DVD Review: X-Files Season 7 & Children of Dune

Since nothing much happened today that is blog worthy, I thought that I’ll fill in today’s entry with my thoughts about the DVDs that I watched this past weekend.

First up is X-Files Season 7. It took me awhile before I got through all the episodes in this excellent DVD set. On the whole, season 7 was a mixed bag of good, bad and god awful episodes. Among my favorites of the season are “Hungry”, “Closure” and “Signs and Wonders”. I think that the worse of the lot is a toss up between “Hollywood A.D.” and “FPS”. I really hated those 2 episodes. Image and sound quality for the set seems to be acceptable to me but I’m not really skilled enough to tell if there is any defect. The price for the package is a bit steep but having all the season’s episode in one neat package makes it worth it for a fan like me. Plus this season had an appearance of Krychek which is always a good thing.

I also got a chance to watch the “Children of Dune” DVD set in one sitting. I’ve always been a fan of the series but it has been awhile since I read them. This series was shown earlier this year on the Sci-Fi channel in the US but being in Malaysia meant that I have no access to see it during the original airing. I had a love/hate response to the first series “Dune” since I remember that book most vividly and also had the feature film version of “Dune” for comparison. So watching “Children of Dune” this time around is a bit refreshing since I’ve forgotten how the stories continued.

“Children of Dune” is actually two stories, “Children of Dune” & “God Emperor of Dune”, rolled into one. So undoubtedly some of the details were compressed and some others omitted totally to fit into the mini-series format. I have to read the books again to figure out which details got cut out but overall the story flowed smoothly, except from a few loose plot threads, so I guess that the cuts didn’t impact the story that much. CGI shots this time around showed improvement over the predecessor so I guess that they put in extra money after the first mini-series. Costume design also looked better than the first one except for that awful wedding suit that the groom wore in the last episode. Man … it was ugly and I’ll be happy if I never see it again.

The special features of this DVD set are a bit on the slim side. I wished that they could have added some audio commentaries that could explain the effort that they took to combine 2 fairly plot heavy books into one story. Picture and audio quality is quite clear and I must say fairly enjoyable to experience due to the dense amount of action happening on screen at one time. Price wise is acceptable for this polished production.

Both sets are available from Amazon.com.