What Dreams May Come

DVD Details: Anamorphic Widescreen Audio Tracks: Dolby Surround, Dolby 5.1, Commentary Subtitles: French, Spanish Talent Bios/Filmographies Featurette Alternate Ending More Extras (see below) PG-13, 114 minutes

This was a movie I originally wanted to see because of the cool effects. As I began watching it in the theater, I realized it was a date movie. Too bad I had gone with another guy to catch the effects. Oh well. I really enjoyed this movie though, and when I saw it was on DVD, I thought the brilliant visual imagery might actually show on DVD. As I looked through this disc, it seems that there was a lot done to preserve the original film quality and look. A very nice DVD, I'll try to walk you through it now.

The story is about the afterlife in general, and follows one man's journey with his soul mate. About as bad of a life as you could hope to tolerate, the people involved seem to handle it well, for the most part. I'll try not to give too much away, but the movie basically follows one man's quest to be with the woman he loves. For a movie that spends most of the screen time on a sad note, the movie is surprisingly uplifting. I want to say this movie really touched me, but I won't go into boring details. Now on to the DVD.

One thing I want to mention before I get too far in, this DVD is one of the few I've seen to actually include something inside besides the disc. The little booklet is a lot more than a single page, and gives nice notes on the story, visual effects, and production of the movie. It'd be nice if more movies included these little write-ups for people to read before they watch a movie.

As you pop the DVD in, you get this choice, up or down? If you couldn't guess, this choice makes no real difference except showing you the "heaven" menus, or the "hell" menus. They really aren't too different, and are laid out identically, so you can take a look at both, but you won't miss much. The movie is presented in Dolby Surround, but there's a Dolby Surround 5.1 Option for those of you with real home theatres. The commentary track is interesting, and doesn't spend the whole time on visual effects, as you might think. It's more of a real movie commentary, and I enjoyed listening to it. There are subtitles available in French and Spanish.

The video quality is really great. The anamorphic transfer really helps this movie keep the original look. It still doesn't look as good as I remember in the theater, but this is as good as you could possibly expect. All the original awe-inspiring scenes still have that affect, and I think you'll really be impressed. Unlike that Matrix effect, I haven't seen the "paint world" effect in use at all since this movie. That's a big plus when you're looking for a movie with some unique qualities.

The number of extras on this disc is really surprising. All are accessible from the "Special Features" menu, and provide a lot of behind-the-scenes information. There are two trailers, (one obviously made before they had done many of the effects) a standard featurette, an alternate ending, Two interviews with visual effects people (Joel Hynek and Josh Rosen), a large photo gallery, Cast and Filmmaker Bios, and finally some utterly disappointing desktop wallpapers. All these extras are above par, except for maybe the alternate ending (which must've had a bad transfer) and the wallpapers (wow, 7 poor quality bitmaps). Aside from those two things I was extremely happy with the extras on this disc.

Overall, this disc definitely deserves its "Special Edition" label. A good movie presented in a way that doesn't diminish its impact, with a lot of quality extras makes for a great DVD. I'm happy to have this one in my collection. A good movie for all the romantics out there, this disc won't disappoint the DVD collector either.