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The Film:
Did I understand it? Not really. Did I enjoy it? Well, for the most part. A young boy finds himself joining a band of time traveling dwarfs in a fantasy directed by
Terry Gilliam. The boy ad the dwarfs find themselves amdist many adventures as he and the dwarfs follow a stolen map through
time and meet Robin Hood, Napoleon and others as the boy joins the dwarfs as they look for the next piece of time to jump through
to become rich. I think the film works as a fairy tale overall, but in an overall view, all of the film is simply pieces as
scene after scene take place in different times but don't really add up together into a whole. I enjoyed the performances
and generally a lot of the locations and the concepts involved, but I guess I'm not one who enjoys this kind of fantasy; I was entertained for a while, but I found it got a little tiresome towards the end of the film.
The DVD:
Image: The image quality occasionally suprises and looks fairly nice, but for the most part it looks quite a bit less than okay. Some of the scenes in the daylight, although quite lacking in sharpness, are fairly decent looking and even enjoyable. Some of the darker scenes tend to look a bit muddy, but still not to the point where the image is unwatchable. Some of the scenes such as the early castle scene
have some nice colors, such as reds and oranges, although still they are not as crisp or vivid as I would have like to have seen. Color saturation is alright; here and there I noticed the slightest touch of bleeding in the colors. Flesh tones look alright as well; sometimes they do look a little reddish, but overall the appearance is generally a fairly accurate one. The problems here really
are not the colors(although again, I didn't think they were as vivid as I'd like to have seen): the colors look generally nice. The problem is the sharpness and clarity. At best, the picture looks alright. But generally, the image looks slightly dim and definitely hazy. This is the same material that went into the Criterion Laserdisc edition and even though this DVD isn't always the best in terms of image quality, I'd imagine that it looks
better than the Laserdisc edition did. There isn't much in the way of problems with major artifacts; there are some small ones here and there, but the main problem is the lack of sharpness which could have probably been helped by an anamorphic transfer(Which is something that Criterion has not yet gotten in the habit of doing, which seems slightly ironic to me for a company
in the business of preserving great films in their best image quality.) The print itself is average: there are a few very noticeable scratches that I viewed that looked like they were from the original source instead of the disc transfer. Overall, it's definitely not a great transfer, but it's not down to the level where the film becomes unwatchable. It is at the level where I think that certainly a better job could
have been done.
Sound: Nothing special. There is some slight hiss and distortion here and there, but generally the dialogue and music sounded passable in terms of clarity. Generally a few nice ambient sounds and an overall nicely structured atmosphere of sound and occasional action. I think it's a satisfactory listen, but it just does it's job; it brings across the dialogue and various sound fx fairly well, but I honestly didn't find it really entertaining.
Extras: We get an enjoyable commentary that mainly features Terry Gilliam, but also has appearances by Michael Palin, Crag Warnock, David Warner and unfortunately, only a little bit of commentary from John Cleese. Gilliam consistently puts forth an interesting vision in the commentary about what it took for him to make the film, talking at first about how he didn't want to make a children's film or going into the details
on what it was like to work with the various actors and to shoot in all of the far-out locations. I think the commentary generally works well, but I would have liked all of those involved to be part of the commentary at the same time into more of a discussion-type of atmosphere. It seems like all of the people involved here had their comments recorded seperately. Also interesting
is Gilliam talking about how he brought together the set for the "Titanic" part of the film and how he brought it all together without building an elaborate and expensive set. Do I think this is really the best commentary that I've heard? Well, not really. Although it certainly has interesting moments, I didn't think it was very lively. I certainly learned a lot about the film,
but again, I think a commentary works better when everyone who is talking is in the same room; I think that when that happens, people begin to converse and the commentary seems to have little or no breaks and even has a better atmosphere(people sound like they're having fun commenting). Some of the most enjoyable commentary tracks are both interesting and entertaining because there are more people in the room( Scott Frank
and Steven Soderberg having fun doing their commentary for "Out Of Sight" is an example). There's also the "Time Bandits Scrapbook", a sort of documentary of a whole lot of behind-the-scenes pictures. Unfortunately, it's not the kind of area where you can click to go to the next picture when you feel like it, it just goes through the pictures in a constantly moving format. There's a lot of
interesting things here, but be prepared to pause the disc yourself if you want to take a closer look. Unfortunately, the "documentary" doesn't go on too long, only about 3 minutes or so which was really quite dissapointing. Forget about making it look like some kind of documentary and just have it as a section where I can look at the pictures at the speed that I please. With the rather loud background score and the speed at which the pictures were displayed, I ended up not really enjoying this suppliment.
Menus:Enjoyable animated(picture and sound) main menus. I was a little suprised though that the scene selection menu didn't offer pictures of the scenes, just a text list of the chapter title.
Value: I think there are a lot of people who enjoyed this film and if you are one of them, it's probably the best way out there to view the film. The transfer is okay and I personally would have liked more extras myself. I think that the $39.99 retail price is quite outrageous though, for the amount of material(and a non-anamorphic transfer). If you want the disc, buy it for a discount online, because $39.99 seems like an awful lot to ask
for a "decent" transfer and a slightly above average commentary track.
Grades:
The Film:75/C = (375/500 possible points)
Video:70/C = (280/400 possible points)
Audio:72/C = (288/400 possible points)
Value:69/D+ = (207/300 possible points)
Extras:80/B- = (240/300 possible points)
Menus:81/B- = (162/200 possible points)
Presentation:75.75/C = (75.75/100 possible points)
TOTAL POINTS:1627.75/2200
Overall Score:73.98%/C
Stars:**
Recommendation: If you're interested in the film on DVD, I'd recommend renting it because this disc certainly doesn't have enough to justify a $39.99 price tag, or wait till the "movie-only" edition comes out soon(which will be $24.99). Overall, I was pretty suprised at this DVD; I would have thought Criterion would have offered far more for the price of $39.99. Hopefully their upcoming discs will prove more enjoyable because personally, I wasn't satisfied with this one.
