|
Contact
I can't, in all honesty, claim that I've examined every feature this DVD has
to offer, but I'm reviewing it anyway. And what's stopped me?
Jodie Foster told me not to.
No, really. Let me explain. I started out listening to Foster's audio
commentary track, one of a grand total of three such alternate audio tracks
available while watching Contact. And mere seconds, maybe
a whole minute, into the movie - during that pullback that spans the entire
universe - Ms. Foster says "I'm not sure how they did this. If you want to
know about that, go listen to the special effects guys. Now."
Well, who am I to argue with Jodie Foster?
Something about that has put me off of ever going back to listen to her audio
track, but the other two - one featuring FX wizards Ken Ralston and Stephen
Rosenbaum and the other featuring director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steve
Starkey
- offer a huge amount of insight as to just how much digital tweaking was done on
even the simplest shots. While it might seem as though Zemeckis wound up helming
Contact merely due to his ability to work Bill Clinton into certain
scenes (a craft he'd mastered with Forrest Gump), he actually has a
great deal of insight into both the FX side of the picture and the emotional core
of the story. On the other hand, listening to the FX guys is a dizzying and -
speaking as someone with considerable experience
working with graphics, image and video manipulation and 3-D animation -
humbling experience. Some portions of the
movie, they're rather laid-back, but when an FX-heavy scene appears, they can't
talk fast enough about how they did everything.
Other features include early 3D fly-arounds of digital constructs like the
Machine launch rings, as well as some text pages about the development of the
film from Carl Sagan's original novel into what's probably the brainiest bit of SF
to hit in the 90s.
Contact makes for a good DVD experience, and the numerous audio
commentaries offer loads of interesting information on how the movie was made -
even when one of these commentaries tells you, less than a minute into the movie,
to turn it off.
Reviewed by Earl
Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
 
 
| 
