Railroad: Revolutionising the West (2003 Video) User Reviews

Not unlike a solitary jigsaw piece

[TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews · 5/10 · 15 May 2010]

I'll try to explain my perhaps enigmatic choice of one line summary. You see, this is nice enough to look at, but it feels like it's a fraction of something bigger, and on its own, when you don't get to see the whole that this is a part of, you mainly feel like you're missing out, regardless of how nice it is to look at. I don't know if this was a tiny portion of a history lesson as concise as this is on its own, but just these six minutes hardly make an impression. If this is indeed the only one made, if there is no series, then this was clearly made to explain what actually happened around the time the film is set, and as kind a motive as that is, it isn't something you can construct much of anything around, and it shows. This is the shortest of the four featurettes on the Special Collector's Edition 2-Disc DVD of Once Upon a Time in the West, with a running time of a mere six minutes. It consists of clips of it, archive footage, narration and interviews. The political content of the movie is gone into(note that this documentary spoils the picture itself), and we get a brief run-down of Westerns and cinema, as well as their relationship with the railroad in the US, and that's it. Relatively informative, although it goes by so fast that you won't catch half of it. There is no offensive material in this. I recommend it to those who are extremely interested in the subjects(well, you can do better elsewhere, I'm sure). 5/10

Great companion disk....but not this particular portion of it.

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 4 March 2011]

This is one of the special features on the companion disk for "Once Upon a Time in the West"--the Sergio Leone epic film from 1968. However, unlike the other special features that were excellent, this short documentary was, frankly, pretty terrible. This was partially because it was so short and partly because the style of the documentary didn't make things any better--and as a result, it was all pretty dull and unnecessary. The film is to be about the impact of the railroads on the American West. However, the discussion was just way, way too short--and relating all this to the feature film was not done effectively. And, to make it worse, the narration is spoken in a very stilted manner and projected a paragraph at a time on the screen--with the action during most of this in a small window. Why? I dunno--but it seemed weird and unnecessary.

By the way, my complaint is NOT about having the narration captioned. My daughter is deaf and I am hard of hearing, so I appreciate captions--just not paragraphs at a time. And, more importantly, it just wasn't interesting at all. My advice is see the three-part documentary on the disk and skip this short and not particularly good one.