red line

I have to confess I was a bit disappointed by red line.

However, part of this was due to the fact the Blu-Ray didn't seem to work properly.  When I first got a Blu-Ray drive on my PC I had assumed that the normal windows applications would be able to play it or, failing that, the usual players I use, like MPC.

However, this turned out not to be the case - there was no native support for BR playing and I couldn't find an additional bit of software that played BR's on the window's support site.  My assumption is this is some sort of thing in relation to monopolies.

But also none of my usual players worked either, which I was particularly surprised by until I thought about how if there's no native support in windows, this would likely hamper any of the programs I use too.  As such I ended up using PowerDVD, which is an awful program, but I got it free with the drive.

Anyway, when I tried to watch Red Line on Power DVD it was all messed up - the picture had horrible issues that I've only ever seen when trying to play fansubs that have used weird codecs.

There didn't seem to be any way to solve this, so I ended up having to download a freeware player.  The problem is this program suffers from the classic problem of this type of program - they've given you access to everything and all at the same level of priority.  So in other words if you just want to do something simple it's buried amongst all the weird and wonderful rubbish that no normal person ever even thinks about, let alone wants to change.

And to make things worse the player side of it has tiny controls and you can't adjust them.  Well my BR PC is hooked up to my TV and so is across the other side of the room from where I sit, so it is utterly impossible to control it without walking up to the screen.

All this pre-amble is to let you know I was quite wound up and annoyed by the time I actually got to watch Red Line and probably helps to explain why I didn't quite take to it.

I have also since been told that the English dub is particularly poor.  I did only watch the dub, but in my defence I couldn't work out how to change audio channels on the player.  So perhaps if I was to watch the original Japanese I would like it a bit more.  Certainly I would say that the dub was a bit flat compared to the visual side.

However, I didn't really love the visual side if I'm honest.

My problem wasn't really with the animation, which I thought was good, it was with the character designs.  However, I found it a little difficult to pin down quite why - they felt, I dunno, too western, maybe?  Now I don't mean the characters looked to western (anime characters can often seem western in ethnicity) it was more like it reminded me too much of the cartoon I used to enjoy as a kid.

The main guy in particular looked like Johnny Bravo, for example.

I also found the ending a bit hard to follow.  I mean, it wasn't complicated, but it seemed to lack any sort of consistency - a lot of stuff happened but without any clear explanation as to why or any real reason for how that then followed on to what happened next.

As I say, I just found it all a bit disappointing.