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PLEASE NOTE: Michael D's is currently in READ ONLY MODE. Anything submitted will simply not be written to the database.
Lots of stuff is still broken, but at least reviews can now be looked up and read.
Far and Away (1992)

Far and Away (1992)

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Released 14-Mar-2000

Cover Art

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Details At A Glance

General Extras
Category Drama Theatrical Trailer
Production Notes
Biographies-Cast & Crew
Rating Rated M
Year Of Production 1992
Running Time 134:08
RSDL / Flipper RSDL (59:10) Cast & Crew
Start Up Programme
Region Coding 2,4 Directed By Ron Howard
Studio
Distributor

Sony Pictures Home Entertain
Starring Tom Cruise
Nicole Kidman
Case Brackley-Trans-No Lip
RPI $39.95 Music John Williams


Video Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame None English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
German Dolby Digital 4.0 L-C-R-S (384Kb/s)
French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Italian Dolby Digital 4.0 L-C-R-S (384Kb/s)
Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Czech Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Polish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio 2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
16x9 Enhanced
Video Format 576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio 2.20:1 Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures No
Subtitles English
French
Portuguese
Danish
Finnish
Swedish
Norwegian
German
Dutch
Smoking Yes
Annoying Product Placement No
Action In or After Credits No

NOTE: The Profanity Filter is ON. Turn it off here.

Plot Synopsis

    The opening narration of Far And Away informs us that the year is 1892. The Irish tenant farmers have begun to rebel against the unfair rents and cruel evictions that have been imposed upon them by their wealthy landlords. After Joseph's (Tom Cruise's) father dies and his family is evicted from their land and home, Joseph sets off to kill their landlord, Mr. Christie (Robert Prosky), with a rusty old gun given to him by one of the local villagers.

    After sleeping overnight in Mr. Christie's barn, he is awoken by the approach of Mr. Christie's’ feisty daughter, Shannon (Nicole Kidman). Joseph confronts Mr. Christie and states why he is going to shoot him. Unfortunately for Joseph, (but fortunately for Mr. Christie!), when he actually fires the gun it blows up in his face. Joseph is knocked unconscious by the blast and is taken upstairs to a bedroom where his clothes are removed so his wounds can be attended to. Mrs. Christie explains why this is done but I will let you hear that for yourself. Shannon is curious about men, and when her mother leaves the room she decides to have a little peek at Joseph's privates, which are being covered by a large bowl at the time. This is a great scene in the film.

    Later, Stephen (Thomas Gibson) arrives, and here we learn of his love for Shannon. Unbeknownst to him, Shannon has plans to run away to America, where she hopes to find a better life. With the help of some rather fortuitous fog, Joseph escapes with Shannon and they flee to America. Upon disembarking the ship in Boston (America), Shannon's plans immediately go astray. Joseph gets introduced to a local pub owner, Mike Kelly, who sets them up in a one bed apartment in a brothel and finds them work in a factory where chickens are prepared for sale at the market. This sets the backdrop for another great scene where Shannon gets into an argument with the manager and is docked several days wages for calling him a pig and a few other nasty names.

    Joseph takes up bare-fisted boxing at Mike's pub and finds that it is quite profitable. Things seem to be going well for our main characters, but inevitably it all goes terribly wrong and our two main character separate. Joseph goes to work laying railway tracks and here we find him remembering a long-ago night when he kissed Shannon (he is obviously still enamoured of her). A passing wagon train reminds him of his goal to posses his own land, so he sets off to try to make his dream come true. While getting ready to be a part of the horse race (which was the way you got to claim a piece of land), he runs into Shannon who has in the meantime been unhappily reunited with her former fiancé, Stephen. I suspect that the scene that had explained this ended up somewhere on the cutting room floor, as I saw nothing in the movie to actually indicate that they were engaged, but it is on the blurb on the back of the cover. Stephen has found a plot of land which fits Shannon's description of her perfect plot. When Stephen starts describing the land you realize it is really Joseph's dream plot of land (she is obviously still enamoured of him!).

    Joseph is forced to buy a wild, unbroken horse after his tamer mount dies the night before the race. The race starts and in the mad rush and excitement to claim a piece of land, wagons roll and break, riders fall off and meanwhile poor old Joseph is still trying to get on his wild horse! Finally, he gets control of the horse by punching it in the head. For all you horse lovers out there, there is no need to worry - you don't actually get to see the punch land. This is reminiscent of that wonderful scene from Conan The Barbarian, where Arnold punches a camel in the head. Joseph sets off at full speed after the pack, in an attempt to claim his piece of land.

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Transfer Quality

Video

    This would have been a great transfer if it weren't for the endless stream of film artefacts and a major video lockup at 46:52 which caused a 3 to 15 second pause on most of the DVD players that were tested. Two discs and seven different DVD players were used to confirm the video lockup, with the test results shown below. Hopefully Columbia Tristar will be able to fix this problem before the scheduled release date.
 

Player/Model
Disc A
Disc B
Orion DVKT
OK
OK
Panasonic A360
not tested
OK
Pioneer 505
Failed
OK
Sony 525
not tested
OK
Sony 725
Failed
Failed
Start 2001
Failed
Failed
Toshiba 2109
Failed
Failed

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It is 16x9 enhanced.

    Sharpness was very good throughout the film, although after the 102:00 minute mark the picture quality seemed to degrade with some minor edge bleeding creeping in. Shadow detail was good, but I felt that a couple of scenes should have been a little brighter. No low level noise was seen.

    The colour was very good and is accurate to the original film.

    The opening sequence was ever so slightly grainy, but it soon settles down to be reference quality, right up until the 102:00 minute mark, whereafter any shot of blue sky has a noticeable graininess to it.

    Aliasing was practically non-existent, with just a few occurrences which were very minor. I saw two instances of telecine wobble, both of which occurred during the end credits.

    Film artefacts are by far the biggest problem with this transfer. A lot of the artefacts are very minor and should go by unnoticed on a TV, but there are also far too many larger distracting ones for my liking.

    This disc is an RSDL disc, with the layer change placed in Chapter 7 at 59:10. It is a little disruptive to the flow of the movie as it causes a noticeable pause in the video that lasts for several seconds. I have seen plenty worse and many better, but it is still far superior to actually having to get up and flip the disc over.

Technical Addendum

    This DVD has been remastered to correct the video problem at 46:52 referred to in this review.

    I first confirmed that the video lockup at 46:52 had been fixed, which it had. I then watched the entire movie to confirm that it did not suffer from any new video or audio problems, which it didn't. The remastered version played seamlessly. I would like to commend Columbia Tristar for fixing this problem. It is good to see such problems are taken seriously and corrected.

Identifying the Version of the Disc That You Have
    To make identification easy, I have included the following table which has most of the numbers that appear on the two versions.
 
 
Original
Remastered
Catalogue Number on the spine of the DVD package DU29947 DU29947
Disc Number on the label side of the DVD DU29947 
U1-20212
DU29947 
U1-20212
Serial number around the inner rim of the data side of the DVD, in non-reversed printing U1 20212.1.A VA02 
IFPI L906
U1 20212.1.A VB05
IFPI L907
Serial number around the inner rim of the data side of the DVD, in reversed printing U1 20212.1.B VA02 
IFPI L906
U1 20212.1.B VA02 
IFPI L906
Note: The U1 and IFPI numbers for the first layer of the DVD are different on the new version.

Video Ratings Summary
Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The overall audio quality is quite good, with no major problems.

    There are no less than seven audio tracks on this DVD of which only one is English. The English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is the default and is the one I listened to.

    The dialogue was mostly clear and easy to understand, but there were several occurrences where it was hard to make out, with the Irish accents not helping this at all. I found myself listening to this soundtrack at 3db louder than I normally do in an effort to overcome this.

    No audio sync problems were noticed. Neither were there any clicks, pops or dropouts heard.

    The surround channels were used to created a nice sound envelope without ever being really noticeable. This made the sound feel front-heavy for most of the movie.

    The subwoofer did not have much to do in this movie, but when it was needed it came through beautifully.

    Special Note: The cover shows the audio tracks for German and Italian soundtracks as Digital Digital 2.0 surround encoded, but they are in fact both Dolby Digital 4.0 soundtracks.

Audio Ratings Summary
Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Extras

    The extras are very limited, consisting of the usual Cast & Crew filmographies/biographies plus a trailer.

Menu

    The menu consists of a non-16x9 enhanced still picture of Tom and Nicole with the movie title in red, just like the cover, with the following selections; Chapter List, Languages, Bonus Material, Play and Information.

Production Notes

    General notes on the film.

Cast & Film Makers

    Cast & Crew filmographies/biographies for Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and director Ron Howard..

Theatrical Trailer

R4 vs R1

NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;     The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on;

    There are no compelling reasons to prefer one version over the other.

Summary

    I really enjoyed this movie when I saw it at the cinema but on second viewing it seemed to have lost a lot of its initial impact. I don't believe this is one of those movies you can just watch over and over again.

    If the major video lockup is fixed or you have a DVD player that is unaffected, then the video quality should be considered as being good, spoiled by excessive film artefacts. On the other hand if the video lockup is not fixed and you have a player that is affected, I feel the video quality can only be classified as just barely acceptable.

    The audio quality is quite good.

    The extras are pretty basic.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Paul Williams (read Paul's biography)
Saturday, February 12, 2000
Review Equipment
DVDSony DVP-725, using Component output
DisplaySony Projector VPH-G70 (No Line Doubler), Technics Da-Lite matt screen with gain of 1.0 (229cm). This display device is 16x9 capable.
Audio DecoderBuilt in to DVD player. Calibrated with Video Essentials.
AmplificationOnkyo TX-SV919THX
SpeakersFronts: Energy RVS-1 (3), Rears: Energy RVSS-1 (2), Subwoofer: Energy EPS-150 (1)

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