Gulliver's Travels (DVD)

...practice and aims to marry Gulliver's wife manages to get Gulliver committed to a mental home. Can Gulliver prove his sanity or is he really mad. Did his adventures only exist in his mind or do the fantastic lands he describes a reality?

CAST, PERFORMANCES AND OPINION

Ted Danson .... Lemuel Gulliver
Mary Steenburgen .... Mary Gulliver
James Fox .... Dr. Bates
Ned Beatty .... Farmer Grultrud
...to make the ambiguity over Gulliver's sanity the main dramatic narrative in the story and Gulliver relates the adventures of his travels in the form of various flashbacks cleverly interwoven in the main thread of the story. This way of presenting the plot helps divide the action into clear distinct chapters and also I'm sure made it easier to present this adaptation as a TV mini series.

Although deviating from the original novel the ... more

A made for TV film adaptation of one of the classic novels of English Literature starring an American sit com star…time to switch off? Well you might have thought such a premise was bound to fail but in fact this adaptation isn’t that bad….

Gulliver’s Travels is one of those books that everyone knows (or think they do) but I suspect very few have read. Some might have seen animated versions dealing with Gulliver’s travels to Lilliput but this is only part of the story. This adaptation produced by Channel 4 is actually quite accurate to the book and includes all the adventures that are mostly forgotten. There is a subplot or more accurately an overplot that is doesn't appear in the original book but aids the narrative of the TV adaptation but in terms of the details of the events this is probably the most faithful adaptation made so far.

THE STORY

Dr Leumur Gulliver is a country doctor who due to a failing practice became a ship’s surgeon in order to support his wife. After leaving on a long sea voyage he and his ship disappear. After many years with no news he is presumed dead. In his absence his wife has been forced to sell her house to another doctor in order to support herself and her child who Gulliver has yet to see. Although selling the house she still lives there as housekeeper to the new doctor in the village.

On a stormy night Gulliver returns. He claims to have been shipwrecked and to have travelled to many lands, lands like Lilliput populated by miniature people constantly at war with each other, who consider him a giant. He tells of other adventure he has had in Brobdingnag a land of peace loving giants where he is treated as a freak used to amuse the royal court. Later he tells of how he travelled to a land under the spell of a powerful sorcerer who can bring spirits back from the dead and discovers the secret of eternal life. On a further journey he meet a race of intellectuals who live on giant islands floating in the sky and whose life is ruled by absolute logic although he soon discovers that despite their logic common sense is alien to them. Finally Gulliver recounts of how he ventures into the land of the talking horses that keep wild ape- like creature called Yahoo's as beasts of burden.

Gulliver soon finds that no one is prepared to believe his stories and eventually Dr Bates who has taken over his practice and aims to marry Gulliver's wife manages to get Gulliver committed to a mental home. Can Gulliver prove his sanity or is he really mad. Did his adventures only exist in his mind or do the fantastic lands he describes a reality?

CAST, PERFORMANCES AND OPINION

Ted Danson .... Lemuel Gulliver
Mary Steenburgen .... Mary Gulliver
James Fox .... Dr. Bates
Ned Beatty .... Farmer Grultrud
Edward Fox .... Gen. Limtoc
Robert Hardy .... Dr. Parnell
Nicholas Lyndhurst .... Clustril
Phoebe Nicholls .... Empress of Lilliput
John Wells .... Flimnap the Treasurer
Alfre Woodard .... Queen of Brobdingnag
Edward Woodward .... Drunlo
Peter O'Toole .... Emperor of Lilliput
Kate Maberly .... Glumdalclitch
Thomas Sturridge .... Tom Gulliver
George Harris .... Brobdingnag scientist
Geraldine Chaplin .... Empress Munodi
John Gielgud .... Professor of Sunlight (as Sir John Gielgud)
Shashi Kapoor .... Rajah
Kristin Scott Thomas .... Immortal Gatekeeper
Omar Sharif .... The Sorcerer
Richard Wilson .... Professor of Language

I always have my doubts when I see an Anglo-American adaptation of a classic novel. There always seems to be an imperative to make the main star American in order to sell the series to the US market. In the case of this adaptation is also true that Ted Danson was brought in to make the whole project more attractive to an US audience but I have to admit that Danson doesn't do a bad job. Firstly he doesn't try to give Gulliver an 'English' accent a la Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins or Keanu Reeves in Dracula. This is a blessing and you soon get used the 18th century Gulliver having a mid Atlantic drawl. Whether you like Danson in the lead role does depend very much whether you like his easy going charming persona that he seem to adopt in almost every role he takes. Being a long time fan of Cheers I didn't mind.

The supporting cast also includes two further US actors the ever-reliable Mary Steenburgen who is Danson's wife in real life and a smaller role for the great Ned Beatty, surely one of the most underrated American character actors. The rest of the cast includes a welcome return to the screen for Omar Sharif and a selection of the great and the god of British cinema from John Geilgud, James Fox, Peter O'Toole and Kristin Scott Thomas to TV stars like Nicholas Lyndhurst and Edward Woodward. All play their roles well and give the adaptation a real touch of class.

The makers of this adaptation decided to make the ambiguity over Gulliver's sanity the main dramatic narrative in the story and Gulliver relates the adventures of his travels in the form of various flashbacks cleverly interwoven in the main thread of the story. This way of presenting the plot helps divide the action into clear distinct chapters and also I'm sure made it easier to present this adaptation as a TV mini series.

Although deviating from the original novel the mains points of the book, the vanity of humans and the absurdness of human society are still made well while still producing a nicely paced and riveting story.

The other aspect of this adaptation to mention are the special effects that bring to life the amazing worlds that Gulliver visits. You can tell from the very first few scenes that the production values are high and all the world whether they are the miniature Lilliput or the Giant Brobdingnag are made believable by the clever special effects.

Apart from the special effects the styling and costumes used in the film are outstanding. The main story is set in 18th century England and the clothes and set look suitably accurate but a lot of imagination as been used in creating the costumes for the more exotic lands. I felt that the sequences in the floating Islands in the sky were particularly outstanding from this viewpoint.

Without going into much more detail about the film itself I can say that it was both visually and dramatically impressive. But what about the DVD?

THE DVD

As I mentioned before this was originally screened as two one and half hour parts of a TV mini Series so the DVD version last a fairly long 3 hours.

Technically the DVD is standard enough boasting an anamorphically enhanced wide screen format. The picture quality is very good the colours crisp and bright. The sound again is adequate being
5.1 Digital Dolby surround that achieves good clarity throughout. The soundtrack is in English with no choice of foreign language and no foreign subtitles apart for the hard of hearing.
The scene selection facility is very good and the sectorisation is such that you can easily skip through the film from scene to scene.

~Special features~

The two special features are listed as a Photo library, which simply gives us selected stills form the film and a documentary on the making of the film. I don't really see the point of the photo library but I found the documentary very interesting. Introduced and narrated by Danson the documentary takes us behind the scenes of the filming and explains how many of the very effective special effects were created. It was interesting to find out that despite the dominance of CGI in modern films the use of scale models and intelligent camerawork can give us just as effective results. The themes that were present in the original novel and the attempt to bring them to this adaptation were also touched on but the film in term of a visual spectacle was dealt with in more detail.

It is easy to forget that the original Gulliver's travels although considered by many a children book was in fact a biting political satire and some of the idea might be a little disturbing for the youngest readers. In making this reasonably faithful adaptation an element of the darker aspects of the original novel are kept and thus some of the scenes could be inappropriate form younger children hence the PG rating but I let my youngest child aged 4 watch this with me and although she found the story difficult to follow she did not find any of it unduly scary. I would say this is ideal viewing for children 7+.

Overall this is very good DVD to own and you will get more than one viewing out of it especially if you have children. Since you can pick this up for around £7 pound form many of the online DVD shops the relative lack of special features is not too much of a drawback and I would recommend it as a good DVD to own. From a more general point of view it is also a good way to introduce what is these days a slightly less popular classic book to children, although it is different enough form the original to still make reading the book still worth while.

Gulliver's Travel's can be bought form Play.com for £6.99 including delivery or from Amazon.co.uk for £9.99 (+p&p)

Thanks for reading and rating this opinion

© Mauri 2003

( Update: there seems to have been a reorganisation of the categories on the site and the picture accompanying this category has chnaged to show the 1976 version of this starring Richard Harris- the correct category for the later version I have reviews seems to have been removed! I will try and get this put right by Ciao!)
 

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