April 16, 2006
Update to Nirvana Review - Get the Italian Version!
Sometimes the US DVD distributors really piss me off. They unilaterally decide that dumb Americans like myself will only watch a movie if it’s spoken in God’s Language (Which is English, of course - this is verified by checking the earliest versions of the “real” bible - turns out it looks exactly like the King James version. 
). If a movie is from one of those foreign places (woe is them!) that haven’t agreed to speak God’s language yet, we must correct this flaw by providing a dubbed version prior to releasing it in God’s country. In one egregious case, Miramax, in their infinite wisdom, provided us this piece of shit:
Based on this version, my earlier review of Nirvana started off like this:
All in all a decent cyberpunk flick from Italy, but unfortunately suffers horribly from bad dubbing. The dubbing here is as bad as your average anime dubbing, and unfortunately here in the US, this is all we get.
I wish I could get a copy of this in Italian with subtitles - if I did, I’m sure this would shoot up significantly on my cyberpunk list, but alas…
Since then, based on a personal pleading at the bottom of my review, a number of you offered advice on how I could obtain a copy of the Italian version. Case provided me a link on XploitedCinema.com where I could buy the copy - something I eventually did, even though it set me back $30 bucks. Now my updated review of Nirvana reflects this copy:
My rating bumped from 6 stars for the English dubbed version to 8 stars for the Italian language version. I must say though, I’m still pissed about having to drop another 30 bucks to get this - truly, the Italian sound track should have been included on the Region 1 disc (hence the ranting above - I really don’t hate religion, but do detest the arrogance in the US at times - this is one of those times). I don’t know that Nirvana is worth $30 bucks though - I rarely pay this much for a DVD. But if you’re planning on buying Nirvana, I would advise skipping the R1 version altogether, and instead save up for the Italian version. The dubbing on the R1 version is truly horrid - like low quality Japanese anime dubbing horrid.
Comments
February 25, 2007
patrick h. lauke said:
i managed to grab a legit copy of the italian version on ebay for US$12 (looks like it was a greek magazine tie-in…small cardboard sleeve, menus in greek, but audio in italian)…well worth it.
i have to admit that i was very impressed with this little movie. the story is very passable, and the whole motivation, characters, tone, etc is a very accurate representation of early william gibson. heck, even the technology and special effects weren’t half bad, and yes the original language really makes the emotion shine through in the protagonists (well, apart from lambert, who is of course dubbed in this version…but the dubbing is of good quality).
strangely, i think this movie is a lot closer to the cyberpunk idea and aesthetic than the overly loud and “hollywoody” johnny mnemonic, for instance…
SFAM said:
Hi Patrick, I couldn’t agree more with you on the idea that Nirvana is about as close as we can get to Gibson’s Neuromancer world. It is FAR closer than johnny Mnemonic.
December 4, 2008
Jose said:
Nirvana is the berst cyberpunk movie filmed. Really my favourite, especially in the original sound. Czech dubbing is also sh**ty, I believe that american was also a dread.
August 14, 2011
zenseeker said:
Anyone in the UK might be interested to know that this is being shown on BBC2 on the 27th August
August 19, 2011
Sniper said:
Nirvana gets all stars from me, too. I don’t know what’s wrong with the English version, but the Russian version is OK. BTW, after the fall of the Union exactly twenty years ago there was a huge rush for Western movies (Western jeans, Western Pepsi, Western anything) and a lot of amateur (read: pirate) dubbing of many movies (Beyond the Law, HD&MM and Stone Cold, to name but a few) were made. These translations have collectible value right now and folks on torrent trackers are hunting for those old VHS cassettes with them, so don’t think your problem is unique