne-style editing works for me. And it's with Top Gear's impressive editors.
