Why I'm a Jerk Who Speedruns Movies

I watch a ton of movies. Well, not so much lately, but there was a time, especially during my college days, when I'd watch movies all the time, averaging at maybe three a day for weeks on end, and at times even going for five. Thing is though, I never liked to leave movies unfinished, I guess it just isn't in me, so I'd often end up starting a horrible movie, I'd become dreadfully bored with it and I wouldn't pay any attention to it. But still, for whatever reason, I'd force myself to get to the end credits. It was painful and boring and stupid, until one day I thought – wait a minute, does VLC have a speed-up function? Lo and behold, it did... So from that day on, I began to watch movies sped up, at first just fifty percent speed, but then even a hundred. And to be honest, I thought that was the most genius move of all time, I thought it was one of those epiphanies I was too dumb to have figured out before, and everyone was already practicing it as a general rule. But instead what I got from my buddies was them finding it a very dumb thing to do. Well, I admit I haven't stopped it since and probably never will, but that discussion did bring up some interesting points.

The face I make when I realize a movie is kinda sucking

I think the main argument I get is that when watching a sped up movie it becomes quite difficult to understand what's going on. That's very true because I remember when I first started this, my first sped up movie was Bryan Cranston's Godzilla by the way, I only gave it a forty percent bump, yet now I watch movies at a hundred percent all the time. So while it can be difficult at first, one can definitely get used to it, your perception will adapt surprisingly quick. But then people answer that, when doing so, I don't get the same understanding from the movie. That is a stronger argument because it's true that it becomes harder to process the movie because you're essentially taking forty-five minutes to commit ninety minutes worth of scenes into your brain. So yeah, you probably won't get a perfect understanding of all things from your very first viewing, but then again, who does? I mean, when people watch a movie at normal speed, even paying great attention to it, do they thereafter remember every single detail, every single scene, every character's name? I don't think so, and thus I think neither argument holds much water. And that is because, when speedrunning a movie, because that's a cool term for it, you're not looking for complete understanding, you're only looking for the complete story.

And that is because the main point behind the speedrun is to get through the whole movie, to know every scene and to discover the ending without spending an ungodly amount of time with it, thereby separating the wheat from the chaff. Say you watch a three hour-long movie and you're bored out of your mind. Most people just turn it off halfway through and move on with their lives, but as I said, I never liked that, I always want to know how it ends, I want to have some kind of experience of the whole story, even if it's an incomplete aesthetic experience of the movie as a whole. But then again, if the movie isn't to my taste, my experience will never be complete or perfect, not in the sense the filmmaker intended. And that's where my main argument comes in – we don't like most movies we watch, therefore we don't need to give all of them equal attention. I've watched some of my favorite movies way more than five times, even long movies such as Apocalypse Now, for example, which definitely steals the better part of your afternoon. But on the other hand, or rather perhaps precisely because of that, I don't have the patience to sit through two and half hours of, say, The Last Jedi, a movie I can understand and forge my opinion of without devoting it two and a half ours of my day. It's very, very possible, and indeed inevitable, that some of the finer details regarding the craft of filmmaking go unnoticed by me. That is especially the case with animated movies because watching them sped up is indeed a bit of a middle finger to the animators. But if I'm not enjoying the movie in any other sense, trying to at least appreciate the animation, though a plus, won't really change my vote all that radically. In essence, I speed through most movies, not necessarily because I'm a busy bee businessman, but so that I can devote much more attention to the ones I do like.

Therein lie the sort of moral considerations of this thing, if the word isn't too strong, which I don't think it is. Because it really is disrespectful to watch a movie sped up, isn't it? It simply isn't the way the movie was meant to be enjoyed, otherwise the filmmaker would have sped it up himself. There's the aforementioned animation and special effects, then there's also the music and the overall pace of the film. All those elements, and perhaps some more, become hindered by speeding the film up. To take the aforementioned Apocalypse Now as an example, if you are finally introduced to Kurtz after a mere ninety minutes instead of at the end of a three hour odyssey, you probably won't get the full impact of his epic reveal. The movie is meant to be a long, grueling experience, and so removing that factor is to remove an essential aspect of it. But then again, if you are completely bored during your viewing, making it all the way to the end with the speed-up function is better than just giving up, isn't it? I for one think so, I find it best to have an incomplete viewing experience as it pertains to aesthetics but having gleamed all of the story elements. I guess it's like being in class – even if you are very bored during most of it, you still learn more from being there rather than from not going at all. And the same way your first class is always an introduction, your first time watching a movie is an introduction as well. At least I speak for myself when I say that my first time watching a movie is never all that special.

I get how speeding through movies could be, and is, disrespectful, I even get how that can be considered “cheating” one way or another. It kinda is in the sense that it takes some guts to sit through movies that go past the three hour mark, people automatically see it as you being serious about cinema. So if you admit you speed them up, it takes some of the shine from it. And I agree that it should, but to me there's no going back now, I'm too far gone... It simply doesn't make sense to dedicate ninety minutes of my life to finish a movie I am not enjoying when I can be done with it in forty-five. Still, and weirdly enough, it's not so much a question of saving time because if it was I'd just be more selective about what movies I watch. I guess I see this as a sort of weird trade-off – I get to watch a ton of random movies, even being pretty damn sure I won't like them, but I can also retain some sanity.

And now, if I can go on the attack, so to speak, if watching a movie sped up yields an incomplete experience, then what really is a complete experience? Before discovering this dark secret I'd at times be so bored during some movies that I'd take sheets of paper and start doodling, just like in a boring class. In the same situation, most people nowadays just take their phones out and go on social media, or they outright skip a bunch of scenes, or they go to the bathroom and, upon returning, casually ask if they missed anything. In a word, there are a ton of viewing experiences that can be said to be both incomplete to the spectator as well as disrespectful to the filmmaker. So is my method really all that bad? Maybe a yes and no is in order. I'd never watch one of Stanley Kubrick's films sped up because I love his films, so I'd probably find it blasphemous if someone did precisely that. But then again, I think I'd rather have them doing that so they could get to the end because at least then they'd witness the major beats of the story and, as it's often the case with me, the movie could marinate in their heads for a bit, and after a few days they might return to it, perhaps with a different perspective. But if you quit halfway through you won't get that, not unless someone convinces you to give it another chance. So while I can be a bit of a jerk by speeding through it, while I can miss out on the intricacies of the film, at least I become informed of the filmmaker's story. And to be honest, I for one find that disliking a movie so much to the point of quitting halfway through is way worse than cheating to watch it... Speeding it up may tinker with the artist's work but at least it shows some commitment to it, it shows that at the very least the story is deemed important. To leave it unended strikes me as way worse.

In closing, I think it was George R. R. Martin who said the worst thing that can happen to a work of art is for it to be ignored, and I'm very inclined to agree. The absolute best that could happen to a movie would be if millions of people watched it, loved it and publicly praised it. But let's face it, that won't happen. There isn't a single work of art in this world that everyone, without exception, loves. It don't matter what it is, some people will inevitably dislike it, for whatever reasons. And still, most people won't even get to experience it. Speeding movies up is simply my way of squaring that circle in the sense that I get to watch a whole bunch of movies I wouldn't have otherwise, but I don't waste as much time as I would have when I dislike them. The upside to that being that some of the movies I wouldn't have watched are ones that I actually end up liking a whole lot. So I dunno... I know only two things – that I speedrun movies, and that I am indeed a jerk.

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