...a wonderful, sadly beautiful concept taken a little too far and too obviously in its sentimental moralizing.
Burton and scriptwriter Caroline Thompson are so concerned with scoring metaphoric points, they often forget to connect emotionally to their audience. Worse still, in their overzealous attempts at lampooning, Burton and Thompson throw Edward in among people who are even more bizarre than he is. I mean, no one in this picture is normal. The Avon lady is well-meaning but dimwitted. The husband is utterly passive. The daughter is hostile. The son is a jerk. The boyfriend is Jack the Ripper. The neighbors are from hell. They make Edward and his mad creator seem positively benign, which is, of course, part of the filmmakers' rather unsubtle purpose. But since everyone in the movie is a cartoon character living in a cartoon world, there is no one for the main character to play against. The best dark comedies, "Dr. Strangelove" or "Catch-22," for example, are about normal people doing absurd things. In "Scissorhands," absurd people are doing absurd things. The only thing we can hope for is to watch the predictability of the plot run its course.
Nor does the conclusion bring any satisfaction. What are we to think, that outcasts will always be losers? To make matters even more mushy, all of this is accompanied by one of Danny Elfman's most turgid, schmaltzy, overwrought musical scores.
Video:
The 1.74:1 ratio widescreen picture quality can hardly be faulted. Every comic-book color shows up vividly, brilliantly, in well-defined shapes and textures. In their THX-mastered transfer, Fox have no doubt reproduced the film exactly as it was intended to be seen.
Audio:
The sound, too, is good but not remarkably so. Audio choices are Dolby Digital 4.0 and Dolby Surround, the former producing good front-end stereo and a comfortable musical ambiance in the rear channels.
Extras:
There are two audio commentaries included on this DVD. Tim Burton contributed the first one, though he doesn't talk much. Danny Elfman recorded the second commentary, and his remarks have been mixed with the isolated music score. There are also included a four-and-half-minute featurette that works like an extended trailer, six concept-art sketches, two pan-and-scan theatrical trailers, three TV spots, English and French spoken languages, English and Spanish subtitles, and twenty-four animated chapter selections.
Parting Shots:
"Edward Scissorhands" is a wonderful, sadly beautiful concept taken a little too far and too obviously in its sentimental moralizing. For more cogent fantasy treatments of what it means to be different and the attendant results of people's narrow-mindedness and greed, I recommend the short stories "Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson and "The Martian" by Ray Bradbury. They are more poignant and more truthful than the stuff of Burton's "Scissorhands."
Nor does the conclusion bring any satisfaction. What are we to think, that outcasts will always be losers? To make matters even more mushy, all of this is accompanied by one of Danny Elfman's most turgid, schmaltzy, overwrought musical scores.
Video:
The 1.74:1 ratio widescreen picture quality can hardly be faulted. Every comic-book color shows up vividly, brilliantly, in well-defined shapes and textures. In their THX-mastered transfer, Fox have no doubt reproduced the film exactly as it was intended to be seen.
Audio:
The sound, too, is good but not remarkably so. Audio choices are Dolby Digital 4.0 and Dolby Surround, the former producing good front-end stereo and a comfortable musical ambiance in the rear channels.
Extras:
There are two audio commentaries included on this DVD. Tim Burton contributed the first one, though he doesn't talk much. Danny Elfman recorded the second commentary, and his remarks have been mixed with the isolated music score. There are also included a four-and-half-minute featurette that works like an extended trailer, six concept-art sketches, two pan-and-scan theatrical trailers, three TV spots, English and French spoken languages, English and Spanish subtitles, and twenty-four animated chapter selections.
Parting Shots:
"Edward Scissorhands" is a wonderful, sadly beautiful concept taken a little too far and too obviously in its sentimental moralizing. For more cogent fantasy treatments of what it means to be different and the attendant results of people's narrow-mindedness and greed, I recommend the short stories "Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson and "The Martian" by Ray Bradbury. They are more poignant and more truthful than the stuff of Burton's "Scissorhands."
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]5125[/release]