Breaking Bad was unequivocally one of the most popular television series ever. It’s antepenultimate episode Ozymandias currently stands at a glowing 10/10 on IMDb, a feat not even the most popular movie on that website has managed to conquer. Brian Cranston’s meteoric rise to power and moral duplicity is well written and acted enough to rival that of The Godfather. Only Game of Thrones comes close to warranting equally puzzled looks of confusion and tones as grave as Cranston’s beautiful, gravelly growl when asking, “seriously..? You actually haven’t seen Breaking Bad?”. So maybe a film was inevitable, but maybe not quite like this…

One anonymous fan, who seems as enigmatic and mysterious as Heisenberg himself has taken it upon himself to take the just shy of 2 days worth of material and condense it into 2 hours, in one epic supercut, and I watched it. Now, it’s not the TV show; a lot of the side characters lose a lot of depth, most notably lost are most of the moments that make Jesse’s arc maybe more nuanced than Walter’s but what’s impressive is how much was saved. I felt actual emotions at the end, and as a more streamlined version of the main narrative of the full show, it worked. Now there are a few clumsy edits but given the extremity of the size of this project, they really pulled it off. It’s something to behold.

Now, you’re going to have a lot of trouble finding this film. Sony have taken down every copy, one can only hope that the reason is that they want to sort out legality and put this out cinematically. It could set an interesting precedent with a fascinating film, and there’s money in it for them, and if there’s one thing we know above all about Sony, it’s that they really love money.

James Selway

Image courtesy of Sony