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Under the supervision of historian Thomas Negovan, the "Ultimate Cut" of the film was created
Line of Events
Follows Caligula as he kills his devious adoptive grandfather and takes control of the decadent Roman Empire, spiraling into depravity, devastation, and madness.. The film is a complete re-imagination of Caligola (1979), based on 96 hours of never-before -seen footage recovered many years after its release. Instead of expanding existing scenes with the new footage, the entire film was edited from scratch, which resulted in a version that doesn't contain a single frame from the theatrical version.
Edited from Caligola (1979)
Visual effects were used to enhance scenes and replace cheap sets and backgrounds, and AI technology was used to restore previously unusable dialogue that was plagued with background noises. A new music score was composed as well, in contrast to the public domain ballet music. Originally planned for a limited theatrical release in late 2020, this version premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023..
This is truly a lost opportunity
After a massive search, a film scholar tracked down all of the original film shot by director Tinto Brass, who is still alive, and he wante4d to work with Brass to finally make a director's cut.Penthouse, which owns the rights , changed management and the new management instead turned the footage over to some people with absolutely no background in film restoration. This new team said they wanted to restore the film to the intentions of Gore Vidal's script. The main problem with that is Tinto Brass was not filming Vidal's script as it was written, as he thought it was terrible.
Instead we get long takes that emphasize the lavish sets and obscure the action
He and actor Malcolm McDowell reworked the script into something more of an art film.The result of this restoration is that the scenes are finally in the right order but put together with with no sense of style or pacing. Tinto Brass envisioned lots of close up and fast editing, and completed about half of the film this way. It looks like a rough cut that is waiting for someone to add closeups and quicken the pace.
A more coherent performance by Malcolm McDowell can be seen, though at times some of the more manic takes might have worked better to emphasize his deteriorating mental state
A few individual scenes work much better in the original due to better editing.Another drawback is the overly modern score, which doesn't reflect musical trends of the 1970s, when the film was shot.On the plus side, all of the incongruous hardcore scenes shot by Penthouse chief Bob Guccione are gone.
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