Immortal: Technical Notes

Technical Notes Technical Notes:
Immortal
All Content Used With Permission.


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    by DVDTalk
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The DVD:
The DVD under review comes from IVL in Hong Kong and is hard-coded for Region 3 in the NTSC format. A comparable Region 1 edition is available from First Look Pictures, but the import was supplied for free (one of the perks of being a DVD critic) and I'm certainly glad I didn't waste real money on this crap.

Video:
The movie is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen with anamorphic enhancement, and is significantly windowboxed with black bars on all four sides of the frame. That's meant to compensate for television overscan (you know, so we wouldn't miss a centimeter of those wonderful visuals) but is a serious annoyance for anyone with a no-overscan screen. The opening English prologue text was obviously slapped on as an afterthought (there's a random "R" in the upper left-hand corner of the screen for some reason) and is positively blurry.

The rest of the video looks as clean and sparkling as you'd expect from a direct-digital transfer, considering how ugly the movie is. The picture has a clichéd monochromatic look and is intentionally photographed in soft focus so that the few live actors will blend in better with the low-res CGI. Once you accept that, the image has very little artificial edge enhancement or other video transfer defects, and is fine for what it's supposed to be.

Audio:
Though the movie was indeed produced in the English language, it still sounds like a bad dub. Part of that is the European actors sounding out their lines phonetically, and part of it is that the soundtrack has erratic dialogue sync. This could be a DVD transfer issue, or is just as likely the result of bad ADR work and lousy lip-flap animation on the cartoon characters. I can't say for certain, and don't really care. The Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks are otherwise loud, crisp, and rumbly, with lots of active separation effects as you'd want from a sci-fi movie of this type.

Optional subtitles are available in English and Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified).

Extras:
Nothing. Not even a trailer. No ROM supplements either.

The Region 1 release gets a half-hour production featurette, if you really had any interest in the startling revelation that, "Hey, this was all made in a computer!"




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