apocalypse

Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is, for my money, the greatest (anti-) war film ever made. It also broke new ground in film sound mixing, and the newly remastered three-disc version, "Apocalypse Now: Full Disclosure" sounds substantially better on Blu-ray than it did on the previous "Apocalypse Now Redux" DVD.

The 1080p transfers were supervised by the director, and the new Blu-ray is the first disc release in the original wide-screen theatrical aspect ratio (2.35:1). The "Full Disclosure" set also includes "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," a feature-length documentary (with optional audio commentary from Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola) that was originally released in 1991.

I'm not going to review the Blu-ray's video quality, other than to say it looks great. The DTS Master Audio sound is truly exceptional; I directly compared it with my "Apocalypse Now Redux" DVD that was remastered in 2006 in Dolby Digital sound.

The first thing I noticed about the Blu-ray's surround mix was that it was bigger and more expansive than the DVD's. The film's sound mixer/designer, Walter Murch, produced a remarkably layered landscape. The jungle scenes are populated with a vast array of insects and birds, the sound of wind is sometimes subtly mixed with a vocal chorus, and the far away rumble of bombs exploding will test your subwoofer's stamina. Returning to the DVD's duller and muddled soundtrack was a big letdown.

The "Apocalypse Now: Full Disclosure" set is jam-packed with nine hours of extras, but two short featurettes, "The Birth of 5.1 Sound" and "The Final Mix" were the standout attractions for me. The "Apocalypse Now" sound mix was so complex the engineers were required to work 12-hour days from November 1978 to August 1979 (that's about three times longer than it takes to mix the average big budget feature film). "Apocalypse Now" was the first film with stereo surround channels, which is one of the reasons it sounds so much better than other films of the 1970s or 1980s. … Read more

We've been looking forward to a few big Blu-ray releases coming this fall, including "Apocalypse Now" (three-disc full-disclosure edition), which hits stores on October 19. As its title implies, in the box you'll find three discs that pull together "The 1979 Cut," the longer "Apocalypse Now Redux," and the "Hearts of Darkness" documentary.

Both versions of the film are presented in high definition for the first time from a 1080p transfer "supervised" by Francis Ford Coppola. You also get a bunch of extras, which gives fans of "… Read more

Sooner or later, it will all end. Hopefully, this will be before the "Singularity" folks fulfill their metallic dreams.

A woman in Germany, however, fears the end really is very nigh indeed. So, according to the Telegraph, she went to her country's most exalted court to get its judges to understand just how nigh our final breaths are.

The court didn't disclose her name, nor is there any evidence that she was wearing a sandwich board during her appeal. Her fears, though, surround the Large Hadron Collider, situated beneath the border of France and Switzerland. This … Read more

As we’re nearing the end of a year and the end of a decade, it’s time to look back and ahead. With at least three formative events in this young 21st century (9/11, the Tsunami, and the Great Recession) providing some sort of apocalyptic arch and instilling a profound sense of anxiety, it is no wonder that former visionaries are gathering at conferences asking “Where did the future go?” But, at the end of the day, the end of all days didn’t occur, and as the New York Magazine points out in its comprehensive review of … Read more

I always thought a stray meteorite would just smack into the world in, oh, 2020, and that would be that.

Or, perhaps, around 2015, everyone would become a celebrity and have a simultaneous nervous breakdown, brought on by excessive drug abuse, causing a Koresh-like disappearance of humanity.

But no, the year to prepare all your insurance policies for is 2030.

By that year, according to Professor John Beddington, the U.K. government's chief scientist, food and energy demand will have risen by 50 percent and fresh water by 30 percent. And the global population will have risen to around … Read more

I am not an intelligent designer. Nor am I a resident of France or Switzerland.

But this Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which particles are breaking the speed limit somewhere beneath the French/Swiss border and then crashing into each other like teenage drunks in fairground bumper cars scares the semi-comatose bejaysus out of me.

These scientists claim to know what they are doing. But scientists always claim to know what they are doing. Then they discover, while doing the thing that they claim to know they are doing, that they are doing something entirely different.

Is any government monitoring … Read more

Correction, 11:00 a.m. PDT: This story incorrectly reported the size of the particle accelerator. It has a circumference of 17 miles.

Remember the fear that the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in 1945 might ignite the atmosphere? The Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator 17 miles in circumference that will begin operation Wednesday, comes with its own apocalyptic possibility: teensy black holes with gravitational appetites voracious enough to swallow the Earth.

But you can breathe easy, because some scientists believe that worry is just as baseless as the A-bomb's flaming atmosphere.

On Tuesday, the … Read more

Hello Kitty laptops are certainly nothing new, unfortunately, but their influence on design seems to be getting disturbingly deeper with each new model. Take, for example, Epson's two new "A4 Monogrammed Laptops."

As spiritual leader Hello Kitty Hell observes, these are distinctly different from the earlier laptops that simply had some Swarovski cat faces glued onto them. The nauseatingly familiar pink and white accents are thoroughly integrated into the design of these Epson computers, which come in your choice of two HK themes.

These are no cheap toys either: They have a Celeron M 1.73GHz chip, … Read more

The work of a true paranoid, we can say with first-person certainty, is never done. The soundproof "WhisperRoom" may be good for countering the eavesdropping devices we're sure are embedded in our walls, for instance, but it's just a start. What we really need is something closer to the "DH1 Disaster House."

The brainchild of California architect Gregg Fleishman, the European birch structure is meant to be used in the post-apocalyptic environment left by disasters of natural and human-made origin alike, according to SCI FI Tech. And at 14 x 14 feet square, it'… Read more