The Movie: Ran is Akira Kurosawa's brilliant adaptation of William Shakespeare's King Lear, set as a samurai tale in 16th century Japan. In this version, the aging Lord Hidetora decides to step down and pass his power on to his three sons, two of which end up turning on him. Meanwhile, Hidetora is also dealing with a number of skeletons in his closet, namely the guilt over all of the people he killed over the years to consolidate his power which has finally caught up to his conscience in his old age.

It's a classic tale of greed, corruption, revenge, and all that good stuff that makes up a proper Shakespearean tragedy, staged absolutely brilliantly by Kurosawa on an amazingly large scale, using well over a thousand extras in the battle scenes. The production design featured thousands of intricate details and colors and patterns from costumes to sets, to everything else. This film truly is a sight to behold, along with having a plot that culminates in a riveting climax. It's just so unfortunate that it comes with such a terrible video transfer, as I'm sure I missed so many more details.

The film itself however, is so good that it shone brilliantly through the terrible video and audio quality of the DVD. After a while, I wasn't even thinking about the video quality anymore because I was getting so into the action on screen, a testament to just how great this film really is.

The DVD: The video transfer on this disc is absolutely dismal. Despite the "restoration" that supposedly involved a "high definition transfer", the odd saturation characteristics combined with the extremely poor resolution resulted in me thinking the first few shots of the film were actually shots of paintings. It wasn't until a shot that actually featured some movement in the frame that I realized I'd been looking at live action shots!

Audio was similarly murky and dismal. Yet another film that claims a 5.1 surround soundtrack with virtually no utilization of the surround channels -- why not just bring us the original soundtrack instead of giving us a modified one that doesn't even really add anything to the experience?

Special features include a commentary track, some trailers, a bunch of text features, as well as a side-by-side demonstration of how great the "restoration" was. And I have to admit, the old video they were comparing their restoration to was really, really bad, but it seemed pretty clear to me that this wasn't so much a restoration of the film as it was a new video transfer... one that certainly wasn't much of a "high definition" transfer considering that it didn't even come close to maxing out the resolution of a standard DVD.

So who knows, maybe this is the best this film will ever look on DVD. I haven't seen any of the other versions that have been published, but at any rate, this is a film that is so good that even if poor video and audio quality take away from the experience... there's still so much of that experience left over in the story and in what visuals you can see, that it is still an amazing experience and a definite must see. A true masterpiece by a legendary director!