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Review: Babylon 5 "The Gathering" & "In the Beginning" DVD
by
Carl Lefler
Aug 5, 2002
A couple of movies with only the most basic features included. No commentary tracks, no interviews or documentary features and even the TNT promos for the movies are left out. This DVD exists for Warner Bros to gauge the public's interest and for them to decide whether or not to proceed with season by season DVD sets. Luckily it seems to have passed the test as we can expect the first season DVD to be available at the end of the year. Even so the two movies are not that bad a deal if you can find them for around $14-18 at Amazon or Deep Discount DVD.
This is a good thing since the announcement of the series on DVD dried up the sales of the series on VHS & laser disc a couple years back. Ironically the drop in sales in turn made Warner Bros decide not to go ahead with the DVDs. Talk about a catch 22 situation!
The Packaging: Pretty basic and rather flimsy box with art and design consistent with the lackluster design of the DVD 2 movie set as a whole.
Testing equipment: To do this review I used a Phillips Magnavox DVD611 DVD player and a Compaq Presario 5000 with 1.2 GB Intel Celeron processor, 512 MB RAM, Compaq DVD ROM drive and WinDVD version 3.1.
In the Beginning
The
Movie:
The movie itself will be reviewed with greater detail separately. The image quality though is very
good but not great. It's clear, though there is some artifacting in several
scenes. The movie
is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen only with The Gathering on the other side of the
disc. This is the better of the two movies but may be pretty confusing to
new viewers and not the best place to start as a first time viewer. Mike Vejar
really does a terrific job as director, most of the scenes are beautifully shot
and the effects used are top notch. Even some of the scenes that were originally
shown in the series fit in seamlessly with the rest of the movie.
The
Menus:
The menus are really pretty basic with no animation but it does include a
muddled musical score. The navigation is good but not great. They've made no
effort to create a menu design that looks anything like a Babylon 5 design, just
fairly standard looking windows with a clunky digital text. The
buttons are fairly clear and moderately readable. At one point the hotspots on the PC's DVD
menu were off but I shut down WinDVD and started the program up again and the
mouse hit the buttons just fine. I haven't had that problem again even after
testing the menus several times since then.
The
Extras: They
really offer almost nothing by way of extra features. A pathetic single screen
view of the cast & crew with no information other than who played what part
for the main five characters, but no additional information is given and no
supporting players are mentioned. The writer, director, producer and executive
producers are also listed with no other information. This is the weakest area of
the DVD. In fact it's one of the weakest features of any DVD I've seen. They could at least have included a couple of the TNT promotional spots
on the disc. I consider scene selection as a basic menu item so I covered that
in the previous section.
The
Sound:
Only English is offered as language option with subtitles offered in English and
French. The Dolby Digital 2.0 channel soundtracks are pretty good with the music
and sound effects utilizing the full effects of the stereo channels but the dialog,
while not as crisp, is clear
enough. Christopher Franke's musical score is extremely well done and enhances
the mood of the movie.
The Gathering
The
Movie: The movie itself will be reviewed on it's own merits separately from
here. The Gathering TV movie is, as mentioned above, on the other side of the disc from In the
Beginning. It is only offered in 4:3 full screen format since it's the only part of
the Babylon 5 saga not filmed in widescreen format. The picture quality is a
noticeable drop off from that of the In the Beginning TV movie. And many times the image seems
soft and a bit blurry. The makeup effects on the characters are more crudely
done than even in season one and the station CGI isn't as good as it will become
later down the line. It benefits from new effects added in 1998 when the TV
movie was given Special Edition treatment for TNT.
The
Menus:
The menus are the same as with In the Beginning meaning that there's not much to
them. Same dopey digital looking design in all the areas. No animation. A
different but equally muddled music soundtrack. I encountered no problems with
the hotspots when using my mouse like I did with the In the Beginning menus. At
least they didn't do something really stupid like showing Sheridan or Ivanova on
any of the menus. I'm hoping for a lot better with the season one DVD set. At
least a design that looks more suited for Babylon 5 rather than such a plain
looking space theme.
The
Sounds:
Same as before. English is the only language option with English and French
subtitles offered. The sound also isn't quite the same quality as with In the
Beginning. There are a lot of pops and crackles that they didn't bother to clear
off for the DVD release. And the release features the music soundtrack by
Christopher (Tangerine Dream) Franke rather than the original Stewart (The
Police) Copeland score, which is a plus. The Franke score allows the Movie to
fit in better with the rest of the series. Not that the Copeland score was that
bad. It was many times better than Evan Chen's Crusade scores.
The
Extras: The
same pitiful Cast & Crew screen is the only extra feature here. It too
provides no added information and is basically useless.
Wrapping Up: I'd like to point out that though my review, as negative as it may seem doesn't take into account the fact that these are two good movies. In the case of In the Beginning, a really good movie. And overall, though lacking in features, worth the money to buy especially if it encourages Warner Bros to continue with the season DVD sets. One can only hope that one day they'll release these movies again on DVD with added features but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen. And remember if the first couple seasons don't sell well on DVD you can forget about season 3-5.