Review of Edward Scissorhands

Introduction

Edward (Johnny Depp) is the creation of a lonely inventor (Vincent Price). The inventor never gets to finish his work and so Edward must fend for himself in the Gothic castle on top of the hill with only scissors as fingers.
Upon being discovered by the well-meaning Avon lady (Dianne Wiest), he is whisked away to live in suburbia with her and her family.
Edwards fantastic adventure begins in the pastel paradise of suburbia. Here he must deal with society and discover emotions that he has never felt before.

A modern fairytale, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands is a unique and enchanting look at society and how it treats outsiders. It looks beautiful, the score is impressive and the story moving. An excellent film which wouldn’t feel out of place in a children’s book, but a film despite all its Hollywood gloss also has something to say.

Video

This 10th anniversary edition of Edward features a very good if slightly flawed 1.85 anamorphic print. The picture is nicely detailed with good uses of colour with no bleed and some really deep blacks. Artifacts are kept to an absolute minimum and colour saturation is excellent. You can really see those soft pastels of the surrounding neighbourhood and the lush green of the grass. The castle scenes look just as good with the almost black and white nature of these being deep and crisp with no blooming of the white. Flesh tones are good throughout and only rarely does a little grain appear. I did notice some print damage in one of the scenes and some flecks here and there, but overall this transfer is very good.

Audio

The sound is presented in Dolby Digital 4.0 and only the great Elfman score lifts this otherwise fair but ultimately dull mix. Don’t get me wrong, the dialogue is always clean and centre but it’s the effects which really fall a bit flat. Dynamic range seems limited, and although the effects move around the forward soundstage it all seems a bit limited and falls well behind the best 5.1 mixes out there. True most of the film is dialogue based with a few ambient effects here and there, but it just seems to me that a lot more could have been done to liven this soundtrack up. Also there are practically no rear effects to speak of and the lack of the sub channel means that bass is limited, although things seem to liven up when the excellent music score kicks in.

Features

On the extras front this DVD is a bit disappointing. Tim Burton makes another appearance on DVD with a commentary track that again is very patchy and dull. Tim always seems to find ways of skipping over interesting facts and details that you really would want to know. It’s a bit of a let down as you can see that the man is brimming with ideas and insight and yet he remains evasive to the last.
The other commentary is by Danny Elfman which is intercut between the isolated score. This is much more informative with tales of where the ideas come from and his relationship with Burton. Maybe it would be a better idea for future commentaries if Burton would be accompanied for his track so they can bounce ideas off each other.

The DVD also contains a featurette that is really poor and soundbites from the cast which look like they were snipped from the original featurette. We also have trailers/tv spots and 6 pieces of conceptual art. Where are all the costume and set designs? Fox needs to do better than this I’m afraid.
The menu`s are nicely animated and scored With Elfman`s superb score.

Conclusion

Altogether Edward Scissorhands isn’t a bad disk and is well worth purchasing. It’s just a shame that this disk didn’t reach its full potential extra’s wise. Please can we have a fully packed DVD next time Fox and oh while you’re at it a remix on the soundtrack wouldn’t go a miss.