The Movie: The first hour of this movie bored me so much that I had to turn it off, and I didn't get back to watching the end of it until about a week later. The last part of the movie, I must admit, was much, much better than the first part. At 162 minutes, this movie is just too long, with absolutely nothing really happening in the first hour. Perhaps if cut down to 130 minutes it would have been a lot more enjoyable.

Somehow this movie won 9 Academy Awards, and I'm really not sure why. The last hour of the movie was actually pretty damned great, but not so great that it makes up for the drudgery of the first hour. Sure the desert photography is great, but I even found myself thinking at some point during the movie "are they trying to be like some kind of wannabe Lawrence of Arabia?" -- but it is certainly a beautiful looking movie, that's for sure.

So what's it about. A guy (Ralph Fiennes) flying a plane near the end of WWII gets shot down and is burned beyond recognition. He doesn't remember anything about the past, and he's dying. A nurse (Juliette Binoche) decides to take care of him, and the mysterious pilot's identity and sordid past is revealed through a series of flashbacks.

There is some clever editing and sound design going on, and the photography looks beautiful, but like I said, nothing really happens for the first hour or so. If you can make it past that point, then the film will reward you, but I'm not sure if it was really all worth it.

The DVD: The colors of the video were vibrant, and there really weren't a whole lot of compression artifacts to speak of, but overall it was wholly average and the non-anamorphic transfer was kind of a letdown for me. The audio also was pretty average, clean, but the surround effects were kind of strange in that the surround channels were used nicely for some environmental sounds, and yet, in some other spots where it would seem to be more obvious to include surround effects -- nothing was there. As far as extras go, there were none.