Distributed by
Pioneer LDCE

Cat.no: PLFEB 36601

Cert: 18

Running time: 122 minutes

Sides: 2 (CLV)

Year: 1995

Pressing: UK, 1997

Chapters : 37 (19/18)

Sound: Dolby Surround

Widescreen: 2.35:1

Price: £24.99

Extras : None

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Director:

David Fincher (The Game, Alien 3)

Cast:

Brad Pitt (Seven Years In Tibet, Kalifornia, Thelma and Louise)
Morgan Freeman (Shawshank Redemption)
Gwyneth Paltrow (Hard Eight, Emma)

One of the first Pioneer PAL releases under their new deal with Entertainment in Video, Seven comes in an uninspiring sleeve with the most perfunctory of sleeve notes (two brief paragraphs). There's nothing to indicate anything special - a shame, since the movie itself is extraordinary. Fincher's second outing (between his run-of-the-mill Alien3 and his distinctly odd Michael Douglas vehicle The Game) is at once a police procedural and a slice of fantastique cinema.

Grizzled homicide cop Morgan Freeman has seven days left before he retires from the NYPD, his idealism long since burned up by the urban hell in which he's required to work. In this week, he must introduce replacement Brad Pitt to the job. However, their first morning takes them to the scene of a particularly grisly murder - an overweight man who seems to have eaten himself to death, possibly at gunpoint, until his head collapsed into the bowl of pasta before him.

Then, a lawyer is found dead having (been forced to) cut off one of his own love handles with the word Greed written on a nearby wall. Before you know it, the word Gluttony has turned up behind the fridge at the first murder scene and the two cops are looking for a killer using his victims to stage the seven deadly sins (listed conveniently on the front of the sleeve so you can mentally tick them off as the victims turn up).

To give away more plot would be criminal. The disc is well chaptered (37 in all) with a good break that has side two open with the first three deadly sins being crossed off a list of seven on a blackboard. Both leads are superb while Gwyneth Paltrow proves a real bonus as Pitt's wife who arranges for Freeman to come over to their apartment for an evening meal. This scene is punctuated by the regular booming train noise that disrupts the apartment, so that even a seemingly relaxing scene becomes unnerving. It's also indicative of the real pleasure of the film - the details which can be found within it at every turn.

And herein lies a problem. The film is very, very dark with large areas of near black or chocolate where some of the finer visual detail is difficult to detect. A small number of silvered prints were therefore made to Fincher's specifications so as to render these effects more visible to the naked eye. While the considerably more costly extra-packed NTSC CAV disc was transferred from one of these - and looks fantastic - its CLV counterpart was not and looks nothing like as good. Given PAL's capability for greater picture resolution than NTSC, one hoped that the PAL disc would give picture quality at least on a par with (if not superior to) the NTSC CAV disc. Alas, it doesn't.

In the cinema watching a silvered print, the open air finale seemed to lack something compared to (all that dark intricacy of detail in ) what preceded it. But on this PAL disc, no such comparative lack is discernible - leading one to suspect that that detail simply wasn't there on the (presumably non-silvered) source print. The transfer is otherwise (and that's a pretty big otherwise) fine. But in the end, Seven is a magnificent film which could have been a really special PAL disc that could in turn have worked wonders for the PAL market. But this disc, while better than PAL VHS, ultimately proves a let down. A lost opportunity for the UK LD industry - a tragedy, no less.

Film: 5/5
Picture: 3/5
Sound: 5/5

Review copyright © Jeremy Clarke, 1997.