Spartacus Special Edition DVD

oramirez012

New member
I was interested in buying this yesterday as it had been reduced

I noticed though that the film was split over 2 discs, whereas the original release was on 1 disc. This put me off

I prefer to watch a film straight through without having to change discs. The extras appealed to me as there was a lot of them on there

Goodfellas was originally released as a 2 sided disc, but the special edition rectified this. The only other 2 disc films I can think of are The Godfather Part 2 and One Upon A Time In America. Is there any reason for these being like this as well? If it is to do with length then how come Apocalypse Now Redux which is around 195 mins can fit on one disc
 
I had this release for a while,but I don't recall it being split.
However,its done to improve quality.
But I already had the US Criterion Collection 2 discer,which has a few extras not on the UK one,and even though the film is on one disc,the picture was better.
I found the UK version to be very grainy.
And although it last 3+ hours,its running time is nowhere near the max for a single disc.
Buy the Criterion edition,but you may have to pay about
 
I always prefer the film on one disc and the extras on another. I found with The Bridge On The River Kwai DVD that the film is split over 2 titles on the same disc, and therefore you get a pause, slightly more exaggerated than a layer change, again anybody know why? This is on the Special Edition by the way

Hopefully this won't happen with the new generation of DVRAB, but I'm damned if I'm going to buy any of my 400+ DVRAB again. It's bad enough that around 15 of the ones (at the moment) I bought have now been re-released as special, or ultimate editions. Ones worth getting as they now have 5.1/DTS, extra disc and bag fulls of features, but not for
 
Films like Spartacus (and Lawrence of Arabia to name two) were originally shown at cinemas with an intermission. If you watch the remastered / restored 'Lawrence' you will see that it was built into the movie i.e. with a musical introduction to the second half. I am sure that Spartacus was released in this fashion as well so splitting the film over two discs is correct.

Films like 'Goodfellas' which were released on 'flipper' dvRAB originally are a different matter - this was just due to some companies esp. Warner Bros who took the cheaper option of using single layered, double sided discs.
 
Although "Spartacus" does have an intermission,this in no way makes it correct to split it over 2 discs.
Splitting is done to maxmise quality,but there is no need to do with this movie unless they used a single layer disc,which is unlikely.
As I said,the Criterion set is better quality and the movie is on a single disc
 
As I said above The Hollywood 10 documentary is about an hour on the Criterion.
Its only about 10 minutes on the R2.
The Criterion also has a restoration demonstration showing what improvements were made and how they were done.
But with the R2 at such a low price,its unlikely anyone bar the pickiest(like me) would consider paying the extra for the Criterion.
Although in my defence,I bought the Criterion a few years a go,and quite some time before the R2 version had any extras
 
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