Review of Legend of 1900, The

Introduction

From the director of Cinema Paradiso comes a strange film, about a man who was born on a ship and named “1900”. 1900 (Tim Roth) has never left the ship, living his whole life on board it. He also happens to be pretty nifty with the piano…

As always, EIV have included an immense amount of quotes raving about how good the film is on the cover, completely ruining the artwork.

Video

The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen, and is a very good transfer, as you would expect from a film made in 1998. The colour reproduction is vibrant, and faithful to the large palette used. Tricky atmospheric visuals such as fog and smoke are dealt with well, and the picture is generally free from specks or marks.

Audio

The stereo track included is clear and free from hiss, but I found the dialogue volume to be a little low – you may need to turn up your centre speaker to hear this clearly. Otherwise, a decent job.

Features

There’s a pretty poor set of extras here – just filmographies and a picture gallery. There isn`t’ even a `‘special features` sub-menu! The menus are terrible, with just an awful still acting as the menu picture – luckily some music playing over the top of them goes some way to making up for this.

Conclusion

The Legend of 1900 is one seriously loved film – just check out the IMDB reviews. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I enjoyed it at all, nor even understand its appeal…the story is horribly corny and basic, and the dialogue is quite terrible at times. The CGI is visibly poor. Even Tim Roth, who is by all accounts an excellent actor, comes across as quite bad in numerous scenes, and his cockney accent a little off-putting. There are some excellent scenes – any of the piano sequences (scored by Ennio Morricone), but especially the piano ‘duel’ – and the set decoration and costumes superbly recreate the era. However, this does not make up for the sad fact that this film goes nowhere fast and reeks of cheese by the kilo.

The DVD has a good picture, decent sound, and stinks in the extras department. If you love this film as much as the majority seem to do, feel free to buy it as it is the best version out there, otherwise, as I wish I was, be a little cautious about purchasing this unseen...