Red Dawn (1984)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Action	Theatrical Trailer Booklet
Rating
Year Of Production	1984
Running Time	109:12
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (58:42)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	John Milius
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Patrick Swayze C. Thomas Howell Lea Thompson Ben Johnson Harry Dean Stanton Ron O'Neal William Smith Powers Boothe
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$34.95	Music	Basil Poledouris

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired German German for the Hearing Impaired French Italian Spanish Dutch Swedish Finnish Norwegian Danish Portuguese Polish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, at start of credits

    While what turns out to be an invading communist force is securing the town, Jed and a small group of high school kids manage to escape into the Colorado Mountains surrounding the once peaceful mid-western town. The group is eventually made up of Jed, Matt, Robert (C. Thomas Howell), Toni (Jennifer Grey), Erica (Lea Thompson), Daryl (Darren Dalton), Danny and Aardvark. Jed is the oldest. In fact, he is the only person in the group that is out of high school and so he appoints himself the leader of the group.

    After some initial reservations, the group decides to stay up in the mountains, living off the land and away from the troops in the town below. With their only radio being broken whilst fleeing the town, the group feels cut off. Desperate for news on what is going on in the town and with their families, they sneak back into town, whereupon they are advised to get out of town as quickly as possible by a friendly storeowner, as they are being looked for.

    One day a trio of duty officers are up in the mountains, sight-seeing of all things. One of the group is spotted and the group is forced to kill the officers to avoid being captured. Now a decision has to be made - do they go further up into the mountains and away from their families or do they fight? Of course the answer is simple - they fight. They organize ambushes and raids against the invading force, and take any weaponry and food they can get.

Video

    Overall the picture sharpness is very good, with a good amount of foreground detail. There are a couple of scenes where the picture was a little dark, which caused some of the picture to appear black when you should have been able to see detail in it. One example of this can be found at 67:30. Shadow detail was otherwise very good. No low-level noise, edge bleeding or edge enhancement was noticed.

    The colour was very good, but it does however have that slightly muted look about it that so many of the early to mid 80s films seem to have. This is more an observation than a criticism, and I never felt that the colour was lacking at any stage.

    Grain is by far this transfer's largest problem. It comes and goes continually throughout the film, with the brighter scenes being more adversely affected. This grain is noticeable, distracting and disruptive to the picture quality on many occasions, but overall it is still tolerable. The grain mostly only affects the backgrounds of scenes, but there are a couple of instances where it spills over into the foreground.

    No MPEG artefacts were noticed, and neither was any aliasing noted. There is some minor telecine wobble present at the start of the film which only affects the titling and not the images behind it. This fact indicates that this fault was introduced during the making of the film and not during the transfer to DVD.

    Film artefacts are another area where this transfer lets us down somewhat. There are a lot of film artefacts. The frequency of these artefacts is the problem, not the size, as most are small. There are, however, some larger ones that will really catch your eye. The biggest and most noticeable of these can be found at 59:49. There are several reel change markers too, such as at 62:58 and 63:03.

    This disc is an RSDL disc, with the layer change occurring in Chapter 8, at 58:42. This is an extremely well-placed layer change which would be totally undetectable if it wasn't for the slight pause in the audio.

    Packaging Error: There is no full screen version of this movie on this disc as is incorrectly stated on the packaging.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The dialogue was clear and easy to understand, with only a couple of scenes where the dialogue was a little harder to understand. No audio sync problems were noticed with this transfer.

    Basil Poledouris' musical score suits the movie, but it is now somewhat dated-sounding.

    The surround channels are mostly used for music and ambience, with the odd sound effect tossed in here and there. Overall, the sound mix is good, but it tended to be front- and centre-heavy, with generally only light surround speaker use. Having said that, there are quite a few scenes that have good enveloping surround channel use. A couple of examples are at 17:58, 61:14 and 92:30. The most prolonged and aggressive surround channel use can be found in the music of the end credits.

    The subwoofer was well-used, adding extra punch to the soundtrack, which in turn noticeably enhanced many scenes.

    Packaging Errors: The English soundtrack is listed as mono and there is no mention of the other soundtracks.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

    The menu exhibited an annoying bug. Pressing STOP during the movie or whilst the main menu was displayed meant that the disc had to be ejected and re-inserted before it would return to the main menu. Pressing PLAY had no effect.

Theatrical Trailer (2:10 minutes)

Booklet

• German, French, Italian and Spanish soundtracks

• Additional Pan & Scan version

    The picture quality is good, but it does suffer from some annoying grain.

    The audio transfer is flawless, but the audio quality is only as good as the limitations of the original soundtrack.

    The extras are extremely limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall