PLEASE TAKE A MINUTE TO READ MY ENTIRE REVIEW. I AM NOT KNOCKING THE FILM ITSELF - ONLY THE DVD VERSIONS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE.

***

I really wanted to give this film even two stars. I mean how could it possibly rank a mere 1 out of 10!?!

Here's how: An epic film adaptation of Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" with historically accurate battle scenes, courtesy of the Red Army, and an extremely faithful, scene-for-scene adaptation of the novel would be difficult but worth sitting through for seven hours - if that's what you were seeing.

The trouble is you can't see that film - anywhere as far as I know.

I am attempting to watch the RusCiCo DVD version - widely considered the best version available since it's letter boxed and restores the scenes that were cut from other DVD releases.

But, it is one of the worst film prints I've ever seen transfered to DVD. The picture is muddy and inconsistent, often strobing. It's almost tolerable if you crank your brightness, color and picture levels up to maximum.... but the problem doesn't end there.

The sound is also way inconsistent, blaringly loud in parts, virtually inaudible in others.

And as for languages, it's a HUGE problem for English speakers - the dubbed option has some good actors, and some really terrible ones whose performance grates, and parts of the film just aren't dubbed at all, slipping back into Russian and even French randomly.

The subtitled option isn't much better. The subtitles don't appear below the image, but right over it - obscuring some of the beauty (or what's left of it) in the scenery. Furthermore, the subtitles are often a poor translation (a shame given that the script took pains to hew so close to Tolstoy's actual words), and the subtitles too seem to just drop out in parts.

So, even if you max out the color, brightness and picture settings, and turn the volume way up, and choose subtitled *and* English dubbed, you're still going to get a film that's annoying to watch and listen to.

Can it's content overcome that? It might have been able to, but at seven hours - who can stand it for that long?

Maybe someday, someone will come along and restore this - and maybe then I will see a masterpiece - but for now, I just can't give more than one star to something I've only been able to stand watching about the first 12% of.
Would you say this review is positive or negative?
a. negative b. positive
a.