Video:
Although "Digitally Remastered" (as we are informed by the packaging), A Better Tomorrow still looks low-budget and old. The 1.85:1 anamorphically-enhanced picture is bright and crisp in its clearest outdoor daylight scenes, but many others look noisy, dull, and grainy. Often the quality of scenes will vary from shot to shot, some seeming fine and others dupey. Colors appear to have been cleaned up and are fairly vibrant, but the image has some minor edge enhancement and frequent problems with noise reduction and compression artifacts. To be honest, I'm not all that familiar with the movie's history on DVD, and it is very possible that this is the best it has ever looked on home video, but expectations should take into consideration its age and the fact that most Hong Kong films were not well-preserved by their distributors.

The sequels look progressively a little bit better, but both suffer most of the same inherent weaknesses.

Sound:
As they have been doing with many of their catalog titles, Fortune Star has remastered the original mono soundtracks into both Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 surround. Purists will find this controversial, as the studio has done more than just redirect some sound effects to different speakers. Many of the original canned sound effects have been replaced with newly recorded versions, bass has been substantially beefed up, and the entire sound mixes have been made as highly directional as any modern action movie.

The Cantonese dialogue was primarily recorded through ADR originally, and here retains most of its constrained and nasally character. It also has some minor sync issues. Nobody cares about that, though; it's the action scenes that matter. To that end, many of the gunshots have nice kick (though some are still weak), and the directional effects are for the most part tastefully applied; they also matrix just fine into a center rear channel if you have DD-EX or DTS-ES processing enabled. The DTS tracks are preferable for their edge in fidelity and breadth, and are tremendously fun during the big gunfights. This may not be the way the movies were originally heard in theaters, but it's true to the intentions of the movies and in many respects an improvement.

Of the three, the final film actually sounds the worst, because the disc producers must have believed that it needed the least work. It has some fun directional effects, but sounds hollow and dull overall, and the front soundstage appears to be mostly mono.

The original Cantonese monaural soundtracks are also preserved in Dolby 2.0 mono. They actually aren't too bad themselves, but are much duller and less fun than the 5.1 remixes. There will be a section of the audience who insist that this is the only proper way to watch the films, and I respect that opinion, but I bet that even the filmmakers would admit that the 5.1 mixes are truer to what they always wanted the movies to be.

A Mandarin dub is also available in Dolby Digital 5.1, but no English dub (no big loss there). English subtitles have been provided, along with both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. The English translation is mediocre at best, with many flagrant spelling and grammatical errors. The subtitles start out as reasonably intelligible on the first film, but the translator must have gotten bored because by the last act of the movie the words only make the barest semblance of coherent sense. It's a good thing the movie is mostly action by that point; an English-speaking viewer will struggle to interpret most of what is being said by the context of the characters' actions. A command like "Get down!" is likely to come out as something like "You floor go!" The subtitles on A Better Tomorrow II are generally better, though we do still get the occasional line like, "Nobody dare not give me face." Either there aren't as many problems on the third film or I'd just gotten used to it by that point.

Extras:
All three discs offer your choice of English or Chinese menus. Each movie includes the original as well as some awfully generic newly-edited trailers. Also available on every disc are photo galleries that can be viewed either as still images or part of an automated slide show.

More substantial is the Code of Bullets featurette, which is divided into three segments, one for each movie. Each part runs between five and ten minutes in Cantonese audio with optional English subtitles. The program is an utterly silly but entertaining attempt to explain the "science" of action movies in terms of how what we watch in them could be related to real life. Part 1 is basically a handgun primer, showing us all the weapons that the movie characters favor, and explaining the strategy of the double-fisted shootout. Part 2 is like a flashy episode of CSI focusing on the plausibility of a person surviving multiple gunshot wounds or dodging an explosion (according to the piece, both are no problem at all). There's also a swell demonstration of where to shoot a human body for maximum stopping power effectiveness. Part 3 gives us a crash course in close-quarters combat and quick shooting techniques. It also tells us how to hold a gun and how to blow up a tank

Finally, A Better Tomorrow III includes five deleted scenes in anamorphic widescreen and with optional English subtitles. All are very short, and none are of any particular importance.

No ROM supplements have been provided.

Final Thoughts:
The films in the A Better Tomorrow Trilogy are undisputed landmarks of Hong Kong action cinema. Fortune Star's box set has classy packaging and makes a valiant attempt at presenting the movies in their best light. Some problems remain, especially in the subtitle translations, but overall it's still a nice package and worth owning. The strengths outweigh the weaknesses, and the set is recommended despite its shortcomings.