Animated Original Ending to Red State

If you've been around the site for a while, you probably know that I have some very conflicted feelings toward Kevin Smith's Red State. It's an interesting movie for  the first eighty minutes or so. It's filled with complex and compelling characters. We have Michael Parks in a standout performance, that is so good at one point he launches into a ten minute or so sermon that is captivating the entire time. It's really an interesting turn for Kevin Smith who before this had more or less done silly comedies, but it was a movie that really made it look like Smith had something to say as a filmmaker.

But the problem with Red State (or at least my problem with Red State) comes at the ending, where the whole movie kind of falls apart. I don't want to outright say that the ending ruined the entire movie, because I still think there's a lot in the movie to make it worthwhile, but the ending is definitely a trip at the finish line and fails to wrap up the movie satisfactorily.

Now Kevin Smith has been fairly open with the fact that the ending to the movie that we got was not the original ending that he had in mind. He's even gone on to say, pretty much beat by beat, what the original ending to the movie was going to be, and that the ending was changed more or less entirely for budget reasons.  Recently, thanks to Entertainment Weekly, we've gotten an animated version of that original ending, narrated by the director himself, Kevin Smith.

So check it out, and see how it could have ended and how that compares to the ending we eventually ended up seeing for the movie.