Black Hawk Down

Video:
My colleague pointed out that the graininess was deliberate, and in terms of cinematography the images that we see certainly shift throughout the film. The picture inside the war room where Garrison leans over his monitors is sharper and with more contrast than you get when you're aboard one of those Black Hawks or on the ground during a battle that produces as much dust as it does smoke. And that visual is different from those which involve CGI grenades followed in flight as they leave their launchers and zip toward targets. Watch the picture quality from frame to frame and you'll see a huge difference in the way that scenes are handled, which means that it's not exactly a Blu-ray showpiece. But the picture is slightly sharper in Blu-ray, and the rough cinematography really complements the film's ostensible focus on journalistic reporting. Now, is it enough of an improvement to ask that fans spend the extra money to get the Blu-ray version when it doesn't contain all the extras from the Deluxe Edition? At this stage of the new technology's development, probably not.

Audio:
Previous SD versions had good distribution across the speakers and a robust sound, but the transfer to Blu-ray disc of the uncompressed PCM English 5.1 audio was done at a lower volume than most of the Blu-rays (and even SDs) I've reviewed. Compared to other six-channel Blu-ray soundtracks, this one just doesn't have the boom and resonance. Obviously, the original source masters aren't of the same quality as some of the better Blu-ray releases. That's disappointing, since "Black Hawk Down" won an Oscar for Sound. Other options include English and French Dolby Digital 5.1, with subtitles in English, English SDH, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and Thai.

Extras:
The Deluxe Version is still the one to get for extras, but this Blu-ray release is among the first three 50GB dual-layered discs produced by Sony, and so they're able to fit a lot more extras on here. All three commentaries are included from the Deluxe Edition, as well as the main documentary feature, "The Essence of Combat."

All three commentaries are excellent: one with author Mark Bowden and screenwriter Ken Nolan, another with producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Ridley Scott, and a third with U.S. Special Forces veterans (my favorite). They're crammed full of information and anecdotes. So is the documentary, which is fleshed out so that there's plenty of real-time footage included in a slickly edited series of featurettes. Some of the best here show the actors at Ranger Orientation, a kind of micro-boot camp, and interacting with their real-life counterparts who visited the set to advise the cast and crew. Scott says he chose Morocco not because he filmed "Gladiator" there, but because it had everything they needed. There's plenty of location footage showing the director and his cast/crew behind the scenes.

Too bad they didn't include the deleted scenes or the PBS "FRONTLINE: Ambush in Mogadishu" program that was on the Extended Cut release. It's getting so fans have to make some difficult choices, or else clog up their storage shelves with two or three versions of the same film. And I'm not just picking on Sony, here. Other studios have done the same thing.

Sony is also introducing "Blu-Wizard," which is basically a feature that allows you to create a playlist of extras so you can play them without interruption without having to watch things you don't care about. Here, for example, if you're not into musical composition you can program the extras to play all while omitting the musical featurette. Frankly, it's not the kind of feature I would use, but studios are still experimenting with the functions on Blu-ray discs.

Bottom Line:
Structurally, "Black Hawk down" has more in common with action films than it does with the war movie genre, and as my colleague first wrote, it's certainly a thrill ride. But if you read the original Philadelphia Inquirer series, you see that a little character development would have helped it . . . not killed it. "Black Hawk Down" makes you feel as if you're right there with the soldiers, and it's nice that dual-layer technology gives fans the chance to watch this in Blu-ray and enjoy the long documentary and three commentaries from the Deluxe Edition.

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