Spiderman trilogy on Blu-ray
Sam Ramie, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe as the lovable Green Goblin – it must be the entire SPIDERMAN trilogy on Blu-ray!
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment took the release of Spiderman 3 to DVD as the opportunity to release all three in the trilogy to its own high-definition format, Blu-ray.
I’ve always been a sucker for a superhero movie. Sometimes I even put my underwear on the outside of my pants in dedication to my favorite costumed vigilantes. But enough about my personal problems. There are benefits to eternal nerd-dom: No girlfriend means spending the entire weekend in high-definition webheaded bliss.
Sound and Vision
Three Blu-ray discs are available this week in a box set. Having taken only a cursory glance at all three, the Blu-ray presentation of Spiderman (1, 2 and 3) is shaping up to be the best yet. The picture quality rendered in full 1080P tops my local multiplex.
The TrueHD audio tracks are impressive as well. The first two discs are limited to only Dolby TrueHD 5.1, the third adds an Uncompressed 5.1 option.
My Blu-ray player is capable of decoding TrueHD and sending it through analogue 5.1 cables to my receiver. It sounds amazing, as Spiderman should.
I compared that to the audio quality when using the player’s S/PDIF digital output to my receiver. I reasoned that the lossless TrueHD audio signal would be downsampled to regular Dolby Digital when passed to the receiver in this manner.
I noticed a distinct difference in the tiny details by A/B testing (albeit sighted as opposed to blind) between the two configurations.
The scene where Dr. Octopus conducts his tritium reactor experiment involves a lot of variation from subtle directional effects as Doc Ock tinkers with his multiple arms to boomin’ and crashin’ as his experiment goes horribly but entertainingly wrong.
When your subwoofer is recruited to reproduce the unexpected results of Ock’s bizarre experiment, anyone dozing off will wake up to wipe the spittle from their chin before it has time to sully your recliner.
It would have been nice to see an Uncompressed 5.1 audio track on discs 1 and 2.
C’mon Sony, do something with all that extra space on your Blu-ray discs. The presence of the lossless TrueHD codec may seem to make an uncompressed track redundant.
But I don’t think so. Most Blu-ray players sold today won’t decode TrueHD and I have a feeling a majority of the home screenings of Spiderman on Blu-ray this weekend will be in a downsampled Dolby Digital mix.
Special Features
The Spiderman 1 and 2 discs are about as lean as Willem Dafoe’s frame being strapped to the table before giving birth the Green Goblin.
Outside a few radioactive movie trailers, all these discs will do is show you the movie. Spiderman 2 surprised me with a choice between Spiderman 2 or Spiderman 2.1. I didn’t know they came in incremental version numbers like my word processor.
Spiderman 3 comes so loaded with special features they had to give you an extra disc. The good thing about these special features is that, for the most part, they all appear to be in high definition which is a great effort. Unfortunately the features consist of loads of overinformative behind – the – scenes documentaries about Spiderman 3 only.
As a bonus there is one gag-inducing Snow Patrol video in the mix.
Just in case you were falling asleep to more Spiderman 3 documentaries than anyone should be allowed to view,you can run to the toilet to throw up when this whiny wretch of Saccarine sentimentality invades your livingroom.
Snow Patrol makes me wish my Blu-ray player came with a delete key.
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