Blu-ray Movie Reviews

The story of a well-intentioned but ultimately failed U.S. 1993 military mission in Somalia, where American Rangers and Delta Force troops tried to capture a savage warlord who was ravaging and starving his own people into submission, is not a pretty one. Nor is Black Hawk Down an easy film to watch. But while it's often gritty, depressing, and filled with violent, bloody imagery, it also paints a very positive, uplifting image of American troops and what they're willing to risk for the mission and for each other. It's hard to imagine mainstream Hollywood producing such a film today, five event-filled years after Black Hawk Down first hit the screens.

The cast consists mostly of actors who were little known at the time. You'll recognize some of them immediately (including one surprising bit part), and they're uniformly superb.

So is this disc. Yes, the photography is often grainy, the colors stylized, and the blacks intentionally crushed. Little about it makes you think of the "pretty pictures" putdown phrase often aimed at HDTV in its infancy by those who thought our NTSC system was good enough.

But from its first scenes it's obvious that this Blu-ray disc walks all over any standard definition presentation. Even with its intentionally gritty look, you can see the qualities that make HD so compelling. I doubt if this film has ever looked better, outside of either a mastering studio or the very best theatrical presentation. Standard definition tries to simulate this sort of detail with artificial edge enhancement. HD gives it to you straight. SD can look detailed, but often appears forced in the effort. The best HD---and this is certainly an example of that---makes it look easy.

The sound is also superb. I auditioned the Dolby Digital track (the disc also includes a 16-bit, 48kHz uncompressed PCM track). Much of it is as hyper as you might imagine, with an almost constant barrage of gunfire and explosions. Your subwoofer and surrounds will be as breathless as you. But the amazing thing about all of this cacophony is that it sounds real without sounding grating or edgy, even at high playback levels. To a certain extent that quality will depend on your system, but the DD soundtrack itself is surprisingly clean considering the density of the mix.

My only reservation here concerns the limited number of extras compared to those available on various DVD releases of the film. Even on this 50GB disc, a 2.5-hour film, combined with PCM audio plus both English and French 5.1-channel Dolby Digital soundtracks, leaves little room for special features. If Sony and other studios continue to use MPEG-2 video and lossless PCM audio, instead of the more efficient AVC or VC-1 video codecs and the lossless audio compression offered by Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio, they might have to go to multi-disc sets to provide the added value that today's buyers expect, particularly at the premium prices that Blu-ray and HD DVD discs command. Anything less could compromise the survival of one or both of the new HD disc formats.

(Picture: 9.5 (out of 10), Sound: 8.5 (DD), Film: 9)