It's not often a swashbuckler comes to DVD, and perhaps the one disappointment with this disc of "The Count of Monte Cristo" is its somewhat pedestrian extra features.

TECHNICAL FEATURES

Picture Whilst the image quality is fair, it's never much better than that in a transfer that's occasionally quite dreary to look at.

Sound A fairly light 5.1 mix accompanies the adventure, distributing the music well between the front speakers.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Audio Commentary Director Kevin Reynolds discusses adapting the Alexander Dumas novel, and comments on aspects of the film that purists of the book do not like. He feels that he stayed true to the themes of the novel, but had to do a lot of compression in order to create an effective film.

An Epic Reborn This 34-minute documentary is split into four sections, covering the writing of the original book right through to its adaptation as a movie.

Screenwriter Jay Wolpert complains that all the novel's characters carry swords but do precious little with them. This lack of action set-pieces, along with the length of the book, made significant changes necessary for the film. What Jay endeavoured was to keep the "great characters and story"; something he feels audiences have too long been deprived of in the bulk of movies made today.

Deleted Scenes Kevin Reynolds is joined by editor Stephen Semel to introduce four short deleted scenes.

Sword Choreography This is three minutes of sword fight rehearsal - something that's better covered in the An Epic Reborn documentary.

En Garde: Multi-Angle Dailies Here you can flick between the steadicam wideshots and handheld close-ups used to capture a sword fight.

Layer by Layer - Sound Design The 'Edmond's Escape' scene is broken down into separate audio channels so you can listen to dialogue only, music only, sound effects only, and the final composite.

The idea to include this is good, but why does Buena Vista keep insisting on only presenting this type of feature in 2.0 stereo? The final composite should be in 5.1, as in the film. You can't expect people to learn much about sound design if you don't properly demonstrate how it's layered into an effective result. One exception is Buena Vista's excellent DVD of "Unbreakable", which has a beautiful sound demonstration in 5.1 for each layer.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION
Region: 2
Chapters: 29
Ratio: 2.35:1 (anamorphic)
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
Audio Tracks: English
Subtitles: English
Captions: English
Menus: Animated main menu
Special Features Subtitles: None of the special features come with subtitles.

This DVD was reviewed on a JVC XV-S57 DVD player.