An okay commentary. Goldsman sounds like a regular hack who knows only what he has learned from “Screenwriting 101 for Dummies”. Proyas offers the real information here. The commentary was recorded six weeks before release and just before the test screening so he is quite anxious about the fate of his film. He sheds light on how utterly moronic (in terms of creativity) men in suits are. Apparently they were constantly at odds with him as the film was considered “too intelligent for a mass audience”. How wonderful it is to know executives give audiences such large credit. With this type of attitude towards audiences the prospects of good and intelligent cinema coming from Hollywood is becoming smaller and smaller.

These two guys don’t seem to be together, but if they were they’d probably praise each other endlessly. The writer keeps almost completely to story elements. The character stuff is something else he talks about a lot. Some of the stuff he says is pretty obvious if you’ve seen the movie, but other things are quite interesting. They talk about Dr. Calvin’s back-story and Mr. Goldsman’s thoughts about it are probably the most interesting thing. I do have to say that Mr. Goldsman’s thoughts on action should’ve been implemented in ‘Batman Forever’ and ‘Batman & Robin’ (both of which he wrote), and maybe those ideas would’ve seemed more credible coming from him. As for Mr. Proyas, he talks a lot about the story and production in the beginning and then after a while he talks about the technical things. Hearing Mr. Proyas bitch about money men is entertaining, and his talks about the translight that was bad and other mistakes is also nice to hear. The director talks a little about the effects and how they did them. Pretty hefty stuff. Mr. Goldsman seems to be a little more enthusiastic than Mr. Proyas, but they’re both as interesting. Believe it or not, they even talk about budgetary constraints. The reasons and the personal theories the two guys express are far more interesting than the talk about the movie itself. This is a nice track with some funny and informative bits, but not a classic. Something that could have been done better is that the commentary was recorded a whole six weeks before the theatrical release, so, I think, the effects weren’t finished. Overall, it’s a nice track.

A somewhat frustrating commentary as it is obvious these two people were recorded separately, and then spliced together, sometimes with comments not quite about what we are seeing on the screen.

However, a half dozen times, one or the other says something rather enlightening and interesting about the film that is not found in the documentary on the DVD (or the IMDB trivia). But this does not happen enough that it is not a mostly boring commentary track.

One thing for sure is that I would like to learn more about the original script, as the robot murder mystery does sound fascinating. I do not mind it was turned into a big summer film, because it is quite good as one of those, but I like the thought of the noir film it started as.

Most of these guys are alone, but two pairs of them are together. I think John Nelson and maybe Brian Van’t Hul are together, I think. The other pair is Patrick Tatopoulous and, say, maybe, Richard Learoyd. In any case, the track is very interesting. For a movie this size and this complex, there’s virtually no end to the amount of information you can have. Indeed, they pretty much never stop talking. The editing in the track is very nice, so the flow is never strange. You get tidbits of information like nine lighting passes for the NS-5s were used, and you get to hear about a neat-o machine called the ‘encodi-cam’, or something like that. If you’re interested in any kind of technical aspects of filmmaking, be sure to listen to this. All the complex shots and CG images are all explained in detail. Very nice technical track.

If you’ve heard one composer commentary, you’ve sort of heard them all. That doesn’t mean it’s boring. Mr. Beltrami enlightens you about how he got started in music and about how he works. He talks about his childhood and getting into movies. Talking about himself and how he started, you know this guy is no joke. He’s good. Anyway, he talks about his process of work and how little time he had to work on this movie. He basically wrote all the time he worked on the movie and had no time with the orchestra (or at least that’s what I understood of it). It’s nice and when he’s not talking his nice score comes out of the speakers, making you hear things you missed while watching the movie. It’s a nice track.