Picture: 
Sound: Extras:
Movie: Picture: Sound: Extras:
The story is simply: the world is coming to an end. But not really. The catastrophes due to collapsing land masses and rising oceans, will be survivable by some especially well prepared individuals. Everyman John Cusack isn't well prepared, but he is lucky enough to have all those coincidences to draw upon.
Anyone with an impressive home theatre system and a desire to show it off to friends should own this disc. The picture is good. Emmerich might tend towards cookie cutter characters, but he sure knows how to do CGI special effects. Not having seen the end of the world I can't say that they were accurate, but they were impressive and mostly looked plausible to the eye.
The sound swirls and engulfs the listener, with chaos arriving from all directions. Perhaps another half octave of bass extension might have made it even more impressive, but otherwise is was absolutely state of the art.
The Australian version comes on a single disc, rather than the two discs of the US Special Edition version. But you're not losing much with the local one. You still get the audio commentary, and the BonusView PIP commentary. You get the 'Interactive Mayan Calculator', a feature in which you enter your birth date to get a horoscope-type reading. For a calendar which is supposed to nonchalantly forecast the end of the world, its personal remarks seem carefully inoffensive. All that the Americans get that we don't are a music video, a 'making of' featurette for the music video, and a 22 minute featurette on how the end of the Mayan calendar might mean the end of the world. Instead we get a four minute version, which is probably a good trade.
(Australian rating); Region Free
The following video bitrate graphs were generated by BDInfo. First, this is the graph for the main movie stream:
This one is the for BonusView PIP video stream:
