The idea of Film Forensics is to try and improve movies, but this area is fraught with pontential controversy. We at Film Forensics pit our pitiful brains against professional filmmakers, who almost certainly spend vastly more time considering their film than we do. There will sometimes be changes that we suggest that completely miss an important point of the film, and produce howls of laughter among those more literate in film than ourselves. Personally, I try to write in areas of minimal incompetancy, so I will avoid such topics as acting, makeup, set design, and I’ll usually avoid discussion of camerawork, lighting, and composition. Besides, the area I’m most interested in is plot (as reflected in the preponderance of ostensibly plot-based films in our reviews.)

But there are other things that we avoid. For example, I’m never going to re-work a film to reverse its political stance. I won’t suggest changes purely for reasons of censorship. Generally we try to keep the spirit of the film, as much as we are able, in the Film Forensics version of the film. It can be a fine line as any change at all, viewed from a sufficiently pedantic perspective, can seen as a philosophical change, reflecting the outlook and personality of the person making the change.

Fair enough. It would be possible, despite our best intentions, for Film Forensics to become a polemic. But we’re going to try to avoid that. I, for one, enjoy the spirit of Film Forensics as it currently stands; the idea of looking at a movie, seeing the ways in which it has failed to achieve what it set out to achieve, and trying to point it in that direction again. We’re here to touch up. We’re not here to strip back, sand-blast, and whitewash.