The World Is Not Enough
This review is sponsored by
Details At A Glance
General
|
Extras
|
Category |
Bond |
Theatrical Trailer(s) |
Yes, 1 - 2.35:1 (16x9 Enhanced), Dolby Digital 2.0 |
Rating |
|
Other Trailer(s) |
Yes, 1 - The World Is Not Enough PlayStation game
(0:34) |
Year Released |
1999 |
Commentary Tracks |
Yes, 2
1. Michael Apted (Director)
2. Peter Lamont (Production Designer), David Arnold
(Composer), Vic Armstrong (Second Unit Director) |
Running Time |
122:54 Minutes |
Other Extras |
Menu Animation and Audio
Featurette - The Making Of The World Is Not Enough (14:53)
Featurette - The Bond Cocktail (22:51)
Featurette - Bond Down River (25:04)
Featurette - A Tribute To Desmond Llewelyn (3:13)
Storyboard/Rough Edit Comparisons - The Secrets Of 007
Music Video - Garbage: The World Is Not Enough
(3:59) |
RSDL/Flipper |
RSDL (32:28) |
Cast & Crew
|
Start Up |
Movie |
Region |
2,4 |
Director |
Michael Apted |
Studio
Distributor |
Fox Home Entertainment
|
Starring |
Pierce Brosnan
Robert Carlyle
Sophie Marceau
Denise Richards
Robbie Coltrane
Desmond Llewelyn
Judi Dench |
Case |
Transparent Amaray |
RRP |
$34.95 |
Music |
David Arnold |
Video
|
Audio
|
Pan & Scan/Full Frame |
None |
MPEG |
None |
Widescreen Aspect Ratio |
2.35:1 |
Dolby Digital |
5.1 |
16x9 Enhancement |
|
Soundtrack Languages |
English (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384Kb/s)
English Audio Commentary 1 (Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, 192Kb/s)
English Audio Commentary 2 (Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, 192Kb/s) |
Theatrical Aspect Ratio |
2.35:1 |
Miscellaneous
|
Macrovision |
Yes |
Smoking |
No |
Subtitles |
English
English for the Hearing Impaired |
Annoying Product Placement |
No |
Action In or After Credits |
No |
Plot Synopsis
Denise Richards in an incomprehensibly tight
pair of shorts and an amazingly well-outlined tank top; do I need any other
excuse to be reviewing The World Is Not Enough? How about
the opportunity to laugh at her trying to play a nuclear physicist with
an incomprehensibly stupid name? What little excuse there is for a plot
in this, the nineteenth film in the loved and lauded James Bond franchise,
mainly revolves around women with guffaw-inducing names running about in
revealing clothes, reciting rather idiotic lines. In that respect, the
James Bond saga has not moved forward so much as a single millimetre in
nineteen episodes, and you really have to applaud that sort of consistency.
The film begins with Special Agent 007, or James Bond (Pierce Brosnan)
as he is known to those outside of MI6, concluding an assignment to retrieve
five million dollars from a Swiss Banker who is acting as a front to some
rather nasty terrorist types. As expected, the operation ends with hostilities,
and Bond escaping from his opponents through a combination of his wits
and some rather implausible gadgetry. Upon returning to MI6 headquarters
to meet with M (Judi Dench) and Sir Robert King (David Calder),
the rightful owner of the money, Bond discovers that his drink has been
spiked with some kind of chemical concoction. By this time, Robert has
already left with the chemical somewhere on his person (the movie isn't
too clear on this point, but I think he drank it), and promptly explodes.
Fearing for the safety of other members of the wealthy King family, M assigns
Bond to protect Robert King's daughter, Elektra (Sophie Marceau).
While I am on this point of the film, I would just say that I have never
seen Sophie Marceau look so damned awful on screen. I mean, making
something that unpleasant to look at out of nothing is an everyday event,
but it must have taken the makeup artists and the hairstylists a special
effort to make Sophie look that repulsive. Anyway, Bond is sent to meet
with Q (Desmond Llewelyn), who goes through a demonstration of the
plethora of gadgetry which Bond will use on his current mission. Q introduces
Bond and the audience to R (John Cleese), who is destined to replace
Q as Bond's weaponry specialist, much to Bond's obvious amusement (and
the general stomach-rolls of the audience). While I am on this plot point,
I would just like to say that I am utterly sick to death of John Cleese
being made to play Basil Fawlty again and again; enough is enough, already.
We are soon introduced to Bond's arch-nemesis, a
rather nasty guy by the name of Renard (Robert Carlyle). Discounting
his appearance for a second, Renard possesses some rather nasty characteristics,
mainly owing to the fact that a fellow MI6 agent put a bullet in his brain
on a previous assignment. Said bullet is apparently travelling through
his brain at a reduced rate, and has numbed all the sensation in his body,
just one of the stops on its course towards eventually killing him. This,
by the way, is plot problem number two: a bullet can only spin so slowly
before tissue stops it completely, and the loss of sensation in a body
part tends to make it rather difficult, if not impossible, to use. In any
case, Bond soon travels to Eastern Europe to investigate a mining site
at which he meets a nuclear physicist by the name of Christmas Jones (Denise
Richards). Soon, all hell breaks loose, and Renard makes off with a
lump of plutonium that, if triggered in the wrong place, could destroy
an oil pipeline that is expected to supply the entire Western world for
the upcoming twenty-first century. I will finish my description of the
actual plot there, because to tell you any more about the film would ruin
the few surprises that this film can really offer. However, I will just
mention that the much-loved Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane)
from Goldeneye makes another appearance in the Bond franchise,
adding some much-needed personality to the support cast.
I know what most of you non-Bond fans are thinking
right now: how does the film's premise hold up after not showing a single
sign of character development in nearly twenty films? Well, to tell you
the honest truth, it's getting just a little stale after all these years.
Pierce
Brosnan makes an excellent Bond, and is certainly a much better man
for the role than some others I could mention who have been given the assignment.
I think that I've already made my feelings about
Sophie Marceau's
performance perfectly clear, and when Denise Richards appeared just
over halfway through the film, I certainly didn't need a black metal vocalist
screaming "miscast" at me to know something was up. Desmond Llewelyn
is as delightful to watch in his seventeenth Bond film as he was in the
other sixteen, and it is a damned pity that he will no longer be appearing
in Bond films due to passing away a few months after this one opened. Don't
even get me started on whether John Cleese should be allowed to
appear in an upcoming episode. Sit back, try not to think of plot problem
number three (without revealing too much, it is literally impossible for
a helicopter with attachments like those to perform essential functions
such as land), and you will enjoy this film enough to consider paying the
price of owning it.
Transfer Quality
Video
This is one of the first DVDs to be released by Metro
Goldwin Mayer after they unceremoniously dumped Warner Home Video as a
distributor and then took their business to Fox Home Entertainment. The
results are nothing but stellar, with little, if anything at all, for even
the fussiest of viewers to complain about. Fox have certainly come a long
way with the DVD format since the release of Titanic.
The transfer is presented in the original aspect ratio of 2.35:1, complete
with 16x9 enhancement and subtitles that are placed in the black bars rather
than on any part of the picture. This is a delightful transfer to look
at, and it falls short of reference quality by the narrowest of margins.
The transfer is exceptionally sharp from start to finish, with not a hint
of grain or noise to be found. Shadow detail is excellent, although the
lighting conditions that the film was shot under sometimes give the eyes
a bit of a workout. Colour saturation is absolutely spot-on at all times,
with skin tones and water surfaces looking lifelike enough to make me want
to crawl into my screen and appear in the picture. This video transfer
leaves the picture looking so incredibly life-like that a good projection
system will deliver a better experience than seeing this film at the theatre
(which I did, incidentally).
MPEG artefacts were absent from the main feature,
in spite of the bit rate being all over the place to accommodate all the
extras and the needs of the onscreen images. Film-to-video artefacts were
the only problem with the transfer, and they were trivial at the worst
of times. Some aliasing became apparent during sequences involving video
imagery, and some fine chrome lines also suffer from a mild degree of aliasing.
However, in the first sixty-seven minutes of the film, I only saw two very
minor instances of this artefact becoming apparent, and I doubt the casual
viewer will even notice. This is a surprise when you consider how hard
the total amount of featurettes on this disc are pushing the compression.
Film artefacts were completely absent from the transfer, reflecting the
fact that this film only left the theatres about six months ago. Finally,
as I mentioned before, the small amount of subtitles that originally appeared
in the film are encoded into the black bar that appears at the bottom of
the film. There are about five lines of dialogue that needed to be subtitled,
so this is a far better idea than merely having a choice between English
subtitles and English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles.
The disc is presented in the RSDL
format, with the layer change taking place at 32:08,
between Chapters 9 and 10. The layer change is rather hard to miss, with
a noticeable pause in the video stream that seems to last about half a
second on the Toshiba SD-2109, but its placement could not be better.
Audio
To put it in a nutshell, this is thoroughly a reference
quality audio transfer with nothing to complain about that directly relates
to the actual DVD, and only trivial flaws appearing elsewhere in the process.
There are three audio tracks on this DVD, but the only dialogue track is
the original English in Dolby Digital 5.1, with the other two tracks being
commentary tracks encoded in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. I listened to all
three of the audio tracks, but for the time being I will simply tell you
about the original English dialogue. The dialogue was clear and easy to
understand at all times, and there were no problems at any point with ambient
sounds intruding upon the intelligibility. Sophie Marceau exhibited
a tendency to speak in a rather thick voice, but this was kept well under
control during the production. Audio sync was never a problem at any point,
although the few lines of Russian dialogue in the middle of the film seemed
to have a slightly unreal quality.
The score music in this film is mostly provided by
David
Arnold, although the opening theme is provided by a rather boring band
by the name of Garbage. It's such a real pity that music has declined
so far in the 1990s that a film franchise remembered for themes like Paul
McCartney's Live And Let Die is now in the doldrums of
using "artists" who barely demonstrate any ability to hold their instruments
the right way. Having said that much, the title theme is at least listenable,
which is more than what I can normally say for bands of this ilk. The score
music itself is simply like any other Bond film, with larger-than-life
themes punctuating the impossible action and moving the feeling of the
film along. Like any other Bond film score, with the exception of Live
And Let Die, it left very little in the way of an impression on
me.
Now that I have gone through the minor quibbles with
the film itself, I am ready to discuss the excellence of the audio transfer.
The surround presence is where this DVD really excels, and it does so within
the first two reels of the film by giving the onscreen action the same
larger-than-life feel as the props. The rears got a high amount of use
to support ambient sounds and music, with a helicopter sound early in the
film moving from one rear to the other in a rather noticeable but satisfying
experience. Although the surround presence fell away slightly during the
dialogue sequences, it only did so by foregoing intensity in favour of
subtlety. This is an excellent disc with which to demonstrate to the people
you know who are still to be convinced about Dolby Digital sound why the
DVD format exists. The subwoofer received a moderate workout to support
gunshots and explosions, not to mention the occasional impact, and it did
all this without calling any attention to itself. Immersion was certainly
the order of the day in this soundtrack.
Extras
There are a plethora of extras on this disc, but I really
wish they had been trimmed down slightly, for reasons I will outline now.
It is worth noting that the disc I am reviewing is a test disc, and some
slight graphic changes are apparently going to take place before the final
release.
Menu Animation and Audio
The main menu, and many of the other menus, are accompanied
by elaborate animations. Only the main menu has continuous animation and
audio while it is displayed, and the looping of the audio leaves something
to be desired. The between-menu animations can also get on the nerves at
times, but this is a much more agreeable arrangement than what normally
takes place. While I am on this subject, the menu is heavily themed around
the movie, and the scene selection menu offers access to all 32 chapter
stops (are you listening, Warner Home Video?).
Commentary - Michael Apted (Director)
This scores a close second to The
Matrix for the most damned-awful boring commentary tracks that
I have listened to, with Michael Apted speaking in a constant monotone
drawl that fails to engage, about nothing of any great interest.
Commentary - Peter Lamont (Production Designer), David Arnold (Composer),
Vic Armstrong (Second Unit Director)
This is more tolerable than the other commentary track,
but not by much. David Arnold hardly speaks at all, Peter Lamont
is boring, Vic Armstrong isn't much better, and the latter two are
extremely hard to distinguish.
Theatrical Trailer (2:05)
Presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 with 16x9 enhancement
and Dolby Digital 2.0 sound, this trailer is just like any other Bond trailer
in that it revolves around that damned musical theme and lots of bass-heavy
noises.
Trailer - The World Is Not Enough PlayStation game (0:34)
An advertisement for a game based on the film. This
is one way that DVD rides all over VHS - you don't have to ruin the tape
to skip advertisements like these.
Featurette - The Making Of The World Is Not Enough (14:53)
This is a shining example of why there should be a limit
on how many extras should be placed on the film. Not only is the featurette
a steaming load of masturbatory drivel, but it is encoded with a bitrate
so low (consistently three to four Mb/s) that MPEG artefacting is rife
throughout the presentation, with macro-blocking even becoming slightly
evident in people's faces. It is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1,
with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound, and a feature I want to see more of in featurettes
of this length - chaptering.
Featurette - The Bond Cocktail (22:51)
Again, MPEG artefacting is rife throughout the presentation
and the featurette is chaptered so you can skip from one uninteresting
moment to another. It is also presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with
Dolby Digital 2.0 sound.
Featurette - James Bond Down River (25:04)
This is another featurette filled with minor MPEG artefacts,
and the fact that the aspect ratio varies between 1.33:1 and 2.35:1 without
16x9 Enhancement for either ratio does not help matters any. It is presented
with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. Unlike the other featurettes, this featurette
has something mildly interesting to say about such things as the Thames
river chase sequence.
Featurette - A Tribute To Desmond Llewelyn (3:13)
This is a tasteful, and surprisingly artefact-free presentation
of a tribute to the late Desmond Llewelyn, who played James Bond's
long-suffering armourer, Q, through seventeen Bond films. Well worth having
a look at if you enjoyed Llewelyn's acting.
Storyboard/Rough Edit Comparisons - The Secrets Of 007
This is a series of comparisons for various
scenes in the film between the storyboards and the final cut, or the animatics/pre-CGI
film to the finished product. The title sequence in particular is very
interesting for illustrating the massive difference between rough cuts
and finished products.
Music Video - Garbage: The World Is Not Enough (3:59)
I only know of one song from a recent film that I would
like to see a music video for, or hear a full version of: Into It,
by one Zoë Poledouris. This song is rather second-rate by comparison,
even if Garbage didn't write it themselves (which is probably what
saved it from becoming completely ear-cuttingly irritating). The video
itself suffers from major lip-synch problems, but other than that is as
good as these music videos get.
R4 vs R1
The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;
The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on;
-
Featurette - Bond Down River
-
Featurette - The Bond Cocktail
The Region 1 version is missing a couple of featurettes,
a total of about thirty minutes worth. Now, normally, I would call this
a bad thing, but the truth of the matter is that none of the extras on
this disc, with the exception of the Desmond Llewelyn tribute, are
of any real interest, and the version of that featurette which we have
is only just over a quarter of what is supposedly the original version,
which by the way can be found on the R1 version of On Her Majesty's
Secret Service. Given the additional malady of the disc being consistently
starved for bits during much of the special features (they hid this well
during the film itself, but a toll is taken), I would consider the Region
1 version to be the superior product due to the fact that the compression
is given significantly more space to breathe. However, as Michael says,
the most important thing is the movie, which is reference quality all the
way except for a handful of frames that will look perfect on a progressive-scan
player anyway. What it comes down to is whether you want all of the extras,
or for the extras to look better as a result of being allocated more bits,
not to mention what you think of the featurettes in question. If you're
not picky, then stick with the local version, or borrow a friend's copy
and look at the extras to see which side of the fence you sit on.
Summary
The World Is Not Enough is an enjoyable,
if inherently stupid, action/adventure ride that you would expect from
the James Bond franchise. It features Denise Richards in revealing
clothing. Must I say more?
The video quality is superb, and almost reference
status but for a few seconds here and there.
The audio quality is a shining example of why DVD
will drive VHS towards its well-deserved death.
To quote Michael
D: Quality, not quantity of extras, please. Seventy minutes of extras
encoded at a consistently low bit-rate is too much.
Video |
|
Audio |
|
Extras |
|
Plot |
|
Overall |
|
© Dean McIntosh (my
bio
sucks... read it anyway)
12th May 2000
Amended 16th May 2000
Review Equipment
|
|
|
DVD |
Grundig GDV 100 D, using composite output; Toshiba SD-2109,
using S-video output |
Display |
Panasonic TC-29R20 (68 cm), 4:3 mode, using composite
input; Samsung CS-823AMF (80 cm), 16:9 mode/4:3 mode, using composite and
S-video inputs |
Audio Decoder |
Built In (Amplifier) |
Amplification |
Sony STR-DE835 |
Speakers |
Panasonic S-J1500D Front Speakers, Sharp CP-303A Back
Speakers, Philips FB206WC Centre Speaker, JBL Digital 10 Subwoofer |