Die Hard

Filmed in Panavision, the 2.35:1 anamorphic picture does not look 14 years old. The early scenes and most of the office sets are shot with warm gentle colours, but the rest of the Nakatomi Plaza has a cold-steel look that is presented wonderfully on this DVD. There is only a touch of pixelation and the fleshtones and blacks are solid.

The Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks are amazing and provide a bombastic and devastating listening experience. Out of all the guns in the movie, Karl's sounds the best when it blasts and ricochets off the walls. The.1LFE can sometimes be so active your living room may well get damaged.

Insomniac? Try John McTiernan's commentary track. I have heard last requests spoken with more hope and emotion. This man has made a classic movie, but obviously doesn't have much to say about it. Jackson DeGovia is also on the track, although he and McTiernan were not recorded together.

A second commentary track with Richard Edlund is better. He talks in depth about the technical details and is more interesting that McTiernan. There are chapters to certain scenes, involving SFX.

An extended branching of the movie is also included. This provides us with an extended sequence in the film when the Nakatomi Plaza is shut down. One particular shot is in black-and-white, due to incomplete effects (what effects?!), and doesn't add much to the film, but still should have stayed for no other reason than to give the FBI more screen time.

A text commentary is available and can be played along with the normal movie. This provides some useless, but interesting trivia and is displayed long enough to read before it disappears. I would still recommend it over McTiernan's commentary.

On disc 2, the menus are broken into categories. The Vault contains the following: Outtakes, some deleted scenes and bloopers. Newscasts from the movie are in here also. They are basically just video footage and extended reports of the story. The magazine articles are from American Cinematographer and Cinefex and are very long and extensive. Clips from the movie also play within these articles.

The Cutting Room contains: The Scene Editing Workshop. And this is much fun, indeed. We get to edit together our own version of the scenes in the Ventilation Shaft, Takagi's interrogation scene and his assassination scene. The raw materials are listed and we choose which shot is best upon viewing them. Multi-camera shooting provides us with three different scenes and the use of the angle button on our control pad. With this, all we get are different views of three non-exciting scenes. Audio Mixing gives us the chance to watch an action sequence with just the dialogue, the music or the sound effects. Why Letterbox is a good feature that I would like to see on more DVDs. It explains the difference between widescreen and pan-and-scan. If only more folk would pay attention to this, then widescreen would not be so heavily criticized for "covering up the screen with black bars". Hint-It doesn't. A glossary here provides us with explanations of some movie-making jargon.

The slide show goes on for ages, but thankfully plays by itself with music from the movie.

The entire script is contained on this disc, as well as three trailers and many TV spots and a featurette. These can be found in the Ad Campaign section of the menu.