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By
NICK ZEGARAC
"The Last Emperor" is the Academy Award winning movie about China's last imperial ruler, Pu Yi (John Lone). Taken from his mother at the age of three and raised to believe in his own divinity as absolute monarch, Pu Yi's marriage to Wan Jung (Joan Chen) is marred by her opium addiction and the tragic death of their only child and heir to the throne. Peter O'Toole appears as Reginald Johnston, English tutor to his majesty in the ways of diplomacy and the outside world. The film presents China's Forbidden City as allegory for the pampered but caged existence of wealth and the destructive nature of absolute power. Eventually forced to flee his gated paradise, Pu Yi succumbs to the decadence of becoming a playboy, a stooge of the Japanese, and a victim of China's cultural reforms and re-education programs.
The film is a poignant, heart-breaking, tragic and sweeping saga that won, among its other award, the Oscar for best cinematography. But you'd ever guess it by looking at this DVD transfer. The 2:35:1 image has not been anamorphically enhanced and exhibits just about every digital anomaly that one can find on a poorly mastered DVD. There's edge enhancement, aliasing, fine detail shimmering, color smearing, tiling, color distortion, loss of fine details, extremely low contrast levels, disturbing halos and fading of the film's negative. There are chips, scratches, tears and camera negative jitter. The audio is a rather dismal 2.0 mix.
After viewing this travesty it is my sincere hope that whoever was responsible for mastering this DVD will never get the opportunity to be near such equipment again. There are no extras and no reason why anyone should invest in this DVD. |
