The Movie: The "Superbit" release of Lawrence of Arabia, as all Superbit releases go, lacks any "special features" and instead, dedicates the extra disc space to higher quality video and audio. As the actual film itself is the same 1989 "restored" cut as the previous Lawrence of Arabia DVD set I reviewed, I will just reproduce, in a somewhat edited fashion, what I said about the film before.

---

Lawrence of Arabia is a classic epic film, and I mean EPIC. I rented [the original 2 disc Limited edition version] and received it from Netflix and had it for about a week before watching it, because frankly, I would need to dedicate an entire day to watching all 3 hours and 47 minutes of this thing!

This movie was originally shot in the "Super Panavision 70" format, and designed to be shown on gigantic screens with 70mm prints, and in many ways, the way this movie was filmed represents this. This movie really is just too big for any TV. And if you do watch it on TV, please watch it on the biggest one you can find, or a widescreen TV as the anamorphic video format will help you get some more resolution out of it when compared to normal TVs.

I say this because I can imagine many of the shots being absolutely breathtaking on a 60 foot screen, but bordering on boring when viewed on a TV. There are quite a few long (both in length of time, and distance from the action) shots of immense landscape with some action taking off so far away you can barely make it out... famous shots like the sunrise in the desert, or the "mirage" shot with the guy riding in from a long ways away. Of course, I personally have not had the privilege of seeing this movie on the big screen, but I can only imagine how beautiful it would look.

I don't think there was a single point in the entire movie where I felt like saying "WOW! This is a great movie!", and yet, it left a very big impression on me, and even hours or days later, the soundtrack and images linger in my mind. Maybe that's what the movie epic is all about.

In so many ways, this movie would never work today. For one thing, those lingering shots of tiny things off in the distance would probably bore the hell out of today's audiences, especially without the glory of a huge screen at a theater. But not only that, everything in this movie is real. Those thousands of camels you see out in the desert are real, not computer generated. Everything in this movie was done on such a grand scale, and every bit of it is real -- I dare to say no Hollywood movie studio would dare to take on this movie today. It's just too big. And maybe that is what the movie epic is all about.

And all of this without even discussing the plot. As near as I can tell, this movie is based on a true story. It's set out on the little-talked-about (at least in the western world) Turkish front in World War I, and it's about a British soldier (T.E. Lawrence) who disappears off into Arabia, which at the time was a desert full of warring nomadic tribes. Through charm and cunning, Lawrence is able to unite these warring tribes into one force and with camels, horses, and swords, they defeat the Turks, and claim Arabia as one nation of their own.

Again, there wasn't a single moment in the movie where I thought "WOW THIS IS A GREAT MOVIE" but I came away with a lasting impression of this masterfully made epic, it's beauty and wonder lingering on. You really feel the searing heat of the desert, and you can really see the unseen conflict going on inside Lawrence's head. Lawrence of Arabia is a true movie epic -- a genre that is long lost in today's world.

The DVD: "Superbit" lives up to its name, with the overall bitrate of the DVD being somewhere around 8 megabits per second, or roughly double the bitrate of your average DVD release, and it pays off, especially in the blackpoint department. I have yet to see another DVD release that has better shadow detail than this one! It was quite amazing.

Of course, such an accurate reproduction would also reproduce the flaws in the original film, which you must expect with something of this age, but I can assure you that you won't find any defects in the picture here that were not in the film source!

I liked the fact that the audio defaults to the DTS audio. Most DVDs with a DTS audio option require you to select it in a setup menu, then warns you that if you do not have DTS compatible equipment it won't work. It's almost like they assume that anyone who would purchase this DVD set would have DTS compatible equipment. And indeed, unless you have fairly high end video and audio equipment, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between this release, and the previous release.

The audio, as is the case with most restored old films, has the peculiar feel of having a pristine sounding score, but less than stellar sound quality on dialog and sound effects. It wasn't so pronounced on this disc, but the effect was still there. The use of the surround channels was quite tasteful and never distracting, and overall the audio was very well executed.

And as I mentioned before, there are no special features because the disc space that normally would be used for such things has been dedicated to improving the picture and sound quality of the feature. One peculiarity though is that unlike the original DVD release, which had the intermission at the end of the first disc, on this release, the intermission doesn't come until approximately 30 minutes into the second disc.

This needed to be done in order to maintain the maximum possible bitrate over the first disc, as the section of the film before the intermission is considerably longer than the section after the break. But if you can put up with that one little annoyance, and you've got decent viewing equipment, and you love this film, there is no way you won't love this excellent presentation of this epic feature! It's a worthy part of any DVD collection, even if due to the film's length, it may end up being seldom viewed.