Bourne and Marie (Franka Potente) are living quietly on Goa and trying to put his past behind them or at least what he remembers of it. However, they are roughly brought back to reality when a Russian assassin (Karl Urban) frames Bourne for a double killing in Berlin, one of them a CIA operative, and then tracks him to Goa and tries to kill him in an attempt to cover his tracks.

Jason still can’t remember all the details of his past but suspects his former Treadstone pals are behind the attempt on his life so he’s intent on living up to the promise he made them two years ago if they didn’t leave him alone. Meanwhile, the CIA have taken the bait set up by the Russian killer and, out for revenge for the killing of their man, are now out to get Bourne for once and all.

Both are headed for a showdown but neither knows that the real truth goes far deeper and further back than either could have suspected…

Review

Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne in this realistic and gritty spy thriller where, unlike most sequels, this successfully continues the story left at the end of The Bourne Identity. A lot of the original characters and cast return with a plot that is nicely woven through the events and characters of the original and it runs at a reasonable and occasionally furious pace throughout.

Director Paul Greengrass also successfully picks up where Doug Liman left off and gives us the same solid and realistic feel with no gimmicks that made the original a success. More of Bourne’s no frills fighting talents and a couple of good car chases mean that there’s plenty of action for the adrenalin junkies and the action runs consistently as Jason moves from Goa to Naples, Munich, Berlin and ending in Moscow. Another thing to note is that there are no “Q” division type gadgets or suave dinner-suit locations used, everything is true to life and as realistic as they could make it.

The only complaint I have is that some of the edits in the faster scenes are cut a bit too sharply and I sometimes felt tempted to rewind and watch it again to see what actually happened. I’m sure it’s deliberately done to give the film it’s sometimes furious pace and you don’t really miss anything important but you’re left going “What was that?” or “What happened there?” a few times.

As for the acting, Matt Damon is again excellent as Bourne, now haunted by dreams of a past he can’t remember but determined to find out the truth. Franka Potente returns briefly as Marie, the girl who gave him a lift that changed her life forever and Brian Cox is as nasty and duplicitous as ever as Ward Abbott, Treadstone’s CIA overseer. Julia Stiles and Gabriel Mann return in slightly more involved roles this time as ex-Treadstone staff Nicky and Danny Zorn.

New faces in this instalment are Joan Allen and Karl Urban. Allen is particularly impressive as CIA depute director Pamela Landy, who’s in charge of the hunt for Bourne and really shows that she can fully play the game in the predominantly male oriented secret service. Urban, whom you might not recognise as Eomer from The Lord Of The Rings, plays the Russian assassin Kirill and really looks the part, no archetypal bad guy dialogue, he just gets on with the job and is totally convincing as a ruthless killer.

The picture is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and is pretty good throughout with an excellent transfer, although the predominant use of hand-held camerawork and the somewhat muted colours give the film a more down-to-earth and gritty look. All of this is quite deliberate and follows on from the look of the first film and it all works quite well. Also worthy of note was Greengrass’s decision to do all of the stunts as realistically as possible and with no CGI involvement and the combination of all of the above mean that the results worked very well.

The soundtrack is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and is a reasonable, if nothing special, mix. Dialogue is front based and clear throughout along with John Powell’s score but the surround effects are fairly low key and ambient except during the car chases and action sequences, where they kick in very well indeed. Could have been better given the material though. There’s a fair amount of subtitle use as most of the action takes place in non-English speaking locations but it works okay and is never too long as to detract the viewer. Of course that meant that some of the cast had to learn a fair bit of Italian, German and Russian but they carry it off very well and sound convincing.

I watched The Bourne Identity the night before I watched this, just to get into the mood like, and thoroughly enjoyed both films. All in all, The Bourne Supremacy is a very successful instalment in the Bourne saga – bring on The Bourne Ultimatum.

Extras

Explosive Deleted Scenes – Five deleted scenes lasting just over seven minutes in all. There’s no explanations as to why these were cut and none of them are “explosive” so I’m assuming they were cut for timing or pacing reasons but a few of them are worth watching.

Matching Identities: Casting – Director Paul Greengrass talks about casting the movie with some interview snippets from producers Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley along with the main cast members. A bit of a mutual praise session and nothing special., lasting for just under five and a half minutes.

Keeping it Real – A five-minute piece on how the production team kept the film as realistic as possible, giving it a documentary style and looking spontaneous and unrehearsed. Focuses a lot on the choice of Paul Greengrass, due to his work on Bloody Sunday, and how his directorial style was perfect for this film. More interview material with the producers, director and cast.

Blowing Things Up – 2nd unit director and stunt coordinator Dan Bradley talks about the gas explosion scene in Munich, where a number of the stunt team are blown a fair distance by the blast. Again, the emphasis was on avoiding the use of CGI effects and it was all achieved using more traditional visual effects. There’s also some input from the special effects foreman, the producers and Matt Damon. Quite interesting but it only lasts for four minutes.

On the Move With Jason Bourne – A little five-minute piece on some of the locations used in the film and the conditions of shooting in these places, which were actually as stated in the storyline. Focuses on Berlin, Moscow and Goa.

Bourne To Be Wild: Fight Training – A short but interesting four and a half minute look at the movie’s big fight scene between Bourne and Treadstone agent Jarda (Marton Csokas) in Munich. The producers and Paul Greengrass talks about the setting and how scrappy it should look while well respected fight coordinator Jeff Imada talks about the moves, using the same Philippino fighting style that Matt Damon was trained in for The Bourne Identity.

Crash-Cam: Racing Through The Streets of Moscow – An interesting look at how the team tried to better the car chase in The Bourne Identity and how they planned to film it in such a way as to let the viewer feel like they are in the car. Good stuff and again, all real stunts and cars. Lasts six minutes.

The Go-Mobile Revs Up The Action – A look at the impressive and amazingly flexible Go-Mobile high-speed stunt car rig. It allows a car being used in an action scene to be driven at high speed by an experienced stunt driver, while still having the actors sitting behind the wheel. It also allows for camera shots to be taken from just about any angle into the car during the action. Looked like real fun for Matt Damon! Lasts seven minutes.

Anatomy of a Scene: The Explosive Bridge Chase Scene – This is a behind the scenes look at shooting the scene in Berlin, where Bourne evades his pursuers by vaulting off a rail station bridge and landing on a passing barge on the river. There’s not a great deal of “anatomy” or “explosive” detail here but there are a few funny moments. Lasts just under five minutes.

Scoring With John Powell – Yet again another almost five-minute long piece, this one concentrating on the film score. Composer John Powell talks about how he and his team went about scoring the movie – using some of the existing themes from the previous film, inventing new ones and avoiding doing it the traditional way of patching together lots of well-known songs and tunes. He also discussed his intent in tricking the audience by changing the cues we’d normally expect to hear in the lead up to certain events.

Feature Commentary With Director Paul Greengrass – A fairly entertaining commentary from Paul Greengrass with all the usual elements of plot development, production anecdotes and trivia. I have to admit that I’m getting a bit jaded listening to commentary tracks, life’s too short. Still, Greengrass does a reasonable job here and if commentaries are your thing, it’ll not disappoint.

DVD-ROM Content – Again Universal have chosen the Windows only InterActual Player to deliver the DVD-ROM content so here’s one unimpressed Mac user. Seriously though, if it’s on the DVD, you should be able to find it yourself and avoid this problematic piece of software. Can’t think why they’d want to alienate us minority groups like this but it gets them a negative score from me.

Trailers – Promotional trailers for Van Helsing, The Chronicles Of Riddick, The Chronicles Of Riddick: Pitch Black Special Edition, The Bourne Identity Special Edition and Billy Elliot The Musical.

Overall

With a sound story basis coming from a writer like Ludlum, The Bourne Supremacy is a solid action thriller and an excellent sequel to The Bourne Identity. If you like spy movies, you’ll almost certainly enjoy this and if you liked The Bourne Identity, then it’s a must see as you won’t be disappointed.

The picture and sound are pretty good throughout but the extras package have a bit of a “Never mind the quality, feel the width!” feel to them and I feel that they could have taken eight of the nine mini-featurettes, lasting about 42 minutes in total, and put them into a much better and more added-value “Making Of” documentary. Still, it makes for a reasonable evening’s entertainment!

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The Bourne Supremacy, DVD Review

What they believe they’ll find there is an ancient pyramid that predates the Egyptian, Cambodian and Aztec pyramids but contains features from all three cultures so may be a missing link to these ancient cultures. They also hope that it will hold an array of fabulous secrets that have lain beneath the ice for millennia. What they don’t realize is that they are being lured into an ancient battleground where they are intended to be the ritual sacrifices necessary to allow mankind’s ancient Gods to prove themselves worthy of their kind by hunting and killing the most terrifying creature in the galaxy.

Review

This is the movie fans of both franchises had been waiting for ever since, by some caprice of Stan Winston, an Alien skull appeared in the spaceship trophy room in Predator 2. That sparked the fans hunger for a confrontation between the two most terrifying movie creatures to date and what resulted was a series of comic books and video games that just had to inevitably lead to a movie and 15 years later, here we have it.

Most of you will already know that this movie suffered from a fairly negative and later unsubstantiated internet press around the time of its release but, having seen it in the cinema, I didn’t think it was as bad as was being put around at the time, even though it’s obvious that it was shot to get it in on a PG-13 certificate (and a wider teen audience). Director and co-writer Paul W.S. Anderson must take some of the stick but, avid Alien fan that he is, he stepped down from directing both Mortal Kombat: Devastation and Resident Evil: Apocalypse to write and direct this film and even though it’s already been nominated for a Razzie for worst remake or sequel, I think he made a reasonable, if flawed attempt.

First thing, the movie is too short at just 96 minutes and over 11 of those are spent on the end credits. That leads to a serious lack of build-up and character development resulting in a lack of fear factor and, other than for a few of the characters, I never really cared either way what happened to them and most were just monster fodder. The lack of time also meant things were rushed through to get to the action. For example, when John Hurt got impregnated in Alien it took several hours for the creature to gestate and rip its way out and then it took a while for it to grow but here, all of that seemed to take a few minutes to get from the face hugging of a few initial victims to a pyramid full of full grown Alien nasties. Then there’s the lack of the gore present in earler movies in the franchise, another price paid for its younger certificate.

There are a few other bits of sheer bollocks in the script such as saying things like “ancient maps show Antarctica was free of ice”. Sorry but any such maps would need to be modern ones as there wasn’t anyone around then to make the maps. References to time were also a bit outrageous. I mean, why would the Predators measure anything by our solar system time reference and if they came back every 100 years, there must have been some lean hunts before mankind returned to the Antarctic or we had satellites to “notice” their presence. Then there’s the laughable device that can be used to dial 10/10/2004, not even remotely close to the Aztec’s way of measuring such things, and the 10-minute cycle used to reconfigure the pyramid based on the same premise.

Anyway, the negative stuff aside, while Anderson hasn’t exactly had a stream of hits so far (Mortal Kombat, Soldier, Resident Evil), his directing here is on target and his style of fast cuts and well framed shots suits the pace of the film. The cast also perform well enough – Sanaa Lathan, who played Wesley Snipes’ mom in Blade, is the real heroine of the piece as Alexa Woods, the team guide and Lance Henriksen, a serious veteran of science fiction movies including Aliens and Alien³, gives an excellent performance as Weyland and it was nice to see him back in the franchise. Others worth a mention, although they don’t really add much to the story, are Raoul Bova and Ewen Bremner as two of the scientists and Colin Salmon as Weyland’s right hand man. Everyone else is pretty forgettable and just fodder for the hunt.

The picture is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and is an absolutely excellent transfer even given that most of the scenes are pretty dark being shot at night or underground in the pyramid. Colours and blacks are solid and shadows well defined and everything is sharp and free of grain, artefact, etc. Altogether an excellent quality picture. The sets and visual effects are also excellent with the Aliens and Predators well realised and especially the periodically reshaping pyramid – a brilliant concept that adds a little more edge to the plot.

There are two choices for sound, a Dolby Digital 5.1 and a DTS 5.1 track. The DTS is as ever the best of the two but you really won’t be disappointed with the Dolby track if you don’t have the hardware to appreciate the DTS one. Both are very well engineered surround sound experiences and once the action gets going down in the continually reshaping pyramid, the soundstage becomes seriously dynamic and effects laden. The DTS track is simply excellent and adds so much more value to the movie.

Anyway, leaving the fairly thin plot to one side, what this movie is all about is the battle between the Predators and Aliens and the scenes where we get to see them get it on. Can the technologically advanced and super strong Predator species prevail over the ultimate predatory species, the Alien? Their history in this movie suggests that they can or they wouldn’t breed them for this sport but the result is never a sure thing and the danger factor is still there and the fight scenes between the two in the film worked quite well for me. As for the corny ending, it reminded me of the ending in Species and it’s obviously a lead into a possible sequel with some new possibilities so here’s hoping they do it a lot better than this one.

Extras

There are two discs here and a pretty full package of extras…

Disc 1

This contains both the theatrical and extended versions of the movie, the latter of which was being hyped as containing a new, never seen in the cinemas, opening sequence. However, that is all you get, a new opening that lasts about 90 seconds, almost a teaser trailer in itself, and no other deleted or extended scenes.

Commentary by Paul W.S. Anderson, Lance Henriksen and Sanaa Lathan – This is a pretty good collaboration where they all seem to be enjoying the experience and that gives us some good information all round and really shows us just how Alien crazy Anderson is. It covers all the usual stuff such as casting, characters, sets, locations and the monsters and we also get a rundown on all the little tributes to the earlier movies in both franchises, and there are a lot of them.

Commentary by Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr. and John Bruno – This is the technical commentary and these guys are the creature designers and visual effects supervisor. They’ve all worked on some of the earlier Alien or Predator movies and they give an interesting commentary on the visual effects used here and give some comparisons on those used on the earlier movies as more and more use is made of CGI these days. It’s not as chatty as the other commentary and is a bit drier but tech-heads will probably love it.

NB: The above commentaries are only available in the theatrical version of the movie.

Inside Look – Promotional previews and behind the scenes peeks at some upcoming Fox projects. Includes Hide and Seek, Elektra and Robots and lasts about six and a half minutes in all.

Trailers – Insert the disc and, after the annoying anti-piracy messages, you get trailers for Millennium/Harsh Realm, Man on Fire, The X-Files, The Clearing and Enduring Love.

DVD-ROM – Stick the disc into a PC DVD drive and it’ll get you into a setup to install something, which eventually gets you to the menu, the first three items of which are decent Flash presentations where mousing over the text bubbles blows them up to a readable size…

• Read The Complete 1st AVP Comic Book – Tear through all 27 pages of AVPs first comic book.
• Making Of AVP Comics – Have a look at the stages involved in making a 10-page comic book. Includes an article written by Randy Stradley, author of Dark Horse’s first Aliens Vs. Predator miniseries (1989) and originally appeared in the Aliens Vs. Predator trade paperback collection, first published in 1991.
• Sneak peek Of The Latest AVP Graphic Novel – View the first 16 pages of “Thrill of the Hunt”
• Dark Horse Comics Official Website – Just a link to the site.
• AVP Official Website – As above.
• Play Movie – Guess what this does?

However, I’ve got a Mac and this isn’t a Mac friendly DVD but open the disc on the desktop and you’ll see a DVDROM folder. I did a bit of digging around in there and entering file:///Volumes/AVP_SE_D1_FG_UK/DVDROM/Screens/base.html into a Flash enabled web browser will get you into the above menu. Not that it works as expected but you can access the first three items directly as follows and they’re well worth it if you’re an AvP fan…

1. Open the DVDROM folder.
2. Open the Screens folder.
3. Open the Comics folder.
4. Open the appropriate file as follows…

• first_comic.html – Read The Complete 1st AVP Comic Book
• making_comic.html – Making Of AVP Comics
• novel_comic.html – Sneak peek Of The Latest AVP Graphic Novel

Disc 2

Pre-Production

• Conception – A pretty good 26-minute piece with director Paul W.S. Anderson, producer John Davis, production designer Richard Bridgeland and creature effects designer Tom Woodruff Jr. talking about the origins of the movie. They also discuss the design concepts for things like the pyramid, whaling station, Predator weaponry, costumes and the animatronics creatures.
• ADI Workshop – Some behind-the-scenes footage showing the ADI (Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc.) visual effects guys at work on some Predator/Alien footage, animatronics Alien facehugger, the Predator shoulder weapon and various other bits and pieces. Lasts about seven minutes.
• Storyboard Gallery – Browse through the 200 storyboards created by Brent Boates, Phil Norwood and Richard Bennett and containing some excellent early artworks.
• Concept Art Gallery – 29 more pieces of Richard Bennett’s excellent artwork on stuff like sets, creatures weapons, etc.
• Conception Enhanced Viewing Mode – This is just the Concept featurette above but supposedly in enhanced viewing mode. I couldn’t tell what was new here though.
• Easter Egg – Highlight the ADI Workshop item and press the Right arrow to reveal a facehugger just to the right. Press Enter to get a nine-minute comical piece with Tom Woodruff Jr. talking to some poor Czech technicians about his roles as the creature in this movie, Alien³ and Alien Resurrection and some of his earlier work on Jumanji, Evolution, X-Files, Mortal Kombat and Pumpkinhead.

Production

• The Making of AVP – An entertaining, hour long feature on the making of AVP with input from Director Paul W.S. Anderson, producers John Davis and Chris Symes, cinematographer David Johnson, creature designers Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr, production designer Richard Bridgeland, miniature supervisor Richard Van Den Bergh and Sanaa Lathan, Lance Henrikson, Colin Salmon, Raoul Boya, Carsten Norgaard and Agathe De La Boulaye. This is the best extra in the package and it gets right into the nuts and bolts of making a big visual effects movie. We get to see the huge sets created in Prague, how they made the Antarctic seem real, the enormous pyramid set, the Alien Queen and her minions and more.
• Miniature Whaling Station – A seven-minute short where Director Paul W.S. Anderson, visual effects supervisor John Bruno and miniature supervisor Richard Van Den Bergh show us how they achieved the collapse of the Whaling Station using amazingly detailed miniatures.
• Trouble at the Mouth of the Tunnel – Cinematographer David Johnson gives us a behind-the-scenes look at filming the tunnel explosion and explains how a camera got destroyed by the sledge and we also get to see how things can go disastrously wrong when you’re working with fire. Lasts just under four minutes.
• Facehuggers and Eggs – 15 minutes worth of showing the filming of the sacrificial chamber scene where Ewan Bremner and Carsten Norgaard are facing a nasty end at the mercy of a horde of facehuggers.
• The Making of AVP Enhanced Viewing Mode – Like the Concept feature above, this is supposedly in enhanced viewing mode but again, I couldn’t tell what the difference was.

Post-Production

• Visual Effects Breakdown – An excellent 30-minute featurette with Director Paul W.S. Anderson, visual effects supervisor John Bruno, visual effects producer Adam Valdez, CG supervisor Ivor Middleton and visual effects supervisor Ben Shepard show us how they created some of the visual effects for ÔAlien vs. PredatorÕ. We get a look at animating the facehuggers, the Predator technology and sequences from roughs to finished composites for the big Alien vs. Predator fight, the Piper Maru, the Flashback, the Queen and the climax scenes.
• Deleted Scenes – There are 11 deleted scenes here and they can be played with an optional director’s commentary with Paul W.S. Anderson and Lance Hendrikson telling us why they were cut. The whole lot lasts just under nine minutes.

Licensing The Franchise

• Alien vs. Predator: The Comic Book – A short, 11-minute look at the Alien vs. Predator comic book with Dark Horse Comics publisher Mike Richardson, editor Randy Stradley and artist Chris Warner and how the movie compares to those stories.
• Monsters in Miniature by Todd McFarlane – This is the guy that created the action figures for Alien vs. Predator and he talks for about 13 and half minutes on how they were designed, produced and marketed for a more adult audience.

Marketing

• HBO Special – A 13-minute featurette giving us a behind the scenes look at making the movie. Includes interview material with director Paul W.S. Anderson, producers John Davis and Chris Symes, production designer Richard Bridgeland, creature designer Tom Woodruff Jr., various visual effects team members and Lance Hendrikson, Sanaa Lathan and Raoul Boya. It’s not bad as a short promotional piece and they talk about the origins of the story, the sets, the creatures, the CGI and visual effects and the characters.
• Theatrical Teaser – A 50-second teaser trailer, just enough to whet the appetite.
• Theatrical Trailer – A two-minute trailer for the movie, promises more than the final result delivers.

Overall

The critical slamming this received aside, AvP is a reasonable piece of sci-fi popcorn entertainment. Okay, it’s a bit short on thrills and running time but the excellent video, sound and the top-notch set of extras on this DVD set goes a long way to try and make up for that here. With two commentaries and a load of extras, there’s way more material here than anyone could reasonably watch in one evening and fans will love the comic book stuff on Disc 1 and there’s even a hidden Easter Egg if you need more.

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Alien Vs. Predator Extreme Edition, DVD Review

James P. Sullivan (Sulley) and Mike Wazowski work for Monsters, Inc., the leading energy company in the monster world. Energy they get by scaring human children and converting the screams into power for light, cars and everything lse that makes their world run smoothly. However, there’s a power shortage, kids aren’t so easy to scare these days, and things are looking grim for the future so the pressure is on everyone to keep those children screaming.

At Monsters, Inc. they have a copy of every childs bedroom closet door, which can be used as a gateway into the room at night to scare the kids. Sulley, an enormous blue monster with orange spots, is their top scarer and Mike, a little green eyeball on legs, is his Scare Assistant, best pal and room mate.

One day, after a pretty hectic shift and while Mike rushes off on a date, Sulley accidentally lets a human child, which as every monster knows is one of the most toxic and disease ridden things known and a source of pure terror to any sane monster, into their world.

The movie follows the hilarious antics of Sulley and Mike as they try to return the little girl to the human world while avoiding such obstacles as the CDA (Child Detection Agency), their own co-workers and the rest of the monster world.

Review

The team that brought us Toy Story have done it again with Monsters, Inc. This is one excellent animated feature with loads of humour for both kids and adults.

Casting is excellent with the voices of John Goodman as Sulley; Billy Crystal as Mike; Steve Buscemi as Randall Bogs, the main villain of the piece; Jennifer Tilly as Celia Mae, Mike’s medusa girlfriend and the late James Coburn as Henry J. Waternoose III, CEO of Monsters, Inc.

The animation is superb and Pixar have improved the technology since previous productions. Things you’ld take for granted in a live motion film are fast becoming possible with todays technology such as lifelike fur and clothing that reacts realistically to motion and weather effects, including even the settling on of snowflakes in a blizzard.

Given that the movie is a comedy and mainly intended for children, the humour is excellent and pretty well balanced with lots of little bits that can be appreciated by adults as well. An absolutely excellent movie.

Audio/Video

This is a THX certified production so you pretty much be sure picture and sound are excellent. The Setup section comes with the THX Optimizer, which allows you to set up your sound and picture for the best effect.

The picture is presented in 1.85:1 Anamorphic widescreen and is absolutely crystal clear with vibrant colours throughout. The sound options are Dolby Digital Surround or DTS 5.1 and is very good. They used something called binaural recording, of which there are some samples in the extras, to give you a feel of being right in there.

Extras

The Collector’s Edition is a two-disc production so there are loads of extras…

Disc 1

• Audio Commentary by Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton – This is pretty good although,a s there are four them, it’s quite difficult to tell who is saying what.
• Trailer for Finding Nemo, which is the partnership’s next movie for release in 2003 and it looks pretty good.
• 5.1 Surround Sound Effects Mix, which allows you to listen to the movie minus voice and music, just the sound effects.

Disc 2

This is all extras, with a short introduction by some of the team giving a guide to the two main routes through the material.

Outtakes – As shown through the end credits, these were obviously specially produced and are a set of pretty high quality snips that add some extra comic moments.

Mike’s New Car – An animated short film, featuring Mike and Sulley. last about three and a hald minutes and is pretty funny.

For The Birds – Another animated short, which was shown in the UK theatres alongf with the movie. It’s pretty short at three minutes but it’s hilarious and won Best Animated Short Film prize at the 2001 Academy Awards.

Human Door – Behind this door, you’re in the door vault and there are more doors to look into…

• Tour – This is a 20 minute combination of some of the material in this area.
• Pixar – This contains the Pixar Fun Factory Tour – A three and a half minute piece introducing the team and a short tour of the Pixar studios and an Easter Egg.
• Story – Over 36 minutes of material on how the story was developed. Includes story boards, deleted scenes and a childs picture book concept of the original story line.
• Monster Files – About seven and a half minutes of stuff on the cast and what makes a great monster. Includes a gallery of character design artwork.
• Design – A guide to Monstropolis and the set designs used in the movie. Includes six galleries of images, a virtual fly through of five of the sets used, how they dressed the sets and a guide to some of the “in” jokes used on the sets.
• Animation – Over 20 minutes of detailed information on the techniques and technology used to animate the characters, clothing and weather effects
• Music and Sound – Goodman and Crytal recording the Monster Song, a piece on the sound design and information and examples of the binaural recording techniques used.
• Release – All the promotional material such as the US premiere, trailers and TV spots, outtakes (again), a poster gallery, how they changed the English signs and voices to accomodate international releases and a multi-language clip reel with samples of over 30 languages they used.

Monster Door – Behind this door, the material is more monster oriented…

• New Monster Adventures – A range of short animations and games such as Mike’s New Car (again); Monster TV Treats; Ponkickies 21; Boo’s Door Game; Welcome to Monstropolis, an animated interactive comic and a music video.
• Behind The Screams – Outtakes (again), a 23 page amusing programme to accompany the company play “Put That Thing back Where It Came From!” and a special, on the job report on the energy shortage with Mike and Sulley explaining how Monsters, Inc is helping make thing better.
• Orientation – You’re a new employee of Monsters, Inc. and here’s all the information you’ll need to get through your first day such as the welcome speech, the short tour, the history, the employee handbook and everyones ultimate goal – the Monster of the Month gallery.

Overview

Disney and Pixar have done it again! This is a marvellous film and the complete DVD package is excellent.

I’m not sure how long folk will be impressed with the amount of detail or volume of information provided in extras of this quality but this is definately a “Get it while it’s hot!” package.

Highly recommended!

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Monsters Inc, DVD Review