The Island at the Top of the World (30th Anniversary Edition)
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List Price: $19.99
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Features
• Color
• NTSC
In Theaters : 20 December, 1974
DVD Release : 07 September, 2004 |
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The Island at the Top of the World (30th Anniversary Edition) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
A great film? No. Great fun? Yes!
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There are some films you love but you can't really justify. Still, I'll give it a try with The Island at the Top of the World. I can understand why a younger generation probably have a hard time taking an adventure movie with action icons Donald Sinden, David Hartman and Jacques Marin seriously. And yes, the once state of the art special effects do look quaint these days, not least Donald Sinden running furiously on the spot to outrun backprojected lava in a shot that elicited roars of laughter from audiences at the time. Maybe it's because it's one of those films I grew up with. In the pre-Star Wars seventies there weren't that many kid-friendly adventure movies, what with nihilism, Vietnam and post-Watergate cynicism setting the screen agenda, so a film that offered airships, volcanoes, killer whales, Eskimos (as we still ignorantly called them in those days), the North Pole and a lost colony of Vikings (in what looks so suspiciously like the Shangri-La of the previous year's Lost Horizon remake that you keep on expecting them to start singing The World is a Circle) was like Christmas come early.
The plot is the standard three-act lost world model - spend a third of the movie getting there, a third finding out what it's like and the last third running for their lives as they attempt to escape - but Disney's now forgotten A-list director Robert Stevenson keeps it moving swiftly along, Peter Ellenshaw's Oscar-nominated production design and Alan Maley's matte paintings give it a storybook quality and it also has a beautiful Maurice Jarre score which has sadly never been released as an album. Dammit, I still enjoy it!
Disney's 30th anniversary edition is the one to get. The extras aren't as lavish as the Vault Disney series, but there better than the pevious R1 and overseas DVD releases - a 1968 presentation reel for the film, a vintage behind-the-scenes featurette, 4 TV spots, 2 trailers, camera dailies and a surprisingly good stills gallery. It's just a shame they didn't carry over the isolated score from the laserdisc issue. |
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The Island at the Top of the World (30th Anniversary Edition) dvd movie.