First Knight (1995/Blu-ray)
Picture:
B+ Sound: B+ Extras: C Film: C
As part
of the last wave of high profile films for Sean Connery revisiting the
historical epic material that helped make him a worldwide megastar soon after
first departing the James Bond role, He teamed with co-stars Julia Ormond and
Richard Gere in First Knight. The script had potential, Columbia Pictures
put out the money for its and then, they hired Ghost director Jerry Zucker to helm it and things did not work out
as planed.
It did
some business thanks to the themes, look and especially its stars, but the film
never totally worked. Some scenes are
uneven, others simply do not work at all, the accents never gel and there are
even moments that are unintended howlers.
Not even the editing of the great Walter Murch could save this, though
it may have prevented it from being an outright disaster. The big problem is that Zucker expects the
stars to carry the film too much and that is why it never feels like it gets
started and moves. Ben Cross and Sir
John Gielgud even help out, but it is overall flat and without Connery, far
worse.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image may have some shortcomings here and
there, but the transfer is pretty good, you can see the money on the screen and
Director of Photography Adam Greenberg, A.S.C., delivers one of the
better-looking Camelots we have seen on screen.
This was one of Sony’s early 8-channel SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound)
releases and though the Dolby TrueHD versions here are only 5.1 mixes, you can
get a very clear idea of how good this mix was intended to be, all the way to
Jerry Goldsmith’s score. The combination
is pretty good for a film its age.
Extras include deleted scenes, three featurettes (Quest For Camelot making of piece, Creation Of A Kingdom production design piece and In Shining Armor: A Knight In Training
segment) and two audio commentary tracks.
One is by a scholar on the subject, the other, Zucker and producer Hunt
Lowry.
- Nicholas Sheffo
