The Saw Project

So you may have heard of this series of movies called Saw. The opinion of these movies will vary primary depending on whether you've seen them or not. People who have not seen the Saw series generally refers to it in distaste. Those who have seen it vary between convoluted and genius, and they have about the same opinon on the movies too (zing!).

I'm one who has seen all six of the existing movies, and there is a solid reason why these movies have won awards for their physical effects. The scenes that Saw is known for (oh yes, there will be blood) are very graphic and extremely well done. There are even some that are cringe-worthy in nature that you honestly want to turn your head from because they are just painful to watch. But while the torture scenes might bring some people in, these are not the scenes that bring people back.

Saw is the story of a man named John Kramer. He was a guy who met the girl of his dreams, married her, helped her start a drug rehab clinic (who doesn't want to live that dream?), and meticulously planned for a child to be born in the chinese year of the pig. John was an engineer and even had a book about engineering. He bought a slew of old, abandoned buildings with a lawyer named Art Blank, and together, they planned on remodeling these building into low-cost housing. Even had several families lined up when tragedy struck. John's wife, who was seven months pregnant, ran into one of her patients while closing up the clinic, and he held her at knifepoint to break into the clinic to steal some drugs. He failed to pay attention to where she was on his hasty escape and slammed the door into her stomach causing her to lose the baby. John entered a deep depression, and dropped out of the project with Art Blank which left all the disrepaired buildings in disrepair. It wasn't long after that John was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, and he tried to kill himself by driving off a bridge. He survived, and after facing death, he decided this gave him a new appreciation of life. Looking around him, he saw that most people lived their life without any appreciation of the blessing they were given, and so he decided to give them the same "gift" he had been given: a chance to face death and realize what kind of a gift life really is. Problem is that most of his subjects couldn't pass their tests and were subsequently killed. Thus, the newspapers dubbed him "The Jigsaw Killer" since he cut a piece of skin out of his subjects following their death showing that they were missing a vital piece of their lives: the will to live.

The series is told in a combination of current events and flashbacks to fill in the history of Jigsaw, his apprentices, and his life. Each movie in the series has a major reversal, or twist, at the end of it that generally folds the movie back on itself and reveals secrets that you may have missed or that the movie deliberately concealed during its duration by misdirection. The twists have generally been immensely clever, fooling even die hard movie goers dsuch as myself, bringing a big goofy smile to my face. Thought I generally disliked the second movie the first time I saw it, I loved the twist(s) at the end. Thinking about it, the movies usually toss a two or three reversals there at the end, though the twists in 6 were a little weaker than most of the earlier ones.

So weird as it may seem, I've been working on a chronological cut of the six Saw movies (and keeping the project open to insert the seventh film next year when it hits DVD). Saw is the only movie that I've bought on DVD after getting a blu-ray player primarily because a) it's a gritty movie that works well on DVD and b) I don't have a blu-ray player on my computer so I couldn't copy the film over if it were on blu-ray. So I took my MPEG2's and loaded them into my movie editor and started cutting and moving scenes. I wasn't concerned over transitions or voiceovers, really (in most cases). It was more about the sequence of events.

The project has consumed my past month and I'm finally to a point where I can rip me a copy of the nearly 10-hour masterpiece. I'm not burning it to DVD since I don't want to waste the plastic disc (5 or 6 of them actually) on an unfinished item. Seven will come out and I'll just need to reopen it. So I'm making files of it to watch on my iPod to see how I did and make any necessary changes to it. It's just really easy to get lost in the events and a lot of them occur simultaneous to other events, so I've wanted to make a chronological cut of the movies ever since the mind-bending twist in the fourth movie. I started on the first four, but the editor I was using had trouble with the growing movie that was pushing 7 hours long at that time. So I stopped for awhile until I bought the last couple movies last month, and I started back in on it.

I had a lot of fun watching all six movies again, and meticulously going through it scene by scene to break it down. The movies are good enough to survive that sort of dissection, so if you've been curious about the Saw series, here's my thoughts for you. First, DO NOT listen to anyone who has not seen it for an opinion on "what they heard about it," especially if they just say it's disgusting. Yes, you need a strong stomach for it. I considered a "tame" cut of the movies so the Queen could enjoy it, but such a cut is not possible because of how everything fits together. A lot of horror flicks you can chop out the blood and guts and lose nothing of the story, but in this series, those bloody tests are integral to the plot, and they permeate almost every scene. It is very bloody and very violent. However, they have infused the series with a rare element in the horror genre: character. The characters drive the plot in these movies, and it is the tests that bring out the characters, which is another reason they cannot be just cut out. To fully appreciate Saw, you have to watch it in its entirety in order. You can't take a single out of the mix and view it. It's not James Bond. You also have to take it as a story, and not watch it for the "torture porn" or you'll miss the point. What is the point?

How are you living your life? Do you exploit others for your own benefit, or do you actually appreciate life for the gift that it is? Life is something to not be taken for granted, but something where every day is a blessing and living it should be a joy, not a chore. Are you grateful for another day or will you find yourself a subject of Jigsaw encouraging you to be grateful...once you pass his test?