Product Description
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DVD Special Features: "ing out the Hollow Man" Behind the
Scenes Special Effects Featurette
"Anatomy of a Thriller" Featurette
3 Deleted Scenes
Feature Length Commentary by Kevin Bacon & Paul Verhoeven
Feature Length Commentary by the Composer
2 Trailers
Storyboard Comparisons
Animated Menus
Filmographies
Languages: English, Hungarian
Subtitles: English, Polish, Cech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hindi,
Hebrew, Dutch, Bulgarian, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, Finnish,
Greek, Norwegian, Arabic
Dolby Digital 5.1
1.18:1 widescreen 16:9 version
.co.uk Review
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In Paul Verhoeven's appropriately shallow Hollow Man, Kevin
Bacon plays a bad-boy egotistical scientist who heads up a
double-secret government team experimenting with turning
life-forms invisible. How do we know he's a bad boy? Because he
(a) wears a leather overcoat, (b) compares himself to God, (c)
drives a sports car and (d) spies on his comely next-door
neighbour while eating Twinkies. Sadly, this is the most
character development anyone gets in this undernourished
action/sci-fi thriller, which boasts some phenomenal, seamless
and O-worthy computer effects and some amazingly ridiculous
plot twists. After experimenting rather ruthlessly on a menagerie
of lab animals, Bacon finally cracks the code that will turn the
invisible gorillas, dogs and so on back into their visible forms,
and promptly volunteers as a human guinea pig. Sure enough he is
rendered invisible, organ by organ, vein by vein, and then
proceeds to on his female co-workers in the bathroom and
molest his comely next-door neighbour.
Soon, Bacon is thoroughly psychotic, and it's up to Elisabeth
Shue (Bacon's co-worker and ex-girlfriend) and hunky Josh Brolin
(her current snuggle bunny) to defeat the invisible man, who's
picking off the science team one by one. You'd think this would
be a prime rtunity for copious as of cheesy sex and
aggressive violence--which Verhoeven served up so well and so
exuberantly in Starship Troopers and Basic Instinct--but if
anything, the director seems to tone down the proceedings, and
really, who wants a muted Paul Verhoeven movie? --Mark Englehart,
.com
On the DVD: In the audio commentary with director Paul Verhoeven
and star Kevin Bacon, Hollow Man scriptwriter Andrew Marlowe
reveals that the story had been in development for some nine
years before it got made, and that he had worked on it for "a
number of years". An amazing revelation, given that the main
attraction of this DVD is surely the cutting-edge special effects
and the fascinating behind-the-scenes deconstruction of them. The
DVD viewer cannot help but wonder how anyone could have spent
years on a script that looks like it was cobbled together over a
weekend as an excuse to play around with some really neat CGI
effects. The various documentary features on the disc break down
all the key FX scenes in exhaustive detail, showing the creative
blend of live action and CGI and all the painstaking methods by
which it was achieved. Director Verhoeven is appropriately
profiled as "Hollywood's Mad Scientist" in the "Anatomy of a
Thriller" featurette (in the commentary he makes a comparison
with Hitchcock's Rear Window that only serves to underline the
gulf between his ambitious vision and its execution). Elsewhere,
legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith provides a commentary to his
music, which gives hope to fans that he will now do the same for
some of his better scores. There are deleted scenes, trailers,
storyboards and a really neat menu interface to round off an
enjoyable DVD package. Anamorphic picture and sound quality are
impeccable. --Mark Walker