Night Watch: Unrated (20th Century
Fox Blu-ray)
Picture:
B+ Sound: B+ Extras: B Film: C
We have
already covered 2004’s Night Watch
when it arrived on DVD, you can read about it here:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3858/Night+Watch+(Russia/Fantasy-Horror)
For
Blu-ray, the film arrives and ups the ante over the previous DVD making this
the version of the film to certainly own, especially for fans. Although, we are not nearly as impressed with
the film despite its potential to be a really unique film, it fails to deliver
even with some of its freshness.
For this
Blu-ray release Fox has issued the film in a 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition 1080p
transfer that looks solid throughout with great depth and dimension. While it is not reference quality, it does
contain some stunning moments, but does have minor moments of softness that
keep it from being a reference disc. The
dark scenes in particular look great, with a full scale of black being evident
and demonstrates once again just how good darker films can look on Blu-ray,
this is due to the fact that this is a 50GB disc, so compression is a
non-issue.
Another
smart thing that Fox decided to do was issue the film in DTS-HD for the Russian
audio track and standard DTS for the English audio track. You can instantly
compare the difference that DTS-HD Master Audio (MA lossless) offers with true
High Definition sound, but even the DTS audio is an upgrade from the previous
DVD that only offered Dolby 5.1. There
are some placed online like Blu-ray.com that is claiming that the film is in
Dolby TrueHD, which is wrong, it’s DTS-HD.
Extras
are plentiful here as well with commentary tracks, extended ending, deleted
scenes with optional commentary, making of documentary, a featurette, plus
enhanced for D-Box control system, still galleries and theatrical trailer. Wow, lots of extras for a film that is rather
lukewarm, but fans will be drooling.
You can
also read about Day Watch through
our Blu-ray coverage:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7592/Day+Watch+Unrated+20th+Century
- Nate Goss
