being another, but here she, William Baldwin and Kevin Bacon each have their
doubts about effectively killing themselves, but their curiosity gets the better of them.
Oliver Platt, stays wise to the facts by opting not to find fame the easy way
and chronicles the events into his dictaphone.
Perfection is the name for the picture quality on view here. A bad encoding job
could easily have helped the disc to fall apart at the mixture of blues and reds
on display, but someone at Columbia deserves a big pay-rise for doing such a fine
piece of work for one of my favourite films of all time.
The film is presented in its original widescreen ratio of 2.35:1, the only way of
doing complete justice to a Joel Schumacher film, especially one where the director
of photography is Jan De Bont, who later went on to direct the actioners
Speed, Speed 2 and Twister. The image is enhanced for 16:9 widescreen
televisions which provides 33% higher resolution - and the average bitrate is
4.78 Mb/s.
The sound quality is also spot-on. James Newton Howard's incredible score plus
the sound FX as one encounters the after-life come across without a hitch.
Just make sure the volume's loud. Since full multi-channel Dolby Digital hadn't
been born yet, the Dolby Surround mix is translated to Dolby Digital 2.0 for
this DVD release, so it should sound excellent whatever your hardware.
Extras :
Chapters and Trailer :
Columbia break the trend of 28-chapters-whatever-the-length as this film
provides 35 throughout the 110 minutes of the film which is most welcomed.
The original theatrical trailer is also included.
Languages/Subtitles :
Both English and German are available in Dolby Digital 2.0, with subtitles
in FOURTEEN languages : English, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hindi,
Hebrew, German, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Greek and Norwegian. The
English subtitles condense the dialogue, but don't make a particularly good job
of it.
Filmographies/Biographies :
Brief filmographies are available for all five main actors plus director
Joel Schumacher.
Menu :
The menu is static, but more attractive than the region 1 release. On
playing the disc you see the Columbia TriStar logo before the main menu appears.
Upon selecting the "Start Movie" option, you'll first see a "Sony Pictures
DVD Center" logo, the copyright info and then the film itself.
Flatliners is one of the few films that I fell in love with the first
time I saw it, even if it hasn't got the most coherent of plots. After seeing
the film in the cinema, the haunting score by James Newton Howard over
the end credits kept me hankering for a soundtrack CD, but just my luck that a
rare thing occurred - a film without such a CD to accompany its release, even
in America and I know as I made several enquiries.
Things went from bad to worse in early 1991 as the retail video release
approached and I crossed my fingers that the unwatchable fullscreen version
would be accompanied by a widescreen version, but to no avail, even later when
a PAL Laserdisc was announced since when Joel Schumacher shoots a film in
2.35:1, there's no compromise possible when it comes to constructing a
pan-and-scan image.
Overall, this release fares better than the USA equivalent which also contains
an anamorphic widescreen print, but while it has three language options, it
has only two subtitle options, no trailer nor any other extras, apart
from a pan-and-scan version which is about as useful as...well I think you
can guess. The UK version also has a slightly higher average bitrate: 4.78Mb/s
compared to Region 1's 4.58Mb/s on the widescreen side.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
