Braveheart

DVD Details: Anamorphic Widescreen Audio Tracks: English 5.1/Surround, French Surround, Commentary Track Subtitles: English / French Making of Braveheart Featurette Trailers R, 177 minutes

In 1995, one movie stormed across the countryside, destroying the competition. With 5 Academy awards including Best Picture and Best Director, Braveheart was truly an epic that captured the attention of everyone. William Wallace became a household name, and in spite of the historical inaccuracies the story of one of the biggest legends of Scotland was made known to the world.

I never saw Braveheart during its original release, so this DVD was a good opportunity to visit a movie I had only heard about. I was very impressed with the movie, and I'm sure the feeling when watching this movie on the big screen would only be amplified. The video and sound quality are very good, although there are a few defects. These are small and make no real impact on the final presentation, but they exist nonetheless. The anamorphic transfer does a lot to help with the quality.

The extras listed on the package make it seem the disc would be packed. However, this is not the case. The "Interactive Menus" are nothing but static images, and there's not even a soundtrack for them. The package lists "Scene Selection" as a special feature, when there's nothing special about it, since I don't know of a DVD without this particular "feature." The selection menus aren't even animated, which I'm starting to get used to. I like to have more than one freeze frame when I'm trying to pick the scene I wanna show someone. At least it has two trailers, I guess two are better than one, right? I would've preferred they took a trailer out and made the scene selection screens animated, or added a soundtrack to all the menus.

It might look like I don't like this disc, but that's not the case. I found the one real extra, A Filmmaker's Passion: The Making of Braveheart, to be entertaining and very informative. Nearly a full half hour, this puts a lot of "Making of" Featurettes to shame. This is how they should all be, possibly even a bit longer. And more than one would be great, as long as it's not just a rehash of the same footage (I'm looking at you ID4). The featurette on Braveheart showed a lot of what it was like on the set, and several of the main actors talking about the movie. Fun, and interesting.

Then there's the commentary track. I read a few reviews of this DVD before it came out, and they all talked about the commentary track and how great it was. Personally I thought it didn't get good until after the first hour or so. There was just too little talking by Mel Gibson before the first big battle scene. After that it gets pretty interesting, with lots of historical information as well as technical information about the production process. If you wanna know the good stuff from before the first battle, the kid who played young William Wallace never acted in a big movie before (and did great) and the sidekick with the scars actually had those scars. There, now you can skip to the first battle and not miss much. I'm just kidding, but it did feel as if there were big gaps in the track for the first hour or so. This makes it not the best commentary track out there, but I definitely say that it's worth a listen, gaps and all.

Paramount could have made this into quite a Special Edition. Gibson mentioned a lot of deleted scenes, and there was a lot that could have been said about recreating the time period. They spent months on those big battle scenes, I would've loved to see a whole featurette on how they carried them out and made them look so good. Along with storyboards, photos, and more cast interviews, they could have made this a great 2-disc set. And there aren't many other movies that deserve it. As it stands, Braveheart's not a great DVD, but the combination of a legendary movie, a nice commentary track and a featurette make it worth a spot on your shelf.