XMonkey said:
Mifune said:
Just got done watching it, so I'll give some quick impressions.
First off, this was my first time seeing it ... and ... HOLY SHIT 0_o. What an amazing movie!!! I was simply riveted through most of it, especially the last 1/4. Everyone saying this was one of the best movies of last year was right. As for the transfer, its quite good.
Audio:
The audio is unfortunately DD, but is actually one of the better 'DVD' soundtracks I've heard. For anyone that's seen the movie, you know it isn't an especially showy soundtrack most of the time, but when there are bullets flying or explosions happening ... they are very well done. Impressive dynamics. Also, the dialog intelligibility is quite good, which is important in a movie that is quite dialog-heavy as well as having numerous accents. Basically, think of it as a really well mastered DVD.
Video:
Now as for video, I'm quite happy with the AVC encode. As I stated, I didn't see it in the the theaters so I can't really comment on accuracy (nor have I seen the HD-DVD's VC-1 encode), so I can only really compare it to other BD titles. The detail level is not quite up to that of the top releases, but I'm guessing that is how the movie looked in the theaters (there's a lot of dreary, foggy locations). It is not however, soft be any means. If anything, I'd say its very filmlike (though there is no obvious film-grain. I don't know if that was removed, or isn't noticeable in the master) On a similar note, there isn't a lot of color jumping out at you all the time, but again ... that's how the movie looks.
What is quite nice to see is an utter absence of any sort of noise. When you consider there are a lot scenes that are either dark, or contain a ton of shadows, this is obviously a nice transfer. Shadow detail is also very, very good. Similarly, there are a lot of scenes with dreary skies, or other large areas of subtle color gradation. As with dark scenes, bit-starved transfers tend to show noise in such areas (and sometimes banding). Thankfully, no such problems are present in this transfer. I took a look at the bit-rate every once in a while, and it was in the 30's most of the time. Given the above, I'm not surprised. All in all, a very nice transfer.
Extras:
:lol None, zero, zip. This release doesn't even have trailers or audio setup. As a matter of fact, the title screen is the only thing it has. On it are 4 selections ... which is simply to pick your subtitle language. When you click on any of the 4, it just starts the movie with the appropriate subtitling (you just then go and turn off subtitling when the movie starts if you wish). I guess this isn't surprising though. Who's going to pay to translate the extras for subtitling? And as for trailers, Nordisk is a distributor ... not a movie studio.
Hopefully the above is somewhat intelligible. I'm in a hurry and need to hit the hay.
