Interesting enough commentary. Nothing stand out. In fact at times McConaughey just watches the film. So there are a few gaps. But generally there's some good information and anecdotes, the two commentators have a good rapport. Not a great commentary, but not bad either, kinda like the film.

I found this to the better of the two commentaries. Director Breck Eisner on his own is full of interesting information. Quite a technical commentary which is great if you are interested in movie making.

Most of the commentary is very technical – Mr. Eisner gives factoids about which specific shots are VFX, what’s live action and what’s a digital matte painting, how they manipulated locations, how they built lighting rigs – and he heavily relies on the picture to provide the context. He gives some interesting throwaways like, he mentions that one location took a month to light. A month to light one location.

And he talks about an interesting bit of product placement – like this one marketing thing they needed to put Jeeps in the movie, and apparently there were no Jeeps in Africa, so he talks about how they figured that out.

The commentary must have been recorded before the film premiered, because in it Mr. Eisner talks about plans for two more movies! Apparently McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Rainn Wilson and the admiral William H. Macy all signed three picture deals. But when the movie came out, it flopped and then it was tied up in litigation, and Paramount pulled the plug. It was the first part in an abandoned trilogy.

There’s one kind of throwaway comment that doesn’t sit right. He talks about how they went into this one house where people lived, and they made molds of the walls and then recreated the room on a soundstage. But they also bought all the people’s things that were in that house, and he says “at a very inflated rate, which was probably about a dollar” – ew, dude. You paid Matthew McConaughey’s personal chef $50,000 and you paid these people a dollar for everything they had in their house? Mm.

One cool thing I found out about the budget of this movie – they spent $200,000 on bribes. Incredible.

Yeah, you know all the stuff I found most interesting was the stuff that I was prompted to look up while I was listening to this commentary – There’s a great new piece from this year in The Telegraph called The Battle of Sahara... Worth a read.