Star Wars: The Last Jedi, as everyone knows, is a cinematic marvel. It has a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, was the highest-grossing film of 2017, and guess what—almost all of its major characters were women and POC. That last fact did not sit well with one man, however, who decided to show us all by spending a great deal of time and effort editing out all the women from the film. (Or, as he called it, removing all the “Girlz Powah and other silly stuff.”) The result? A 46-minute short film called The Last Jedi: De-Feminized Fanedit that was universally panned and mocked relentlessly by the director and cast.
Twitter user Logan Smith, however, was not content letting it end there. Smith, who’s also behind the Twitter project @YesYoureRacist, took things one step further and applied the same flawed logic to Saving Private Ryan. “In response to the MRA douche who edited all the women out of #TheLastJedi,” he wrote, “I decided to edit all of the men out of Saving Private Ryan. Here it is in its entirety.”
The result is 2 minutes and 20 seconds of abandoned roads, graveyards, women looking out the window, the American flag undulating forlornly in the wind, and raindrops. For some perspective, the original cut of Saving Private Ryan is 2 hours and 49 minutes long. To be fair, it’s not like women don’t speak at all in those 2 hours and 49 minutes. It’s just that they speak only when there’s a man present. As Smith explained, “I think there was one or two scenes where a woman said something but there was also a man in the shot so I had to cut it.”
The new cut of Saving Private Ryan has since achieved viral acclaim, and Smith quickly followed up his breakout debut with a solid sophomore effort, a manfree edit of The Shawshank Redemption. This one is even leaner and slicker than the last, capping in at a minute and a half of run time. Beautiful.
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