Die Hard

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Theatrical Trailer(s)	Yes, 1 - 1.33:1, Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1988	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	126:51 minutes	Other Extras	Main Menu Animation & Audio Featurette-EPK (5:39) Cast Biographies
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (63:54)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	John McTiernan
Studio Distributor	Fox Home Entertainment	Starring	Bruce Willis Alan Rickman Alexander Godunov Bonnie Bedelia
Case	Transparent Amaray
RRP	$39.95	Music	Michael Kamen

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Dolby Digital	5.1
16x9 Enhancement		Soundtrack Languages	English (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s) Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	?	Smoking	Yes, heavily
Subtitles	Czech Danish English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Spanish Swedish	Annoying Product Placement	Yes, moderately
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Die Hard is where it all started, and audiences were introduced to the indestructible, wise-cracking New York street cop John McClane (Bruce Willis).

    John lives and works in New York. Six months earlier, his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) got a promotion within the Nakatomi Corporation, whom she works for. This necessitated her and her two daughters moving across the country to Los Angeles. John is yet to follow his family across the US. John is, however, planning to surprise his family for Christmas, so he gatecrashes the Nakatomi Corporation's Christmas function. Unfortunately, so too do some ruthless terrorists, lead by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). I must admit that Hans Gruber is one of my favourite screen villains of all time. He is so cold, so calculating, and so polite that he spawned countless imitations in other good guy-bad guy movies. The terrorists are after a large sum of money in the vault of the Nakatomi Corporation, and will stop at nothing to get what they want. Unless, of course, John McClane can stop them.

    One thing that struck me about this movie, watching it again after a few years of not having seen it is that it is quite tame action-wise compared with other more recent movies of this genre - nonetheless, because the villain is so wicked it still works very well.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It is 16x9 enhanced. Right from the very start we are presented with cause from concern, when the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. It is vertically squeezed, giving the typical appearance of an image that is not 16x9 enhanced being displayed in a 16x9 enhanced mode, even though this particular part of the transfer is definitely 16x9 enhanced. This is just plain careless or sloppy on the part of the disc authors who failed to correct the logo.

    The transfer of the movie itself starts dreadfully, and then improves after the first two reels - the transfer is quite good after about the 30 minute mark, though it is still not without its problems.

    The image is variably sharp. Many scenes are soft and poorly defined, whilst others suffer from excessive edge enhancement, giving them an unnaturally harsh appearance. The early part of the movie is excessively dark, but this does improve as the movie progresses. Shadow detail is poor, particularly early on in the movie where blacks are exactly that - black, with no detail revealed at all in their depths. Low level noise was thankfully absent from the transfer.

    The colours are variably presented. The early part of the transfer was very dated colour-wise, with colours that varied in saturation from under to oversaturated, and really showed the age of the film. A very strong yellow tint pervaded the overall colour of the film for much of the first 30 minutes after which time the colour adopted a more natural hue.

    There were no MPEG artefacts detected in the transfer. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of an annoying amount of aliasing. In fact, this was very annoying. It did not occur often, but when it did, it was severe. Any image in the transfer that showed a lot of detail was prone to it whenever the camera moved, so there would be frequent times during the transfer when the camera would move every so slightly and the image would shimmer severely for a split-second before restabilizing. This became very tiring and distracting after a while. Film artefacts were surprisingly rare and unobtrusive.

    This is an RSDL disc with the layer change coming at 63:54, during Chapter 16. This is well-placed and not at all disruptive to the flow of the movie.

    The packaging makes reference to a Hebrew subtitle option, but this is not present on the disc.

Audio

    There are two audio tracks on this DVD, an English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack and a Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack.

    There was a short audio drop-out at 18:10.

    Dialogue was very muffled and frequency limited, making it quite hard to make out. It was limited at all times to the center speaker, and was mixed at too low a level so that it was not infrequently drowned out by action in the surround channels.

    There were no audio sync problems with this disc.

    The score by Michael Kamen was a typical action movie score - well-suited to the on-screen action, but not particularly notable in any way.

    Now, to discuss the problematic surround remix of this movie. Right from the very start of this movie, I thought "oh-oh", as the aeroplane landed from right to left on-screen and from left to right across the soundscape - this was definitely not a good start to the movie, and filled me with a sense of foreboding.

    The surround channels were aggressively utilized for special effects and music, with crisp, clear music and foley recorded all around the soundfield. That sounds good, doesn't it? Well, if all we were listening to in this soundtrack were the surround channels then this would have been a great remix. The problem is that the surrounds were so different in fidelity and level to what was coming out of the centre speaker that it made the surround activity distracting and not at all integrated into the movie. It sounded like the entire original film soundtrack was emanating from the centre channel and a newly-created and aggressive surround mix was emanating from the remaining 4.1 channels. This could have been a great remix. Instead, it is a very poor effort indeed because of this total lack of integration between the center channel and the rest of the channels.

    The subwoofer got a reasonable workout at times, though this tended to be uneven, and once again the tonal and level imbalance with the center channel was problematic, leading to poor integration of the subwoofer into the overall soundscape.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer

Featurette - Electronic Press Kit (5:39)

• 16x9 enhancement

• Theatrical Trailers for Die Hard 2 and Die Hard: With A Vengeance
• Photo Gallery

    The video transfer is variable, and quite poor at times with excessive aliasing and poor colour balance early on in the movie.

    The audio transfer is a shining example of how not to do a 5.1 remix.

    The extras are basic.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
21st January 2000