Christopher Lambert Movie:

		List Price: $39.98		Label: Republic Pictures Salesrank: 116711 Released: October 26, 1999
		Used Price: $20.88
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: DVD

Highlander 1 & 2 Reviews:
Shocking image quality
2001-01-19 - This review is about "Highlander - 10th anniversary director's cut" only - I haven't seen "The Quickening" yet. You will not find a worse image quality on DVD even if you tried! First, it is appalling to sell a letterbox transfer as "state of the art", as it says on the box. Only an anamorphic transfer deserves to be called that.... The picture is so bad, I truely have seen better looking VHS-tapes. ...The noise in some scenes is so bad, it looks like snowflakes - this cannot be attributed solely to the high-speed film used for some parts of the movie. Diagonal lines are completely torn up by the lack of resolution. There are artifacts of all kinds throughout the movie. It is a shame! The sound quality is very disappointing, too - this is what you get when you try to squeeze a stereo master into the 5.1 format - very unnatural sounds with artificial, reverberated ambience and dialogues. Some very disturbing noise (hiss) is clearly audible, too. I have to use all my discipline not to resort to very personal, R-rated comments about the studio and producers who are responsible for this terrible DVD. Too bad, because this classic movie would have deserved much better.

Just Horrid
2000-12-31 - I was a big fan of the Highlander TV series and finally got around to seeing the movie. Let's start with the movie itself:

The Movie:

The Highlander TV series often not only explored the wisdom that came with 400 years of life but also the heart break of seeing both mortal and immortal loved ones die. This story explored neither. The acting was only so, so -- except for Sean Connery who was excellent.

The DVD:

The 30 seconds of video showing the script edits, letters, etc. were useless on my computer but was sort of a bittersweet delight. I saw what Highlander was originally intended to be according to the writers.

The sound quality was horrible. Since this was actually one of the first DVD's I've actually watched on my TV (with full 5 speaker surround sound) as opposed to my computer I thought that the barely audible dialogue was being caused by my sound system. After reading the reviews, I found everyone had that problem.

Overall though if you are a Highlander fan, I guess it is worth the money I paid for it.

What a joke
2000-12-29 - These discs look like re-packaged VCDs... the video quality is apalling. There's compression artifacts, color bleeding, ugly doses of aliasing.... you name it. It's like watching one of those dodgy pirate copies from the far east, where someone's gone into the cinema with a camcorder.

The sound aint nothing special, either - the 5.1 remix of Highlander, in particular, is very poor... it sounds like it was mixed by a deaf person working from their bedroom. I'm not kidding.

How'd they get the THX certification on this package? Remember when 'reference quality' actually meant something?

Shame about the video quality
2000-10-01 - This is part two of my review. I saw Highlander. Took me a long time to finish viewing it, because it just didn't grab me. Can't really understand its appeal. It has some nice scenery shots, some okay fight scenes, but is doesn't have a real plot, and flashbacks get in the way of what plot there is. IMO Highlander 2 is the better movie, although it suffers from the forced attempt to link it to the first movie.

Video quality is not very good. Colouring artifacts appear in some places, and it suffers from the same aliasing problems that I mentioned for Highlander 2, although to a lesser extent.

The commentary track is a bit boring (they usually are, but these people do sound a bit more boring than most), but does give some interesting insights into the making of the movie.

This is not The Quickening
2000-08-06 - I have yet to watch the Highlander part of the pack. I started with Highlander II, and was pretty amazed. I won't claim that it's the best ever film - the acting isn't that great, and the fight scenes could be more exciting. But it still makes more sense than The Quickening.

Not only are there quite a few new scenes, but there are also many changes in the editing, including rearrangement of scenes. All in all, there are tens of changes (42 counted in the accompanying booklet), which make this movie distinctively different than the original.

Amazon lists it mistakenly as "Highlander 2: The Quickening: The Renegade Version", but it's just "Highlander 2: Renegade Version". The quickening has been cut completely from the movie, which allows it to make more sense, and link better to the first movie. The link is still a bit tenuous, but it's not as bad as before. It's nice that the people involved have gone back and actually tried to make the movie the way it was first envisioned, and not how it turned out in The Quickening.

All in all, I found this movie enjoyable, especially noting the new scenes. The DVD also includes a feature that explains the changes, a commentary track that explains the changes over the movie, and a small booklet that details the changes, which is nice - I always like adds on on paper. I'll probably take the original on DVD or VHS, to make a better comparison. Interestingly, the booklet mentions that there were both American and British versions (the American was first and worst), and this is neither. I have no idea which of the versions I've seen in the past.

I watched this on a computer with an ATI XPERT@Play 98 card outputting the picture to the TV. At 800x600, this was the worst looking film I had ever seen. Really awful. Luckily, the ATI can also output at 1024x768, which was much better. It could actually be that the film is just "too sharp", and downscaling it badly causes too many artifacts. I can't say how it would look on a DVD player. I played the sound through my mono TV, so I can't really comment about the sound track.