By Dawn's Early Light (1990)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1990
Running Time	100:43
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Jack Sholder
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Powers Boothe Rebecca De Mornay James Earl Jones Martin Landau Darren McGavin Jeffrey DeMunn Rip Torn Peter MacNicol Glenn Withrow Ronald William Lawrence Kieran Mulroney Nicolas Coster Ken Jenkins
Case	?
RPI	$9.95	Music	Trevor Jones

    This made for TV movie depicts what may have transpired during the Cold War era if there were to have been an armed conflict. The story is actually quite well done, with two plots running simultaneously. The first centres around a B52 bomber crew from the Strategic Air Command ( SAC ) who are tasked with the release of strategic nuclear warheads should the order to attack the USSR be given. The second plot follows the actions of the US government whilst it reacts to a nuclear confrontation with the USSR and how the US government tries to desperately defuse the escalating situation. I found this movie to be a little dated by today's standards, but overall I was still entertained by it. Whether or not this is how things would have panned out in the event of a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers is open to debate.

    Rebecca De Mornay is certainly easy on the eye, and I thought most of the acting was well done and of much higher quality than I expected for a telemovie.

Video

    Straight off the bat I must comment that I had trouble getting this DVD to play on two separate standalone players and on my PC DVD ROM. After several attempts I managed to get the movie to play on my Maya 603 standalone player - I hope this is a problem with the review disc only and not indicative of the final release discs.

    The movie is presented in its original 1.29:1 aspect ratio and is not 16x9 enhanced, which is what you would expect from a telemovie of this vintage.

    There is quite a bit of graininess to the video and it is lacking in shadow detail, which can become annoying as a lot of this movie occurs in dimly lit scenes. Overall the picture is soft and lacks the sharpness that it should have to compensate for the low level lighting of most of the scenes. Low level noise is present throughout the entire transfer.

    Colour is accurately rendered and there was only minor evidence of bleeding.

    Unfortunately, the entire video transfer is marred by the presence of MPEG artefacts. Add to this the presence of telecine wobble and you get the impression that the quality of this video transfer is average at best. The film stock for this transfer was obviously in poor condition as can be seen by the film artefacts that are present throughout the movie - a good example of this can be seen at 18:51-18:57. I did not see any evidence of aliasing during the movie, which is probably the only thing going in its favour as far as the video is concerned. Analogue tape tracking errors are noticeable along the top of the picture.

    The layer change occurs at 33:17. It has been placed at a scene change so that it is unobtrusive.

     This movie has a plethora of subtitle languages but as I am not conversant in any other language other than English I confined my review to the English for the hearing impaired subtitles, which I found to be accurate to the spoken word.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The audio is plain English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s). Also present on the disc are similarly specified German and Italian soundtracks.

    I found the dialogue to be a little muffled at times, but there were no signs of lip sync problems. Occasionally the dialogue could be lost in the engine drone noise that was coming from the surrounds.

    There was very little in the way of a music score to show the talents of Trevor Jones - for this movie there was basically one song to set the date for the movie in the opening scenes but that just about accounted for the music. I don't think they will release this movie's soundtrack on CD.

    The surrounds were used appropriately, mostly for the droning noise from the B52 bomber engines.

    The subwoofer was used on occasion, but not to as great an extent as you would think for a movie with a lot of nuclear detonations happening - had this been a theatrical movie I think we would have been treated to a lot more in the subwoofer department.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    There are no extras associated with this release.

    The menu was presented in full screen format, 1.33:1 aspect ratio and is silent and still. It has selections for playing the movie, chapter submenu selection and language submenu selection.

    I have not seen the R1 release of this movie so I am unable to comment on which would be the better release.

    Overall this movie should have been treated a lot better than it has. The plot was good, the acting was reasonable but the special effects were lacking due mainly to the low budget it had to work with as a telemovie. The DVD mastering certainly is below par which has marred an otherwise entertaining movie. I would not be surprised to see this movie remade into a theatrical release in the future and if it does I think the extra budget would make for a very entertaining movie.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall