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DVD COMPARISON
There were three different GOLDENEYE DVD editions issued and reissued troughout 1997 and 2015. But there are still some interesting differences among each different issue of the Premiere, Special and Ultimate Editions of the movie depending on the territory. Let's go with some of these facts.
In the case of the Premiere and Special Edition DVDs, the most notable difference the hard-edged GOLDENEYE viewer are the cuts. To reach a "12" rating, Europe (Region 2) has cut a number of frames considered too violent or with a great amount of sexual content in comparison with the theatrical release and the American edition (Region 1). Some of these include:
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Xenia headbutting Natalya during the Jungle showdown.
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More headbutts in the fight between Bond and Trevelyan.
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Xenia moaning while gunning down the Severnaya personnel.
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The Ultimate Edition was uncut, but rated "15" in European territories.
The subtitles did not just differ by the font used between the US and European editions. In every North American release, the phrases said in French and Russian were not subtitled, while the European editions did subtitle the line in that language so that the viewer could at least get an idea on what some characters were talking. Another notable difference regarding the subtitles were the location captions: the Region 1 DVD kept the original yellowish Marseille-Serial font text, while the Region 2 offered a clean version of the movie with electronic forced subtitles changing according to the language selected by the viewer.
Last but not least: the video quality. The masters used for the Premiere and Special Edition DVDs offered much more vibrant colours, definitively closer to the theatre experience, and the movie was correctly matted. For the Ultimate Edition DVD, Lowry took charge of an unaptly called "restoration" which darkened and muted the colours, besides criminally cropping a portion of the frame of each side (something that also happened with A VIEW TO A KILL's Ultimate Edition). BluRay has fixed the latter problem, but the video colours is still poor in comparison to the initial home video releases. Hopefully, all of this should be corrected by the time the 4K UHD BluRay version of the film comes for around 2020.
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