Conspiracy Theory (1997)

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General		Extras
Category	Thriller	Biographies-Cast & Crew Production Notes
Rating
Year Of Production	1997
Running Time	130
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Richard Donner
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Mel Gibson Julia Roberts Patrick Stewart
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$29.95	Music	Carter Burwell

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Arabic English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Alice visits Jerry in the hospital, where he implores her to change his drug chart with that of another patient. The next day, when Alice returns, the other patient is dead and Jerry is alive. "They" want to see Alice in the basement - one of they being Dr Jonas with his damaged nose which Alice heard about from Jerry during his near-incoherent ramblings earlier on. At this point, Alice is very confused and does not know who is telling the truth - up until now, she believed Jerry was a harmless paranoid. Jerry manages to escape from the hospital, and he and Alice find their way to Jerry's apartment.

    We learn that Jerry's newsletter only has five subscribers, and that Jerry compulsively buys the book Catcher In The Rye. The agents are hot on his trail, however, forcing Jerry and Alice to leave via Jerry's emergency escape exit, torching his apartment whilst they are leaving. They end up at Alice's house, where Alice kicks Jerry out into the street.

    Jerry buys a copy of Catcher In The Rye, and this is picked up by a central monitoring agency who despatch black helicopters and men on motorcycles to capture Jerry. Jerry manages to avoid capture again, and goes to ground. Meanwhile, Alice is checking up on the subscribers to Jerry's newsletter - four out of five of them have just died, so she visits the fifth one, and discovers it to be Dr Jonas. Dr Jonas tells Alice of a secret government mind-control program called MK-Ultra, which had programmed Jerry to be a killer, and implores Alice to help him find Jerry. Alice believes Dr Jonas and agrees to help track him down.

    Jerry contacts Alice via a pizza delivery, and Alice meets Jerry, with a tracking device added to the pizza. Jerry manages to avoid the trackers, and drives Alice to her father's place. Alice's father was murdered some time ago, and the killer had never been brought to justice. Jerry remembers that he was programmed to kill Alice's father but could not do it. Alice's father was going to expose the organization responsible for the mind control program, and so was killed by someone else.

    Dr Jonas and his troops arrive and capture Jerry. They attempt to kill Alice, but she escapes. She figures out where Jerry is being held, and makes her way there. Dr Jonas, Jerry and Alice engage in a fight, where Dr Jonas is killed and Jerry is mortally wounded.

    Several rapid and cunning plot twists follow which I won't disclose, except to say that there is at least one more plot twist than you would have expected to finish the movie off, and the movie has, sort-of, a happy ending, which for once is not a syrupy-sweet Hollywood-style happy ending, but a very satisfying ending nonetheless.

Video

    The movie was razor sharp at all times. Shadow detail was superb with clear shadow details and not a trace of noise. This is another movie with a lot of dark scenes - these movies really benefit from DVDs lack of low level noise.

    The colour is perfectly rendered throughout the transfer.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. There are a number of scenes in this movie involving very rapid strobing of screen shots which I would have expected to have been degraded by MPEG encoding, but in fact they appear to have come through completely intact. As an interesting aside, the Region 4 version of this DVD has a warning regarding the strobe effects that the movie uses as part of the initial copyright message, and warns epileptics to beware. This warning is not present on the Region 1 title - perhaps Warners has had some complaints? Film-to-video artefacts were few and far between, except for some shimmer and moire effects seen on some of the scenes involving Venetian blinds and in one scene involving a car's grille. I directly compared these scenes with the Region 1 DVD of this title, and the artefacts were identical. I noted no significant film artefacts on this transfer.

    One of the subtitle choices, which I feel deserves special mention since I have not seen it before, was "English for the Hearing Impaired". This is identical to the English subtitle track with the addition of occasional descriptions of sound effects (eg GLASS SMASHING) where the sound effects take place off-screen.

Audio

    Dialogue was pretty much always clear and intelligible, even in scenes with high ambient noise.

    The music is suitably conspiratorial, and I noted the usual PAL 4% speed-up when directly compared with the NTSC version.

     The surround channels were used frequently to create an ambient soundfield, especially in the outdoor scenes. Particularly notable was the interrogation scene, where Dr Jonas could be heard all around you in various directions, an effect impossible to achieve with a matrix mix. This added significantly to the disorienting nature of this scene. The surrounds were also well used during special effects sequences, such as when the black helicopters were flying around, when you could clearly hear the directions they were coming from. The surrounds were also well used during the action sequences to envelop you in the movie. All in all, a good soundfield was created with this soundtrack.

    The .1 channel was sometimes used to enhance the music, but was mainly used to underscore the action sequences. The additional slam added by the subwoofer added nicely to these scenes.

    There is censorship information available for this title. Click here to read it (a new window will open). WARNING: Often these entries contain MAJOR plot spoilers.

    All versions of this DVD are identically specified for all practical purposes. Note that whilst the Region 1 DVD packaging makes mention of a Theatrical Trailer, it is in fact not present on the Region 1 DVD.

    The video quality is superb except for the very minor artefacts mentioned above.

    The audio quality is also superb with a soundtrack that frequently envelops and involves you.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall