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Backdraft (HD DVD)
Universal // R // September 19, 2006 // Region 0
List Price: $29.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Just before the title blazes across the screen, there's a shot in Backdraft of a young child still reeling from watching his fire-fighting father march to his death. In shock and clutching his father's smoldering helmet, the boy quickly has a camera shoved in his face by an opportunistic photographer who snaps a shot that would go on to adorn the cover of LIFE Magazine. That shot summarizes Backdraft for me in a few short seconds; it's as if director Ron Howard is that photographer who knows he's stumbled onto a goldmine, grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me violently in front of my TV, and screaming "Look! Look at how heart-wrenching this is! I demand that you f-e-e-e-l!" for more than two hours straight. Oozing with melodrama and cloying and manipulative from the first frame to the last, I found Backdraft to be a tedious, formulaic attempt at a crowd-rousing action/drama.
The story goes something like this: after witnessing his father's death and stumbling along at every turn in the twenty years that followed, Brian McCaffrey (William Baldwin)
has decided to give the family business another shot. His estranged brother Stephen (Kurt Russell) has established himself as one of the top firefighters in Chicago, and Stevie's determined to prove that Brian doesn't have what it takes. To really fill out this 138 minute flick, Brian winds up at Station 17 as an arsonist-slash-serial killer is racking up a body count throughout the Windy City. His weapon of choice is the backdraft -- setting traps so that a fire burns up all of the oxygen in the room, and when his victim cracks open a door and lets some new air in...boom.
Backdraft was produced before digital effects were nearly as ubiquitous as they are now, and the flames you see in the film are all real. That lends the action scenes a sense of urgency and authenticity that even modern CGI can't duplicate, but unfortunately, the fire is the only thing about Backdraft that seems genuine.
The movie's bogged down by too many generic subplots. (You know a movie has too much going on when I have a tough time figuring out where to mention that Robert De Niro has a supporting role.) There's the stock sibling rivalry (and on the off-chance you forget how Brian and Stephen are related, every other line of dialogue has the word "brother" in it once or twice), the flawed hero who tries to rekindle a romance with his lost love, the other flawed hero who tries to rekindle a romance with his lost love, a faux-Hannibal Lecter firebug (Donald Sutherland) who continually refers to himself in the third person while not really helping their investigators with the arson case, and even a sleazy politician. Ron Howard, having seemingly little confidence in his actors' performances or the audience, double-underlines every plot point as well as each and every synaptic fire in his characters' heads. The line readings are so overwrought that it's impossible to get lost in the movie; it's too obvious that the actors are acting, especially with the emotion so artificially cranked up in every scene. The sweeping strings in Hans Zimmer's score teeter on self-parody, and every cliché you can think of -- from slow-motion shots of firefighters emerging from billowing smoke to a 30 RPM dramatically screamed name to...yes...a frantic mother pleading for the firefighters to save her baby -- is tossed in for good measure and usually more than once.
I'm not really criticizing Backdraft
for being overly conventional. Really, how many truly original movies are there anyway? It's just that aside from its still-thoroughly impressive pyrotechnics, Backdraft doesn't manage to do anything well. The script is bloated and overflowing with unconvincing "who talks like that?" dialogue, there seems to be a studio mandate to overact, nearly every facet of the plot is overly familiar and unerringly predictable, and it's so sappy and over-the-top that I was more interested in watching the counter on the front of the player tick forward than anything happening on-screen. Not recommended.
Video: The 2.35:1 high definition video looks nice, although this 1991 film not surprisingly falls short of the best HD DVDs released to date. Universal has done a commendable job cleaning up the movie, though, leaving only a handful of specks scattered throughout, and the film's slightly grainy texture has been preserved.
Even if it's not quite in the same league as more recent theatrical releases, crispness and clarity offer a marked improvement over movies of a similar vintage in HD on cable and landed a notch or two above my expectations. The level of fine detail is inconsistent, though, often fading away in some of the longer shots. The quality varies from scene to scene but is a predominately solid effort, and I'd imagine these variations owe more to the state of the Super 35 process in 1991 than anything specific to this transfer. I was especially pleased with color reproduction, and as odd as I'm sure this sounds, I found myself more quietly wowed by some of the subtle gradations in fleshtones and clothing than any of the bombastic action sequences. I instinctively wince whenever I'm subjected to a scene teeming with fire in a high-definition movie on cable -- the image always seems to devolve into a noisy, blocky mess -- but no compression woes were spotted in this HD DVD of Backdraft.
No, it's not demo material, but Backdraft is still a strong effort from Universal.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is a mild disappointment. The mix makes uneven use of the multichannel setup; the surrounds are only utilized to any great effect when the firefighters are flanked by flames, and even then, the mix occasionally prefers rooting the majority of the action in the front channels. Imaging varies greatly from action sequence to action sequence, and when things get especially noisy, dialogue takes a drastic hit. For example, both en route to the first big fire in the present day and during Brian's subsequent baptism of fire with the Station 17 crew as they hack their way through a torched building, most of the dialogue's reduced to a barely discernable mumble. With as many explosions are littered throughout Backdraft, I was expecting tighter, more substantial bass response. There's still a good bit of activity in the lower frequencies, but it generally sounded like more of a loud but dull rumble, and the largest booms didn't dip quite as low as I would have thought. The audio's okay, but some elements of the mix sound rough and dated, and perhaps that limited how robust this six channel remix could be.
Like most of Universal's HD DVDs to date, this disc also offers dubs in Spanish and French along with optional subtitles in these same three languages.
Supplements: There's nothing exclusive to
this HD DVD of Backdraft, but all of the extras from the simultaneously released special edition DVD have been included. The disc opens with a three minute introduction by Ron Howard, and the director lobs out a quick overview of the film, the interviews on this release, and what Backdraft has meant to him over the years.
Opey's intro is followed by nearly forty-five minutes of deleted scenes which are presented at a speckly, workprint-grade 1.33:1. Approaching 140 minutes in length, Backdraft seems excessively long as it is, and this footage pushes it past the three hour mark. I'm sure this makes me a bad, bad reviewer, but I passed on watching these in full. Skimming through, I don't see a whole lotta fire, so it looks to be more of what I disliked.
I find myself appreciating features more and more that aren't just another routine making-of doc. "Real Life Firemen, Real Life Stories" spends eight minutes or so with a group of firefighters from Station 73 in Santa Clarita, CA. They briefly comment on their reactions to Backdraft and how the movie changed the public's perception of what they do, but they spend most of the featurette offering insight into the life of a fireman. These six men are far more personable and genuine than any of the characters in the movie, and the stories they tell engaged me more in the space of a few minutes than Backdraft managed to in a couple hours-plus.
Having just been to Universal Studios Hollywood earlier this year and with the footage shown in their Backdraft stage show (or whatever you'd call it) still fairly fresh in my mind, it's kinda funny how familiar so much of the vintage talking head footage incorporated into the remaining making-of featurettes looks. Naturally, two of them -- running around thirty minutes in total -- are devoted to the incendiary special effects. The eighteen minute "Bringing Together the Team" is an average casting featurette with new interviews with most of the cast, although some of the more recognizable names are either not present or only rear their heads in fifteen year old clips. Finally, the fifteen minute featurette "Igniting the Story" covers the genesis of the script, production and costume design, and the score. The best parts of the featurette leave it worth a look even if some of stale on-set interviews from a decade and a half ago drag it down. I can't say I'm all that keen on screenwriter Gregory Widen's script, but I still enjoyed hearing about some of his experiences about actually having worked as a fireman and having seen a real backdraft firsthand. I was also intrigued by comments about how much costuming is part of De Niro's method acting (to the point of fretting about how his character would clean his uniform) as well as how you handle shooting a second or third take on a set that had been engulfed in flames.
Conclusion: Backdraft dumps so much overcalculated schmaltz into its uninspired, formulaic plot that it extinguishes the thrills of its spectacularly staged action sequences. Established fans of the movie should be pleased with the treatment its gotten on HD DVD, but to those who haven't already caught Backdraft before, I'd suggest giving it a rental first. Rent It.
Standard image disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review were lifted from AllMoviePhoto.com and don't necessarily reflect the appearance of this HD DVD.
The story goes something like this: after witnessing his father's death and stumbling along at every turn in the twenty years that followed, Brian McCaffrey (William Baldwin)
has decided to give the family business another shot. His estranged brother Stephen (Kurt Russell) has established himself as one of the top firefighters in Chicago, and Stevie's determined to prove that Brian doesn't have what it takes. To really fill out this 138 minute flick, Brian winds up at Station 17 as an arsonist-slash-serial killer is racking up a body count throughout the Windy City. His weapon of choice is the backdraft -- setting traps so that a fire burns up all of the oxygen in the room, and when his victim cracks open a door and lets some new air in...boom. Backdraft was produced before digital effects were nearly as ubiquitous as they are now, and the flames you see in the film are all real. That lends the action scenes a sense of urgency and authenticity that even modern CGI can't duplicate, but unfortunately, the fire is the only thing about Backdraft that seems genuine.
The movie's bogged down by too many generic subplots. (You know a movie has too much going on when I have a tough time figuring out where to mention that Robert De Niro has a supporting role.) There's the stock sibling rivalry (and on the off-chance you forget how Brian and Stephen are related, every other line of dialogue has the word "brother" in it once or twice), the flawed hero who tries to rekindle a romance with his lost love, the other flawed hero who tries to rekindle a romance with his lost love, a faux-Hannibal Lecter firebug (Donald Sutherland) who continually refers to himself in the third person while not really helping their investigators with the arson case, and even a sleazy politician. Ron Howard, having seemingly little confidence in his actors' performances or the audience, double-underlines every plot point as well as each and every synaptic fire in his characters' heads. The line readings are so overwrought that it's impossible to get lost in the movie; it's too obvious that the actors are acting, especially with the emotion so artificially cranked up in every scene. The sweeping strings in Hans Zimmer's score teeter on self-parody, and every cliché you can think of -- from slow-motion shots of firefighters emerging from billowing smoke to a 30 RPM dramatically screamed name to...yes...a frantic mother pleading for the firefighters to save her baby -- is tossed in for good measure and usually more than once.
I'm not really criticizing Backdraft
for being overly conventional. Really, how many truly original movies are there anyway? It's just that aside from its still-thoroughly impressive pyrotechnics, Backdraft doesn't manage to do anything well. The script is bloated and overflowing with unconvincing "who talks like that?" dialogue, there seems to be a studio mandate to overact, nearly every facet of the plot is overly familiar and unerringly predictable, and it's so sappy and over-the-top that I was more interested in watching the counter on the front of the player tick forward than anything happening on-screen. Not recommended. Video: The 2.35:1 high definition video looks nice, although this 1991 film not surprisingly falls short of the best HD DVDs released to date. Universal has done a commendable job cleaning up the movie, though, leaving only a handful of specks scattered throughout, and the film's slightly grainy texture has been preserved.
Even if it's not quite in the same league as more recent theatrical releases, crispness and clarity offer a marked improvement over movies of a similar vintage in HD on cable and landed a notch or two above my expectations. The level of fine detail is inconsistent, though, often fading away in some of the longer shots. The quality varies from scene to scene but is a predominately solid effort, and I'd imagine these variations owe more to the state of the Super 35 process in 1991 than anything specific to this transfer. I was especially pleased with color reproduction, and as odd as I'm sure this sounds, I found myself more quietly wowed by some of the subtle gradations in fleshtones and clothing than any of the bombastic action sequences. I instinctively wince whenever I'm subjected to a scene teeming with fire in a high-definition movie on cable -- the image always seems to devolve into a noisy, blocky mess -- but no compression woes were spotted in this HD DVD of Backdraft.
No, it's not demo material, but Backdraft is still a strong effort from Universal.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is a mild disappointment. The mix makes uneven use of the multichannel setup; the surrounds are only utilized to any great effect when the firefighters are flanked by flames, and even then, the mix occasionally prefers rooting the majority of the action in the front channels. Imaging varies greatly from action sequence to action sequence, and when things get especially noisy, dialogue takes a drastic hit. For example, both en route to the first big fire in the present day and during Brian's subsequent baptism of fire with the Station 17 crew as they hack their way through a torched building, most of the dialogue's reduced to a barely discernable mumble. With as many explosions are littered throughout Backdraft, I was expecting tighter, more substantial bass response. There's still a good bit of activity in the lower frequencies, but it generally sounded like more of a loud but dull rumble, and the largest booms didn't dip quite as low as I would have thought. The audio's okay, but some elements of the mix sound rough and dated, and perhaps that limited how robust this six channel remix could be.
Like most of Universal's HD DVDs to date, this disc also offers dubs in Spanish and French along with optional subtitles in these same three languages.
Supplements: There's nothing exclusive to
this HD DVD of Backdraft, but all of the extras from the simultaneously released special edition DVD have been included. The disc opens with a three minute introduction by Ron Howard, and the director lobs out a quick overview of the film, the interviews on this release, and what Backdraft has meant to him over the years. Opey's intro is followed by nearly forty-five minutes of deleted scenes which are presented at a speckly, workprint-grade 1.33:1. Approaching 140 minutes in length, Backdraft seems excessively long as it is, and this footage pushes it past the three hour mark. I'm sure this makes me a bad, bad reviewer, but I passed on watching these in full. Skimming through, I don't see a whole lotta fire, so it looks to be more of what I disliked.
I find myself appreciating features more and more that aren't just another routine making-of doc. "Real Life Firemen, Real Life Stories" spends eight minutes or so with a group of firefighters from Station 73 in Santa Clarita, CA. They briefly comment on their reactions to Backdraft and how the movie changed the public's perception of what they do, but they spend most of the featurette offering insight into the life of a fireman. These six men are far more personable and genuine than any of the characters in the movie, and the stories they tell engaged me more in the space of a few minutes than Backdraft managed to in a couple hours-plus.
Having just been to Universal Studios Hollywood earlier this year and with the footage shown in their Backdraft stage show (or whatever you'd call it) still fairly fresh in my mind, it's kinda funny how familiar so much of the vintage talking head footage incorporated into the remaining making-of featurettes looks. Naturally, two of them -- running around thirty minutes in total -- are devoted to the incendiary special effects. The eighteen minute "Bringing Together the Team" is an average casting featurette with new interviews with most of the cast, although some of the more recognizable names are either not present or only rear their heads in fifteen year old clips. Finally, the fifteen minute featurette "Igniting the Story" covers the genesis of the script, production and costume design, and the score. The best parts of the featurette leave it worth a look even if some of stale on-set interviews from a decade and a half ago drag it down. I can't say I'm all that keen on screenwriter Gregory Widen's script, but I still enjoyed hearing about some of his experiences about actually having worked as a fireman and having seen a real backdraft firsthand. I was also intrigued by comments about how much costuming is part of De Niro's method acting (to the point of fretting about how his character would clean his uniform) as well as how you handle shooting a second or third take on a set that had been engulfed in flames.
Conclusion: Backdraft dumps so much overcalculated schmaltz into its uninspired, formulaic plot that it extinguishes the thrills of its spectacularly staged action sequences. Established fans of the movie should be pleased with the treatment its gotten on HD DVD, but to those who haven't already caught Backdraft before, I'd suggest giving it a rental first. Rent It.
Standard image disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review were lifted from AllMoviePhoto.com and don't necessarily reflect the appearance of this HD DVD.
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