OK, I watched it last night, and I have to say this is really impressive work. I went into the viewing with extremely low expectations, not at all expecting it to work, but I knew in the first 5 minutes that I was watching something special. The way everything has been cut down and ordered is truly elegant, and it plays more like an honest-to-god film than any other tv-to-movie edit that I've seen. It moves at a quick pace, but it never loses its rhythm, and I didn't find any glaring plot holes (just one line toward the end that doesn't make much sense without some deleted context). The only complaints I have are that, at times, it moves just a little too quickly, and some of the characters are (unsurprisingly) thinly drawn. It's not a problem for everybody (The story doesn't suffer for cutting down Walt Jr's screentime, for instance), but Jessie really could have used more scenes to flesh out his relationship with Walt and give the conclusion to his story more emotional payoff. The best advice I can give to anyone who's planning to watch this is to let go of any preconceived notions of what
must be included in a BB fanedit. Likely, your favorite moments from the series are not included (most of mine weren't), but what is here is still fantastic, and the movie as presented doesn't really suffer for what wasn't used. I don't want to go into any specifics because it was so much fun to just watch this play out as envisioned by the editor.
Nic said:
As someone who never saw Breaking Bad, I would love to see this fresh take before going into the series proper
I can't recommend against this enough. If you are interested in watching Breaking Bad, watch the series, because while this is a fascinating exercise and a decent film, the series is
incredible. Watching this first will spoil some of the surprises, killing your suspense during key moments of the series, and everything that works here works infinitely better within the full context of the show. I would say this edit is purely for existing fans of the show and people who don't ever plan to devote the necessary time to watch all of the seasons in their entirety.