DVD Review HTF REVIEW: Resident Evil: Apocalypse (1 Viewer)

[Oswald Pascual]

Forget about it. Anamorphic & Full Screen should not be on the same disk or even box for that matter. I will also skip it and wait for a Superbit. If RE 1 was Superbit, then they should do RE 2 to keep the Superbit collector happy.

Ozzie

 

[ChrisBEA]

This movie is a definite guilty pleasure for me. I'll be picking it up.

 

[Kelly Grannell]

The movie (widescreen) and its 5.1 sound is no more than 3 Gb in size.

 

[Grant H]

Sad, since the original release of Resident Evil was high quality. I've toyed with the notion of picking up the SB, but I don't know that there's a reason to upgrade. It has a nice transfer and with no DTS track or loads of extras cluttering up the disc, the bitrate should be pretty good. I like DTS, but it has a banging DD track and a great transfer. Don't know that it's worth the bucks just for the DTS.

If I can rent RE:A cheaply enough, I will just to check out the bonus features. Then, I'll holdout for SB or Deluxe, or whatever Sony wants to call the next release.

 

[Rob Tomlin]

Yes, the first release had very high quality video (and sound). Too bad it doesn't sound like that is the case here.

:frowning:

 

[Grant H]

Was the first RE release before the debut of Superbits?

Back then, Sony probably didn't go out of their way to necessitate subsequent (or simultaneous) Superbit sales like they do now.

Those were good times. Briefly, they seemed to be doing away with FS and WS on one disc in favor of Widesreen only and bonus features. Since then, they've actually replaced original WS/FS DVD's with FS only.

They kind of went from trying to please everbody, to pleasing the videophiles, to pleasing everybody again, but in separate (sometimes expensive) packages.

Again, I wouldn't have had a problem with this release if the first disc could have been DVD-18 or even dual-layer on one side (the WS side of course) and Single-layer on the FS side. Or they could have done separate releases like they do with the Spider-Man films and I'm sure some other Sonty titles. Seems like it was a cost-saving move at our expense since this is more of a popcorn flick than other titles.

 

[Nick Graham]

My brother and I watched this last night. One of the most active and impressive Dolby Digital tracks I've heard in a long time. Transfer was solid...nothing to write home about, but nothing to gripe about either. Didn't notice any EE or artifacts. As for the movie, well, I think my brother summed it up best "I enjoyed that movie an almost shameful amount." It's pure cheese, and some of the acting is horrible, but Anderson chose someone with as good an eye for visual flare as he has, so it was really good looking, except for the fight/attack scenes, which were from the quick cut every half a second school of action filmmaking. They pulled a big jump scare from the beginning of the second game, and I nearly jumped out of the couch when it came out of nowhere towards the beginning of the film.

Dunno if I'd dump $20 for it, but I know we'll be grabbing it when it's a $10 PVD, and my brother has already informed me he'll be grabbing the Superbit when it's released.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

I'll be adding the special features to the review tonight.

 

[Donnie Eldridge]

I just finished watching the movie. If you enjoyed the first one, my feeling is you will enjoy the sequel. Sound was great, pic quality suffers a bit at times, but it's not completely distracting though. Assuming the Superbit version is released I think I'll double dip.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

The complete review is now up. Apologies for taking so long -- I've been mostly incapacitated for a couple of days due to illness. Enjoy!

 

[Chris Tedesco]

Just got done watching this for the first time.

I will agree with Aaron on the video rating that he gave it, but for me the most distracting issue was the black levels. For a movie that is almost completely rendered at night, I was suprised at the levels I was getting. (too bright) At first I thought my TV was screwed up, so I popped in a couple other movies to make sure. Nope, was the movie.

With that said, the sound clearly made up for it. I thought the surround use was brilliant. (The church scene) LFE was also suprisingly good. I might even go as far as to say reference quality. ?

Oh, the movie was also better than I expected. Wasn't great, but wasn't a complete loss in my book.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

The black levels didn't really stand out to me so much, but I'll take another look and see what I think. I think the compression artifacts that plagued the dark scenes may have contributed to your perception of the black level -- they were far from uniform in appearance.

One interesting piece of information from the commentaries is that they made a digital internegative so that they could go in and fiddle with the colors and brightness levels of individual parts of the image in great detail. I would expect that the (pre-compression) black levels were pretty close to what the filmmakers intended due to the digital signal chain.

I agree about the sound. Not sure if I'd quite call it reference quality, but it is excellent. Maybe one step below reference.

 

[Jon Martin]

I'm not a fan of that type of filmmaking either and didn't think this was that bad in that respect. The action scenes were all well defined, clearly choreographed.

Meanwhile, BOURNE SUPREMACY I thought was cut so quickly I could barely watch it. I can not understand how critics who loved BOURNE hated RE. BOURNE gave me a headache , but I thought RE was a lot of fun.

 

[David_Blackwell]

I don't agree with your opinion on the cast commentary. Milla got on my nerves this time (she wasn't bad on the other commentary track she did for Resident Evil). I do agree the video and audio could have been better.

 

[Dave Simkiss]

Would anyone know for sure if the Region 2 Resident Evil/Resident Evil 2 box set that’s soon to be released does infact include the Deluxe Edition Resident Evil 1? So far it’s never been released over here in the UK, we have just had to make do with the SE which I’ve held off buying as I’ve been waiting for the deluxe, if it’s included in the box set then Im getting that.

I’ve been all over the net looking for specs, but no site seems to have a definite answer.

 

[Jack Johnson]

For anyone who has the dvd, I've noticed a discrepancy in time coding from version-to-version.

Pick a moment a fair amount of time into the film, pause the disc and note the time. Then, switching to the other format go to the exact same time point and note how the footage is slightly out of sync by--at least--several seconds.

Not much of an issue...unless this suggests a difference in the cuts of the film, opening the question of exactly which cut is official (I don't remember which format clocks in as the longer...). Or, does this simply suggest an error in encoding? If anyone can shed some light on this, I'd appreciate it.

Beyond that, I was struck to find that the full screen version looks to be a Super35 extraction, which isn't the disaster a panavision cropping would be; the IMDB suggests Apocalypse was filmed in panavision. Oops, their bad.


Finally: Did Sony include liner notes with this dvd? Mine only contained a promo leaflet for one of the Resident Evil video games. Anything I'm missing? Thanks.

--Jack

 

[Antony James]

^Could the time discrepancy simply be due to the P&S version having the "THIS FILM HAS BEEN MODIFIED..." title card?

That usually adds 10 or so seconds to the running time.

 

[Jack Johnson]

Hi, Anthony:


I checked this issue again, and the time difference is more minor than I thought...more like a second or two than several. And it's right there from the outset; the full frame version simply starts a beat or two later--after a comparably long segment of black leader--than the widescreen version.

I suspected a greater difference after doing frame caps from each format for comparison--at the same time mark--from a fast action sequence which created the illusion of bigger spread. A lot can happen onscreen in mere frames when things get fast and furious, especially in this film.

So, my bad.


Once again, though, did you receive liner notes in your copy of the dvd?


Thanks,


Jack

 

[Aaron Silverman]

My copy just came with the single insert card that advertised other DVDs and the video game. Nothing special. (All the recent screeners I've gotten from Sony have basically the same sort of insert.)