Product: The Avengers
Company: Warner Brothers
Review By: Byron Hinson

Aspect Ratio	Regional Information		DVD Disc Details
1.85 : 1 Anamorphic Widescreen Pan & Scan	1 : USA	NTSC	Closed Captioning: CC Master format: Film Sides: 2 (DS-SL) Chapter stops: 31 Macrovision copy protection

Sound:	English	French
	5.1	5.1
Subtitles:

It hasn't been that long since The Avengers was released in theatres. Critics all over the world slammed the movie as it came nowhere near expectations and fans of the original TV series were also very disappointed with the movie. I must confess to only ever seeing one episode on television a few years back and I felt even that was unimpressive, so I go into watching this DVD with no high hopes at all.

The story (?) goes a little something like this. Ralph Fiennes plays John Steed (Looks like Stan Laurel) and Uma Thurman takes the part of the catsuited Emma Peel, two British secret agents. Sean Connery has the role of the villain, Sir August De Wynter a man who wants to control the world through a high tech weather machine.

The Avengers DVD comes on two sides, one is the full screen pan and scan version, the other a widescreen 1.85:1 version. I am personally all for this as more and more people are getting on the DVD bandwagon with not only full players, but also DVD-ROM so the more viewing choices the better I say.

Once you place the disc in your DVD drive you are greeted with an excellent animated menu (Not quite as good as The Truman Show's). The menu has the usual Jump To Scene, Special Features and Adverts for other DVD titles by Warner. While the menu looks great, it's nothing without a bundle of special features and unfortunately The Avengers doesn't have anything great to offer the viewer apart from the very basic behind the scenes info and a theatrical trailer.

Once I started to watch the movie, I was quite surprised to see how gorgeous the image quality was and not only that - I felt the directing and photography were also quite superb. The Avengers contains a mass of great colors that are clear and vivid, so on DVD they really stand out. The Widescreen 1.85:1 version on the other side of the disc is also excellent in terms of image quality.

The main problems with The Avengers are the acting and storyline because the action isn't all that bad either and if you don't take it too seriously it isn't a bad waste of an hour and a half and as I mentioned earlier, it is gorgeous to look at.

To sum up - The movie is badly acted and has some truly awful lines but you can have fun watching it as long as you do not take any of it seriously. If you like style over content then this might be for you, but personally I think there is room for both.

"The Avengers" - DVD Features

• Interactive Menus
• Production Notes
• Scene Access
• 6 Trailers

PC Setup

• Pentium II 450
• Windows 98
• 128 Meg SD-Ram
• Voodoo 2 - 8mb
• SoundBlaster Live Value
• DVD-ROM - 32x
• XingDVD 2.0.3 and ATI DVD Player 3.0
• 17" LG Electronics Monitor
• ATI 8mb XPert AGP Graphics Card