Home Forums Ganymede & Titan Forum IGN review Back to Earth on Blu-ray

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  • #5176
    littlesmegger
    Participant

    http://uk.bluray.ign.com/articles/103/1035277p1.html

    The first paragraph gives you an idea of what to expect from this budding expert review… sigh…

    “Before examining the back of the case when I got my copy of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, I initially thought it was some sort of space-related documentary from BBC. I had little idea that this TV movie was based on a hugely successful sci-fi comedy series that aired in the U.K. from 1989 to 1999.”

    Anyway, it gives an unbiased review of the bluray version at least. See what you think. He wasn’t all that keen on the audio, I’ll mention that.

    #105021
    JamesTC
    Participant

    Quite a kind review I think, maybe it was a little too focused on the faults but it given it a good rating out of ten. I presume the person reviewing isn’t from the UK.

    Looked at the comments below the review – “This sounds exactly like The League of Gentlemen movie.”, epic fail.

    #105023
    ChrisM
    Participant

    “new hologram. But before [Katerina] does this, she decides to rid the ship of the squid using a dimensional gateway of sorts.”

    Eh? She created the gateway to get rid of the squid?

    #105024
    Jonathan Capps
    Keymaster

    Ah, come on, he’s only a DVD reviewer, you can’t expect him to understand basic story beats.

    #105049
    Andrew
    Participant
    #105056

    That’s a really good review. He’s honest about not watching much Dwarf over the years but he doesn’t then proceed to slag off people who have. Care and attention has been made to getting the show and extras details right.

    #105057
    Mr-Stabby
    Participant

    Despite having BtE on DVD i bought the Bluray purely because i’d just bought a 63 inch TV, and if anything would benefit from Bluray it would be that.

    The Bluray is miles ahead of the DVD in quality. Not if you’re watching it on a 40 inch or less TV, but anything over it is miles ahead.

    Where it does go wrong though is the digital zooms that they did. The shots that are zoomed in are very bad quality in a lot of instances on the Bluray. A shot of Lister in the ‘ironing sneezes’ sleeping quarters scene is especially bad. Considering they had 4k to play with, that surprises me some, but it’s bad. The shot where Katarina is talking a load of crap about mining lasers and it digital zooms into her, you can slowly see the pixelation appearing, whereas on the DVD you just didn’t (obviously because it wasn’t high definition enough to see the dodgy bits).

    #105070
    Ben Paddon
    Participant

    That’s odd, because when I watched the thing on a 63-inch HDTV last weekend I thought it looked stunning from start to finish. Absolutely gorgeous.

    #105071
    Andrew
    Participant

    As we’ve moved into HD, I’ve become more and more obsessed by the distance between screen and subject. Dunno if that’s apposite here…

    #105083
    Ben Paddon
    Participant

    The further away from the screen you get, the more the benefits of HD diminish. For example: Helen has a small-ish HDTV – about 19″. It has a built-in DVD player which is, by all accounts, very nice. She wanted to borrow some of my classic Doctor Who DVDs so I let her borrow my spare region-free DVD player. It’s a Coby, it cost $30, and it’s not the best DVD player in the world – the way it handles the PAL to NTSC conversion results in pixelated, almost VHS-like picture quality.

    However the distance in Helen’s dorm room between the TV and the bed on which we sit on to watch the TV is such that the pixelation becomes almost unnoticeable.

    I’m sure the inner tech geek in me will get fed up and I’ll probably wind up snagging her the same Philips region-free DVD player that I have (it has HDMI out and upscales beautifully). Then she’ll have to buy a bigger TV. And then, naturally, she’ll need a Bluray player. And of course from there she’ll need a nice couch to sit on…

    …I may well wing up encouraging her to financially cripple herself in the name of home entertainment. I’m not sure I could live with that guilt.

    #105130
    Andrew
    Participant
    #105131
    Jonathan Capps
    Keymaster

    Nice review, but AGAIN with the lack of basic research.

    #105132
    ChrisM
    Participant

    >Nice review, but AGAIN with the lack of basic research.

    Heh, yeah. I like how the cat species evolved during suspended animation.

    #105134
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    “Since the show didn?t have a large budget, Rimmer is a ?solid hologram? and the only difference between him and Lister is the letter ?H? in the middle of his forehead to signify hologram.”

    Love it.

    #105135
    hummingbird
    Participant

    I?m a big fan of Red Dwarf.

    But not a big enough fan to actually get his facts right.

    #105137
    ori-STUDFARM
    Participant

    >There have been more rumors of a movie or a new series, and at a recent convention Robert Llewellyn confirmed that series 10 has been commissioned and will make sense since there never was a series nine.

    Did he?

    #105138
    JamesTC
    Participant

    Well he was at the convention when he posted it on twitter.

    #105144
    Seb Patrick
    Keymaster

    God there are some bad writers on the internet. There’s nothing obnoxious about that review, or anything – it’s just so completely insipid, devoid of any kind of spark, and nothing more than a trotting through of descriptions in unvaried and repetitive fashion.

    #105145
    Dave
    Participant

    >repetitive fashion

    The use of suspended animation in three consecutive sentences is particularly nice, but there’s something really odd about the lack of explanation of the difference between cat & Cat.

    #105147
    Phil
    Participant

    >repetitive fashion

    The use of suspended animation in three consecutive sentences is particularly nice, but there?s something really odd about the lack of explanation of the difference between cat & Cat.

    #105148
    Seb Patrick
    Keymaster

    See you in ten minutes?

    #105489
    Andrew
    Participant

    http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/39012/red-dwarf-back-to-earth/

    (Even when the review’s so positive the little inaccuracies still stick out…)

    #105491
    John Hoare
    Participant

    Down To Earth?

    I don’t care for the first paragraph at all, either.

    #105652
    Bob Loblaw
    Participant
    #105654

    > try as it may, Back to Earth fails to reinvigorate the franchise.

    They’re making a new series for entirely different reasons then?

    > Red Dwarf has died a cold and lonely death in the icy vacuum of fandom.

    Something is not right, it’s saying we don’t exist.

    #105660
    ori-STUDFARM
    Participant

    He’s talking to a figmant of his imagination!

    #105670
    Ben Paddon
    Participant

    > Red Dwarf has died a cold and lonely death in the icy vacuum of fandom.

    Oh dear. I guess everyone at GNP has already cleared their desks by now, then?

    #105680
    JamesTC
    Participant

    >Oh dear. I guess everyone at GNP has already cleared their desks by now, then?

    Yep, they are moving to a bigger office to write that show set in the cold, lonely and icy vacuum of space.

    #105681
    hummingbird
    Participant

    > Something is not right, it?s saying we don?t exist.

    I’ve suspected this for some time.

    #105683
    Phil1034
    Participant

    > Something is not right, it?s saying we don?t exist.

    Correction, we don’t ever have existed.

    #105687
    John Hoare
    Participant

    …I don’t know that one.

    #105704
    Danny Stephenson
    Keymaster

    Why not explore the reaches of space?

    They have.

    Why not toy with the conventions of your established series?

    They did.

    Why not give your beloved characters something more to do than traipse around England questioning existence and reality?

    I stopped reading after this.

    #105729
    Jo
    Participant

    http://www.joblo.com/dvdclinic/dvd_review.php?id=2541

    They were doing so well until… “We also get a pair of commentary tracks , one featuring series creator Greg Naylor”

    #105738
    Andrew
    Participant

    “(lol- Rimmer)”

    #105749
    Ben Paddon
    Participant

    Greg Naylor? Really?

    #105753
    JamesTC
    Participant

    I think they meant to say Doug Garcia.

    #105786
    ori-STUDFARM
    Participant

    http://www.joblo.com/dvdclinic/dvd_review.php?id=2541
    “a female hologram who builds a device to send Lister to another dimension so he can find a mate.”
    And all this time, I thought it was a genuine attempt to return Lister to Earth! It was all so Lister could get his end away!

    #105789
    ChrisM
    Participant

    >And all this time, I thought it was a genuine attempt to return Lister to Earth! It was all so Lister could get his end away!

    To be fair, that part isn’t incorrect. Katarina did state this when she created the device. (Not the end away bit, the bit about returning to Earth to find a mate.) I’m not too clear as to why she wouldn’t just return him to Earth for it’s own sake.. (maybe repopulating the human race in this universe was her concern), but anyhoo, events obviously caught up with them and finding a honey was no longer a priority… except, in the end, it sort of was.. just not in the way they originally thought…

    Interesting how on pondering the episode I see new things that never quite occurred before. I like that.

    #106038
    Andrew
    Participant
    #106040
    Danny Stephenson
    Keymaster

    Hurrah!

    What a nice review!

    #106455
    Andrew
    Participant

    Worth mentioning this little mention:

    http://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/television/83164/greg039s-tawdry-outing

    ..for this line: “the story line seems borrowed directly from Stranger than Fiction”.

    There’s something very meta about how many different meta movies/books were apparently ripped off ‘directly’…

    #106456
    Dave
    Participant

    “with up to four people coming out as old fans”

    Three, then.

    “and a list of two people who have demanded to borrow the DVD”

    Can you call a piece of paper with two names on it, a list? I’m sure you can but list implies more. I’m not sure what word he should have used, a pair, a couple, a brace?

    #106457
    ori-STUDFARM
    Participant

    >Metafiction is primarily associated with Modernist and Postmodernist literature, but is found at least as early as the 9th century One Thousand and One Nights and Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a metafictional novel.

    Quote was taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction So, essentially, Chaucer, the thieving fucker, stole his ideas from The League of Gentlemen!!

    #106458
    Seb Patrick
    Keymaster

    >There?s something very meta about how many different meta movies/books were apparently ripped off ?directly??

    It’s just people showing off their basic lack of knowledge, and the self-centredness of their frame of reference. If Stranger Than Fiction / LOG’s Apocalypse is the only thing they’ve heard of to do a certain plot, then OBviously they’re the only things EVER to have done it! (it’s similar to Louis Walsh saying that a song didn’t count for X-Factor’s “movie week” because he hadn’t heard of the film it was in)

    I don’t mind it so much from online commenters, but people who actually purport to be critics should at least know what they’re fucking talking about.

    #106460
    ori-STUDFARM
    Participant

    And everyone knows it was ripped off of Last Action Hero anyway!

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