Posted 28 November 2005 - 20:09
Bought the review today and had a decent flick through it.
The first thing to catch my eye this morning was the title - Fantastic Fernando! It's always interesting to see what they title these end of year reviews. Anyway, looking at the back cover and it's the usual blah blah blah, running time 220 minutes........
220?! Cool, it was only advertised for 170 mins on the websites.
First thing to strike me when i played it was the opening menu being the same style as last year, only with an updated background If you were'nt looking carefully you'd think you'd put the '04 review in the player by accident.
So onto the main programme itself. Ben Edwards is again the commentator, for the fourth straight year in a row, and so he's now done more of these official review gigs than anyone else (himself and Clive James had both done three each, 02 to 04, and 82, 84, 86 respectively) and with so much time to play with, to say the least it's pretty comprehensive. Now all of the main action and local bits of camerawork i'd seen before throughout the year, but there were still some excellent additions that have been withheld until now....
Standout moments previously unseen were the 4 car shunt on the Saturday morning of Monaco at the massenet, as we watch JVs on board of the incident. I'll spare you my take on it looking from his car, and you can judge for yourself how much warning he had. The other stuff that left it's mark on me were the pitwall shots that we had'nt seen before. Flavio's reaction to Alonso holding off Michael at Imola is a brilliant piece of footage, also Ron Dennis & Ross Brawn provide plenty of entertainment showing their emotions right in the heat of battle.
There's a few nice little off-track features along the way, mainly centered around Red Bull. The energy station gets a once over, and there's a clever short star wars piece in the lead-up to Monaco.
One thing that disappointed me ever-so-slightly about the main programme was how Indianapolis was handled. I was thinking beforehand that they might really go to town on that whole Friday into Saturday, Saturday night into Sunday episode, but no.. Friday and Saturday seemed to be done quickfire, although Edwards takes us through a good description of the last hour before the start. His WTF reaction to the field coming in however, is the one blot on his superb commentary through the whole thing, most likely a scripting issue though. If you'll recall most of the watching world knew with a few minutes to go (at the very latest) that these guys were gonna pull in. Indeed the shock at the start of the formation lap, would have been if the Michelin runners had gone to the grid. Thinking a little more about it, i'd say the Indianapolis part of the review is more political and glossing over the deep issues of the weekend than anything else. I'd be very interested to see what others think on this......
Aside from that, the main programme on the whole is brilliant, a really good, comprehensive account of the year, with good commentary, the pick of the camerawork, and some cracking unseen interviews as well, with a few musical background pieces thrown in. It's done pretty much the same way as 2004 was. 187 mins for the review.
I can hear you all saying yeah, yeah, yeah...enough with the bullshit, what about the extras!!!?
Again i found the extras menu almost hidden, like they don't want you to see it. From the main menu at the start of the disc hit the sub-menu to reveal it. Again, menu is the same as the 2004 review. It's a load of markers with an onboard lap from each circuit thrown in. The OB lap is commentated this year by the driver of that car, and it's not necessarily the pole lap either, witness Sato talking us round a lap of Suzuka during that wet weekend. Not having all the pole laps was a slight disappointment, they should come as standard. As i said, the rest are markers so you can choose to watch the intro to the event, race highlights or the classification onwards - just like last year. Reckon on 38 mins or thereabouts for the On-board lap extras. So there we are, running time 225 mins, pretty impressive.
Overall it's a good DVD and well worth getting just for the story of the season. FOM have done a good job with it save for Indy, but the rest of it just has this scent of "have'nt we been here before" about it.
