Review of Gupt

Introduction

When the governor (Raj Babber) is murdered his wife sees her son, Saahil (Bobby Deol), holding the knife. Saahil says that he did not murder the governor but no-one believes him as everyone knew about Saahil threat to kill his stepfather during a party. Now it is up to Saahil to escape from prison to find out who really killed him and why..................

After EROS and DEI released Gupt back in 1998 on DVD (one of the first DVD titles to come out) EROS realised that the quality of it was quite poor. EROS then re-released this second version with Media Dimension which I have briefly reviewed here.

Video

After the tiresome adverts of EROS and B4U which lasts for 5mins, and you cannot skip, scan or stop it, we are force to watch them.

Anyway the film is correctly presented in its original aspect ratio of 2:35.1. This means that you can see the film as the director intended without any frame cropping. But it is not anamorphic which means some resolution is missed out upon to the thick black bars (oh well!).

The film has no signs of any artefacts but it does have signs of grain noise throughout the film. This could be due to the film stock as it might have been worn out from over usage while playing at cinemas. It would have been an improvement if the 35mm print source used was of an interpostive or original print in India.

The film also has a lot of shimmering which interrupts with viewing, and at times distorting images making them not as detailed as they should be.

On the plus side the picture has good colour fidelity and fair amount of dark details and contrast helping the viewer understand what is happening on the screen.

Audio

The sound is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 mastered from the orignal film DTS-6 soundtrack source. Here the sound is really dynamic giving off an impressive soundfield.

Again here the sound is as crisp and sharp soundtrack displaying the wonder works of Viju Shah`s background and songs compositions. Dialogue track on the centre channel is audible and the LFE channel superbly handles the bass for the action sequences

Features

While the moving menus are presented with nice designs the box seems rather cheapish. Can`t understand why this is so as the film had great stills during it publicity run. Also there are no other features present.

The English subtitles used are poor and are 16:9 unfriendly.

Conclusion

As brief as I can get as this is a mystery film and it is best to not reveal the whole sub-plots that the film has. Never the less this film marks high technical values and great performance.

What really makes this film excellent is the stunning work put into it by Rajiv Rai, and it shows on screen. The stunning camerawork by Ashok Metha ranks up with one of the best ever seen on Indian cinema. The brilliant soundtrack provided by Viju Shah with his Techno/Garage theme based music. Also the fast pace editing by Rajiv Rai help set the film`s overall pacing which is rather MTV.

This DVD improves on the DEI and EROS version, yet it still needs to go a long way for better visual quality.