Speed: Special Edition (1994)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Main Menu Introduction Main Menu Audio Audio Commentary-Jan De Bont Audio Commentary-Graham Yost & Mark Gordon Featurette-Bus Jump; Metrorail Crash Storyboard Comparisons-3 (Multi-Angle) + 1 unfilmed storyboard Multiple Angles-Stunts (4) Featurette-On Location; Stunts; Visual Effects Screenplay Notes-Production Design + Images Interviews-Cast & Crew Deleted Scenes-5 Gallery-18 Theatrical Trailer TV Spots-11 Featurette-HBO First Look: The Making Of Speed Music Video-Speed-Billy Idol Production Notes Easter Egg-Cargo Jet Explosion: The Airline Version
Rating
Year Of Production	1994
Running Time	111:10 (Case: 116)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (76:17) Dual Disc Set	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Jan De Bont
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Keanu Reeves Dennis Hopper Sandra Bullock Joe Morton Jeff Daniels
Case	Soft Brackley-Transp-Dual v2
RPI	$36.95	Music	Mark Mancina John Van Tongeren

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) English dts 5.1 (768Kb/s) English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (96Kb/s) English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (96Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Swedish Turkish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Unless you've been stuck down a bug-hole on Klendathu for the last eight years, there's a good bet that Speed is already familiar to you. I myself have seen the film about ten times since it was released in 1994, on each of its VHS, TV and laserdisc incarnations. After so many viewings, one tends to forget the exhilaration of that first encounter with a breathless cinema audience.

    Jan de Bont's kinetic thriller endures as one of the classic mainstream action pictures. Made for a modest $28 million, Speed still holds your attention with its ingenious perils, appealing lead characters, neat special effects and savvy direction. And as with all sentimental favourites (Star Wars, Top Gun, and The Rock to name a few) the flaws and cheesiness that once made us cringe now make us smile.

    What follows is a list of assorted observations about Speed. Please note that spoilers are embedded at random.

• Dennis Hopper is great as the mad bomber, even though his 'maniacal laugh' sounds rather forced. He delivers Graham Yost's dialogue beautifully, so much so that some lines could have been lifted from Blue Velvet: "Do you wanna die, friend?", "You've got blinders on to the world!", "At my age, Jack, you've got to think ahead" and the whole speech about letting bombs yield to their purpose, which recalls John Carpenter's Dark Star. I also love the moment when he realises the bus video has been looped. One hopes Dennis Hopper got a juicy pay cheque from Fox for doing the movie.
• Keanu Reeves was okay, although every now and then his lines fall flat. Interestingly, Reeves comes across more relaxed, articulate and (dare I say it) intelligent in the HBO interviews than he does in the film itself.
• Sandra Bullock was born to play Annie, and I don't think she's done better since. From what I saw in the HBO featurette, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock appear to have been more than just friends. Ahem – you heard it here first.
• Joe Morton as Mac the SWAT team lieutenant is fabulous. I crack up whenever he barks orders at people, particularly at the start when he issues all these commands in one breath, then roars, "Move!". Or when he's waiting for the TV technician to record a loop of bus video footage. He screams at the poor guy, "OK run it. RUN IT!!" Very funny! The talented Morton was Miles Dyson in Terminator 2, and had parts in Ali, Bounce, What Lies Beneath, Apt Pupil, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Executive Decision (another minor mainstream classic) and Brother from Another Planet.
• All of the bus passengers give wooden performances, possibly because their exchanges sound dubbed half the time. Nowadays their awful line readings strike me as amusing.
• One of the executives emerging from the corporate meeting is in Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar. I happen to own a Dogstar CD, yes I do.
• The number of the rigged bus is 2525, which of course adds up to 50 mph.
• The narrative flow is lean and efficient. Bookended by two tense sequences, the bus ride is the perfect vehicle for tossing a new crisis at the characters every 10 minutes. When you cut between that action, the SWAT team, Harry in the office, Howard Payne gnashing his teeth, you have a combination that can't fail. Speed also reminded me of that dynamite French film Wages of Fear.
• Speed won the following prestigious MTV awards: Best Action Sequence (airport finale), Best Female Performance (Sandra Bullock), Best On-Screen Duo (Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves), Best Villain (Dennis Hopper) and Most Desirable Female (Sandra Bullock).

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and is 16x9 enhanced.

    As Ian said in his review, the title sequence immediately reveals sharpness, clarity and shadow detail. Although, if anything, shadow detail and sharpness is a little sluggish in the opening elevator drama, at least compared to later films. Outdoor shots fare better, thanks to more favourable lighting conditions and faster film. Too much edge enhancement would have ruined this transfer: there are countless high contrast transitions, but apart from the nearly invisible quantity added by my 76cm widescreen Loewe, none is evident. A larger display might reveal a different result.

    Colour saturation is perfect. Colour bleed and low level noise problems are absent, and skin tones are natural. This is a well-balanced transfer that is rich and life-like when it needs to be, without going overboard.

    The source materials were virtually devoid of film artefacts – this is a very clean transfer. Film grain is apparent in a handful of shots, yet it was so fine as to be inconsequential. The frame jump reported by Ian at 97:37 also appears in this rendering. With all the shaking inside the train, I assume it was caused by a freak camera jerk, since other sudden sideways lurches occur in this shot, but none are as conspicuous. Slight aliasing is noticeable at 11:50 (steel girders), 31:25 (shelter rooftops), 53:19 (radiator grill shimmer) and 76:25 (front of a car). Such fine lines are nearly impossible to eliminate at this resolution without sacrificing sharpness.

    I missed the layer change – it was that well placed. The switch happens at 76:17 on the wide shot of Howard Payne's house in suburbia, just as the cop cars pull up outside. This is exactly where the first DVD cuts over. Fox are now manufacturing dual-layer DVDs in silver, not gold.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    I watched the dts track in its entirety and most of the Dolby Digital track. Hence, the evaluation and ratings apply to the dts track only. A comparison of the two follows.

    Dialogue is crisp and clear in dts. Sibilants are bright, almost too bright, as if the 768 Kb/s compression exaggerated the treble. Another theory is that dts has replicated the deficiencies of the original dialogue stems recorded in 1993. The audio is always in sync, taking into account the vagaries of ADR.

    The original music score by Mark Mancina (Training Day, Con Air, Code Name Vengeance, Space Mutiny) is instantly recognisable with its sinuous, overlapping melodies, pounding drums and clichéd little stings. It is given great presence and body by the surrounds (sometimes exclusively) while never hijacking the sound effects. The Billy Idol song at the end is suitably bombastic.

    The fidelity dts offers is first class, although I'd love to hear it compressed at 1536Kb/s. Regardless, this track is spacious and detailed from go to whoa. All front and surround channels are active throughout the feature, scattering ambient noises and echoes around the room. Loud crashes, clanging metal, sirens, bursting water barrels, explosions, roaring engines, scrapes, and gunshots give the ears a good pounding. There are a number of split rear effects and some side-wall imaging. While the dynamic range is muscular, the frequency response favours the mid-to-upper ranges. It's not hard to see why Speed won Oscars for Best Effects / Sound Effects Editing, and Best Sound. One may assume that the same engineers created the 5.1 remixes.

    The subwoofer channel and lower frequencies in general seem to be subdued in the dts track. The three major explosions (bus, house, plane) rate low on the Richter Scale.

Dolby Digital vs dts

    It is a close call. The dts track is recommended if you have a choice. What would a Dolby Digital 448 Kb/s track sound like?

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Disk one contains the movie and two commentaries. Disk two contains all other extras.

Menus

    Most of the featurette footage is presented full frame (composed for 1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 2.0 Pro-Logic sound. This footage was assembled from the HBO documentary The Making of Speed and is in excellent shape. The extras are listed in menu order. I listened to the commentaries last of all.

1. ACTION

Featurette - Bus Jump (9:17)

Featurette - Metro Rail Crash (6:05)

Storyboard Comparisons

• Bomb on Bus.
• Bus Jump.
• Metro Rail Fight and Crash.
• Unfilmed Baker Sequence. A SWAT guy called Baker is lowered to the bus roof by helicopter. He narrowly clears an overpass hurdle-fashion, only to smash through glass panes carried by a truck. This would have been very cool, but the studio did not authorise the $500,000 expenditure. RIP Baker.

Multi-Angle Stunts

• Bus Jump (x8)
• Cargo Jet Explosion (x8)
• Jack vs Payne (x3)
• Metro Rail Crash (x8)

2. INSIDE SPEED

Featurette - On Location (7:04)

Featurette - Stunts (11:39)

Featurette - Visual Effects (8:52)

Original Screenplay by Graham Yost

    The paging mechanism was clunky, with bundles of pages allocated to a chapter, thus causing the screen to go black for two seconds while my Pioneer lurched forward to grab the next batch, which probably equates to one block or buffer's worth of MPEG-2 data. Despite the difficulty of reading text on a TV screen (100Hz is so nice in this regard), I believe that every extras package should contain the script, if not in a GUI, then added to the DVD-ROM content or made available on the Web.

    Graham Yost's other writing credits include The Last Castle, Challenger, Mission to Mars, Hard Rain and Broken Arrow.

Production Design Notes & Images - Written by Jackson DeGoiva

    Two direct quotes describe the tone of this interesting feature better than I can. (a) "The square font we picked for the numbers (on the speedometer) was nixed. I think the zeros in the final version are too pointy on the ends, and wish we'd stuck with the first font." (b) "They used a combination of classic rear projection technique and inspired cheating to produce an exciting sequence, which today would be done with boring perfection in front of a green screen using computer generated effects."

    Certain references to drawings or finished work are accessed by invoking the bus icon. Again, this was a hard slog: blackouts occurred before and after each detour, but it was worth all the effort.

Interviews (x5)

• Keanu Reeves (5:43)
• Sandra Bullock (9:08)
• Jeff Daniels (6:35)
• Dennis Hopper (4:33)
• Jan de Bont (4:14)

3. EXTENDED SCENES (10:54)

• Jack shoots Payne in the neck after Harry drops to the floor - this is in the script
• Payne Lives / Cops Party - more dialogue from the script
• Annie's Job - a suitably droll occupation with a nice quip at the end
• After Helen's death - more dialogue from the script
• Ray's Crime - a trivial matter of course

4. IMAGE GALLERY

5. PRO-MOTION

Theatrical Trailer (2:41) and TV Spots (x11)

    All TV Spots are 30 seconds long. The image is on the soft side, with the occasional cross-colour artefact appearing.

• Pop Quiz
• Game
• Get Ready
• Go Faster
• This Weekend
• Ultimate Rush
• Review
• Movie of the Year
• Critics
• Rescue Me Review - Alt.
• Everybody

Featurette - HBO First Look: The Making of Speed (23:15)

    The documentary is hosted by Dennis Hopper, who appears to be having a ball doing the gig; he even blows up the Hollywood sign at the end of it. It was mentioned several times in various places: many people were surprised at how well Speed turned out. You can see the pride on Hopper's face as he does his little skits for this featurette.

Billy Idol Clip - 'Speed' (4:23)

    And that's 4 minutes 23 seconds too long. Billy Idol and his band of hard rockers and rollers play on stage in a crowded basement nightclub. Obviously galvanised into euphoria by the thrill of one day appearing on a DVD supplement, the attractive patrons dance up a storm for the cameras and their idol, Billy. This song plays over the end credits of Speed. I think it was a sly attempt to make audiences leave faster.

Press Kit (19 pages)

6. EASTER EGG - Cargo Jet Explosion: Airline Version (0:52)

7. AUDIO COMMENTARIES (x2)

Jan de Bont (director)

Graham Yost (screenwriter) and Mark Gordon (producer)

    Recorded two weeks after the September 11 terrorist attack, fast-talking Graham Yost and Mark Gordon fall over each other to comment on scenes and generally tell tall tales. Yost the writer related a number of background anecdotes about how the screenplay got written: where ideas came from, influences (Runaway Train naturally), making the movie, script changes and rewrites (for example, Annie was originally African American). He also mentions the WTC terrorist attacks, moaned about not being invited onto the set, disowned the woeful sequel, et cetera. Producer Gordon threw in his own associations to this info, as well as explaining his connections to the project, criticising aspects of the film (which they both did), and quoting lines of dialogue. This became a running gag between the two of them, and by the end of it all both were in top gear...not unlike the movie itself.

    Before hearing this marvellous commentary, I was already quite satisfied with the fat extras package, which took me a few nights to digest. Discovering what a gem it is only sweetened the cake that much more. Icing doesn't taste much better than this.

    One set of detailed specifications for Speed (Five Star Collection) due for release in Region 1 on 23 July 2002 is almost the same as our DVD.

    The Region 1 version misses out on:

• Earlier release date

    The Region 4 version misses out on:

• French Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack
• Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack
• Production notes (40 pages)
• DVD credits Easter Egg - unless I never found it on our DVD
• THX certification - needs confirmation since I've not seen our cover yet

    This special edition DVD presents the movie with a gorgeous video transfer and two glossy 5.1 surround sound tracks. The extras are also generous, increasing my fondness for the film. The two commentary tracks alone are worth gold. A recently produced making-of documentary is the only item not created by Fox that would have made this bundle perfect.

    This edition of Speed is being released five days short of the 8th anniversary of its US debut, which falls on 10 June.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall