I've been a home theater enthusiast since the early 1990s, and back in the heyday when LaserDisc reigned supreme as the premium consumer video format, demo material to show off 5.1 sound systems were hardly scarce.
But I never understood why salespeople loved using the bathroom fight scene in True Lies for home theater demonstrations. "Listen to the tiles falling on the floor," they would say. 🙄 It's a great action scene, but there are other scenes in that and other films that are excellent demo material, not to mention less violent. Some of my favorites were scenes from the original 1977 Star Wars with its 2-channel matrix (as opposed to discrete) surround sound Dolby Stereo soundtrack.
Anyhoo, I'm glad True Lies is finally available on Digital HD. The story goes that Arnold Schwarzenegger saw this French comedy film (La Totale!), told James Cameron about it, and a few years after they did Terminator 2: Judgment Day, they made True Lies.
Schwarzenegger leads the memorable cast that includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, and Charlton Heston. Incidentally, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Paxton appeared briefly together in Cameron's The Terminator.
Many probably don't know that James Cameron co-founded the visual effects company with the legendary Stan Winston called Digital Domain. True Lies was one of the company's very first productions, and I'll never forget how blown away I was by the visual effects in the film, particularly the sequence at the end with the Harrier jump jet.
James Cameron often incorporates comic relief in his screenplays, but, strangely, True Lies is the only action comedy film he's ever done, which is too bad. True Lies would have made a great film series. I have yet to see the TV series based on the film, and it may be too late to do a legacy sequel now, but True Lies is still a very fun movie to watch after all these years.
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