BUY

General		Extras
Category	Action	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	Yes, 1 - DVD Teaser #2
Year Released	1994	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	113:35 minutes	Other Extras	Featurette - Making of Filmographies-Cast & Crew
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (66:01)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Martin Campbell
Studio Distributor	Columbia TriStar Home Video	Starring	Ray Liotta Lance Henriksen Stuart Wilson Kevin Dillon Kevin J O'Connor Michael Lerner Ernie Hudson
Case	Transparent Amaray
RRP	$34.95	Music	Graeme Revell

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	No	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Dolby Digital	2.0
16x9 Enhancement	Yes	Soundtrack Languages	English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) French (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) German (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	No
Subtitles	English French German Italian Spanish Dutch Portuguese Arabic Czech Danish Finnish Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Swedish	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    John Robbins (Ray Liotta) is a Marine captain convicted of the premeditated murder of his commanding officer, sending him to jail for life. After escaping from two jails he is sent to the Leviticus jail from where he is shipped to Absolom after an altercation with The Warden (Michael Lerner). Absolom is the perfect jail - no one escapes and very few know of its existence, as this is not exactly a legal facility. It is an island where men with no future are sent to eke out an existence as best they can in an anarchy. The island is dominated by the Outsiders led by Walter Marek (Stuart Wilson) and Robbins stumbles upon them: given his penchant to date, he naturally upsets Marek and escapes to "freedom". Robbins eventually throws his lot in with a group led by The Father (Lance Henriksen) who have re-established a relatively civilized and peaceful existence in this hell. But Robbins is determined to escape from the island - something that no man has ever done - against a back drop of the plundering Outsiders and a system very tightly controlled by The Warden.

    This is not an especially great story and I found it less than engrossing, but it has its moments. Whilst Ray Liotta has generally been seen as a supporting actor, here he takes the lead and I am not quite sure that the role suits him well. He does however give a decent fist of a character that really has not been given much of a fleshing out in the story. Stuart Wilson lacks a little as the leader of the Outsiders and really does not have the same sort of dark side the character needs that say a Dennis Hopper or a Gary Oldman would bring to the role. The rest are adequate and not a whole lot more in a story not especially well brought to life by Martin Campbell, who later went onto much better things with GoldenEye and Mask Of Zorro. Still if you like action then this is not too bad a film - just ignore the less than believable explosion that destroys the boat - although there are better around. Whilst this is rated M, I would caution that some scenes are just a little more graphic than I would have expected.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and it is 16x9 enhanced. The Internet Movie Database lists the aspect ratio of the film as 2.35:1; if this is indeed correct then it is a little unusual that we have not got that ratio from Columbia TriStar.
[Ed. Several other sources that I checked also indicated that the correct aspect ratio for this movie is 2.35:1. The cinematographic process used for this movie was Arriscope (similar to CinemaScope and Panavision), so this image must have been cropped at the sides rather than open-matted, as far as I have been able to ascertain.]

    Whilst this is clearly not amongst the very best that Columbia TriStar can offer, there is not too much wrong with the transfer. In general it is a very sharp transfer with some very nice detail to it. At times the transfer seemed a little grainy, but this suits the film quite well and was not overly distracting. Shadow detail was very good in general. There did not appear to be any low level noise in the transfer.

    The colours are in general quite vibrant, with the greens really coming up very well. There was quite a palette on offer here as the colours in both camps were somewhat muted, although consistently well rendered, whilst some of the scenery shots were extremely vivid. There was no hint of oversaturation of colours at all.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts, whilst film-to-video artefacts comprised some relatively minor aliasing that was barely noticeable. There were a few film artefacts present, although none were especially distracting to the film.

    This is an RSDL formatted disc with the layer change coming at 66:01. The layer change is noticeable although not especially disruptive to the film.

Audio

    There are five audio tracks on the DVD, all Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded: the default English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. I listened to the default English soundtrack.

    The dialogue was clear and reasonably easy to understand, although a couple of times I needed to boost the sound level a little to hear what was being said.

    There did not appear to be any problems with audio sync with this transfer.

    The music score is provided by Graeme Revell, who has turned up on a few films that have made it through the player. Frankly I do not find his work especially memorable and this is another instance of that. I can only presume that this is his understated style and I simply do not respond to it.

    This is actually a very nice surround encoded soundtrack with some lovely surround detail through both the front and rear channels. At times it almost sounded like a 5.1 soundtrack without bass. The resultant sound stage is very believable and you feel a real part of it. Nonetheless when the action gets going, you do really miss that bass channel making its presence felt..

Menu

Featurette - Making of Escape From Absolom

Filmographies - Cast and Crew

• Correct Aspect Ratio
• Theatrical Trailer
• Additional Footage

• 16x9 enhancement

    A good video transfer.

    A good audio transfer.

    A reasonable extras package.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris
28th November 1999