Se7en on PAL Laserdisc

• Cat.no: PLFEB 36601
• Cert: 18
• Running time: 122 minutes
• Sides: 2 (CLV)
• Year: 1995
• Pressing: UK, 1997
• Chapters : 37 (19/18)
• Sound: Dolby Surround
• Widescreen: 2.35:1
• Price: £24.99
• Extras : None
  

  ---

  Director:

  David Fincher

  (The Game, Alien 3)

Cast:

Brad Pitt (Seven Years In Tibet, Kalifornia, Thelma and Louise)
Morgan Freeman (Shawshank Redemption)
Gwyneth Paltrow (Hard Eight, Emma)

Oneof the first Pioneer PAL releases under their new deal withEntertainment in Video, Seven comes in an uninspiring sleeve with themost perfunctory of sleeve notes (two brief paragraphs). There’s nothingto indicate anything special – a shame, since the movie itself isextraordinary. Fincher’s second outing (between his run-of-the-millAlien3 and his distinctly odd Michael Douglas vehicle The Game) is atonce a police procedural and a slice of fantastique cinema.

Grizzled homicide cop Morgan Freeman has seven days left before heretires from the NYPD, his idealism long since burned up by the urbanhell in which he’s required to work. In this week, he must introducereplacement Brad Pitt to the job. However, their first morning takesthem to the scene of a particularly grisly murder – an overweight manwho seems to have eaten himself to death, possibly at gunpoint, untilhis head collapsed into the bowl of pasta before him.

Then, a lawyer is found dead having (been forced to) cut off one of his own lovehandles with the word Greed written on a nearby wall. Before you knowit, the word Gluttony has turned up behind the fridge at the firstmurder scene and the two cops are looking for a killer using his victimsto stage the seven deadly sins (listed conveniently on the front of thesleeve so you can mentally tick them off as the victims turn up).

To give away more plot would be criminal. The disc is well chaptered (37in all) with a good break that has side two open with the first threedeadly sins being crossed off a list of seven on a blackboard. Bothleads are superb while Gwyneth Paltrow proves a real bonus as Pitt’swife who arranges for Freeman to come over to their apartment for anevening meal. This scene is punctuated by the regular booming trainnoise that disrupts the apartment, so that even a seemingly relaxingscene becomes unnerving. It’s also indicative of the real pleasure ofthe film – the details which can be found within it at every turn.

And herein lies a problem. The film is very, very dark with large areasof near black or chocolate where some of the finer visual detail isdifficult to detect. A small number of silvered prints were thereforemade to Fincher’s specifications so as to render these effects morevisible to the naked eye. While the considerably more costlyextra-packed NTSC CAV disc was transferred from one of these – and looksfantastic – its CLV counterpart was not and looks nothing like as good.Given PAL’s capability for greater picture resolution than NTSC, onehoped that the PAL disc would give picture quality at least on a parwith (if not superior to) the NTSC CAV disc. Alas, it doesn’t.

In the cinema watching a silvered print, the open air finale seemed tolack something compared to (all that dark intricacy of detail in ) whatpreceded it. But on this PAL disc, no such comparative lack isdiscernible – leading one to suspect that that detail simply wasn’tthere on the (presumably non-silvered) source print. The transfer isotherwise (and that’s a pretty big otherwise) fine. But in the end,Seven is a magnificent film which could have been a really special PALdisc that could in turn have worked wonders for the PAL market. But thisdisc, while better than PAL VHS, ultimately proves a let down. A lostopportunity for the UK LD industry – a tragedy, no less.

Film: 5/5
Picture: 3/5
Sound: 5/5