DVD Review

Cast

Synopsis

When Douglas Quaid gets a false memory implant of a trip to Mars it unleashes a whole new personality which leads him to Mars and a wider conspiracy.

Film

Douglas Quaid is haunted by the same dream every night about a journey to Mars and a mysterious woman. He decides to find out more about his dream by purchasing a memory implant holiday from specialist company Rekall. However, during the memory implant process something goes terribly wrong and he starts to remember being a secret agent fighting against the evil Mars administration. 

Now all of his friends don't appear to be as they should. They are all now trying to kill him and even his wife is attacking him with a kitchen knife. After a mysterious person gives him a suitcase, Douglas discovers that his life is not really all that is seems and his 'other self' has left him instructions to get to Mars. There he must join up with the underground movement to overthrow the Mars administration of Vilos Cohaagen.

I was very disappointed with sound quality of the disc. There was so little use of the surround channels and LFE's that I kept having to check my system to make sure I had it set up correctly. The front channels were good enough, with the dialogue steerage through the centre channels handled well with no bleeding.

Again, the picture quality was disappointing and can only be classed as average. Although there is no artifacting and high bit-rate throughout the film, I thought that the picture was very washed out and any lacked colour. I appreciate that the majority of the film takes place on 'the red planet' and some of the colouration was probably deliberate, but it just lacked any real dept and vibrancy. On the plus side though, and unlike the video edition, there was no colour bleeding and the DVD handled everything that was thrown at it with ease.

However, the thing that shocked me the most about the film was the acting. Arnold's acting was so wooden I was in stitches of laugher for most the film. I hadn't seen this film for quite a while and it really exposed how bad his acting skills really were in his early Hollywood outings. The extras didn't have me jumping for joy either.

This DVD was bought during my trip to Australia, and so far, all the discs that I've bought have been encoded as both R4 and R2. This is especially interesting for people who only have R2 players and wish to obtain films earlier than the R2 release. I suppose you do run the risk that a title won't be encoded for R2, but I suspect this will be a rare occurrence. It also raises the question as the whether all R2 discs are also encoded with R4.