Kaleidescape Archives - Page 8 of 19

Kaleidescape | Jojo Rabbit

Kaleidescape | The Batman

Kaleidescape | Shadow of a Doubt

Lots of humor, some character development, and Christian Bale as a new villain help keep this latest installment in the Thor saga engaging

by John Sciacca
September 12, 2022

With Thor: Love and Thunder, Thor (Chris Helmsworth) now has the most standalone films of any hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with four. Thor definitely took on a more humorous bent in the previous standalone film, Thor: Ragnarok, directed by Taika Waititi, who returns here as both writer and director, and to continue voicing Korg, the Kronan rock-man introduced in Ragnarok. With Ragnarok, Waititi interjected some humor to lighten the mood and bring more of Hemsworth’s personality to the role, and one of the criticisms of Love and Thunder is that the humor has gone too far, nearly becoming an outright slapstick comedy.

While the comedy is definitely still here and pretty pervasive, I feel like it just continues the evolution of Thor and calling it slapstick is overly harsh. While some things like the repeated gag of the giant screaming goats and the odd love triangle between Thor, his old weapon Mjölnir, and his new weapon Stormbreaker, might wear thin on some, they weren’t enough to ruin the film for me. The best touchstone would be how you felt about the humor in Ragnarok or how Thor related to Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) in Avengers: Endgame. If you enjoyed that, you’ll likely enjoy Love and Thunder.

To me, Thor’s comedy style is best summed up in these lines from a Love and Thunder deleted scene:

Star-Lord: “Remember when you told us that this was going to be a safe vacation? I said, ‘Are you certain?’ You said, ‘Oh, yeah. 100%.”
Thor: “Out of 1,000%.”

I loved the interplay between Thor and Star-Lord and wish there would have been more time to explore that relationship, and I thought it was great Matt Damon and Luke Hemsworth returned to reprise their rolls of Actor Loki and Thor from Ragnarok.

One thing I did find an odd choice was the repeated use and references to the band Guns N’ Roses. It’s almost like Waititi was listening the GNR’s greatest hits on repeat while writing the movie and just fanboyed out. Four different GNR hits play over pivotal points and then again over the end credits, and another character says they have changed their name to Axl, “a singer from a popular band [he] heard on Earth,” along with having GNR posters in his room. Frankly, it’s a bizarre amount of product placement for a rock band in a superhero movie.

The last time we saw Thor in Endgame, he was depressed over his failure with Thanos. He had been drinking and over-eating, and became what is referred to as “Fat Thor” by the fandom. At the film’s end, he turned rulership of New Asgard over to King Valykrie (Tessa Thompson) so he could head off and become part of the Guardians of the Galaxy crew and find himself again.

While Marvel has made the mid- and end-credits scenes an expectation among fans, Love and Thunder includes, I believe, the first pre-title scene in MCU history. Here we are introduced to Gorr (Christian Bale), a mortal being who has lost faith in the gods after his daughter, Love (India Rose Hemsworth), dies. Gorr takes possession of the god-killing Necrosword and with it he becomes the God Butcher, swearing to kill off all gods across the galaxy.

Thor has turned his dad bod back into a god bod, and he is still with the Guardians of the Galaxy (though far too briefly) before returning to New Asgard to help protect it against Gorr. There he’s reunited with his true love, Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who we last saw briefly in Endgame, and who is now battling stage-four cancer. Foster has also developed a special relationship with Mjölnir, the hammer wielded by Thor until it was shattered by his sister, Hela, in Ragnarok.

While Bale/Gorr started off reminding me of a War boy from Mad Max: Fury Road, his practical makeup (apparently taking three and a half to four hours a day) and actual shaved head make for a creepy and compelling villain, and his intensity definitely elevates the stakes and counterbalances some of the humor.

Shot at a 4.5K resolution, the home transfer is taken from a 4K digital intermediate, and images looked sharp and clean. While the Kaleidescape download features a constant 2.39:1 aspect ratio that will be preferred by front-projection owners, the Disney+ stream offers the ability to watch in IMAX Enhanced, which features some scenes in 1.90:1. While these aspect-ratio switches aren’t as engaging as in Top Gun: Maverick, the expanded ratio did make the scenes in Omnipotence City a bit more engaging.

In the opening, there is a stark contrast between the actors in the foreground and the deep sandy landscape behind them that has terrific depth. You can really appreciate the texture and detail in Bale’s makeup, letting you see the fine lines and pores in his head in closeups. You can also appreciate the design and opulence of Omnipotence City, where the gods live, and the incredible depth and scale of many shots there.

There are many instances where HDR helps to improve the picture quality. Whether it’s small effects like the crackling of electricity sparkling on Stormbreaker or Mjölnir or called down from the heavens, bright white lights gleaming in a dark sky, the flames burning in New Asgard, the glint of gold off of chest armor, or the rainbow-colored Bifrost Thor summons. There are also some vivid colors throughout, like the deeply saturated red of Thor’s cape, or the gleaming metallic blue of his armor, or some wonderful golden sunsets, and the blues and pinks of space clouds.

But the film’s true HDR tour de force is near the end when the group arrives at the Shadow Realm. Here nearly all color is drained, and images take on an incredibly contrasty black & white effect, with deep inky blacks against vibrant whites and occasionally bright flashes of color. These scenes look fantastic and are truly reference-quality.

One of the big reasons I opted for the Kaleidescape download over a Disney+ stream was for the Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack. While not as aggressive a mix as you might hope for a big-budget superhero film, it’s still pretty engaging, with loads of surround activity and plenty of overhead fill that helps to establish the sonic space. There are scenes where you’ll hear the hum of Mjölnir flying around the room, winds and sands swirling around, the boom and echo of voices in large halls, the creeping movements of the shadow monsters, thunder rolling across the skies, or Zeus’s (Russell Crowe) lightning bolt whizzing past and exploding.

There’s plenty of deep and authoritative bass, and here the Kaleidescape download far surpassed the Disney+ experience in weight, impact, and punch, delivering truly tactile low end. You really feel the bass kick in with the first big Guns N’ Roses track and then to further accentuate the big battles, hammer/sword strikes, and explosions.

Of course, stick around for a mid-credits scene that points towards Thor’s next adventure, as well as an end-credits scene that gives some closure for a couple of main characters.

If you go into Thor: Love and Thunder predisposed to hating it and wanting to pick apart all the jokes and humor, you’ll probably find plenty of fodder. But go in expecting to have a good time, to be wowed by some beautiful and stunning visuals, and to enjoy some dynamically deep bass, then you probably will.

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | The kind of clean, sharp images you’ve come expect from a 4K transfer, with HDR providing an able assist with highlights and vibrant colors, and in a striking black & white scene near the end

SOUND | The Atmos mix isn’t as aggressive you’d expect from a superhero film but is still engaging, with lots of surround activity, overhead fill, and deep bass

Second Thoughts: The Apartment

Second Thoughts | The Apartment

Kaleidescape | Citizen Kane

Kaleidescape | The Godfather

Amazon Prime | Double Indemnity

Amazon Prime | The Apartment

The 4K release of Billy Wilder’s 1960 comedy/drama proves to be both a revelation and a bit of a mystery

by Michael Gaughn
September 5, 2022

After watching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment on Amazon Prime back in May, I wrote:

The Apartment looks . . . great. And this is in lowly 1080p. Apparently a 4K digital intermediate was created just this year, and I’m keen to revisit the film if it gets a high-res re-release. But, for now, this version gets just about everything right.

A higher-res version has recently appeared, which I checked out a few days ago on Kaleidescape—and it turned out to be another one of those elaborate puzzles, like The Godfather and Citizen Kane (and Chinatown and Psycho . . .), that shows just how adventurous it can be bringing older films into the 4K realm.

Let me first make it clear that, if you’re anything ranging from a casual to rabid fan of this movie (I sit somewhere on the more tepid end of that scale), you should make a beeline to this release. What it gets right it gets right so well that it overshadows any problems.

But there are problems, all subtle, in a sense, and likely to bother some people more than others. It kind of comes down to, do you watch it in 1080p off a streaming service where the experience is consistent but just good enough or do you go 4K and run the risk of occasionally being pulled out of the film?

This is a straight 4K transfer and yet it feels like an HDR grade was applied. The whites are frequently pumped up, resulting in scenes, like the first one in Jack Lemmon’s apartment, that feel very video-like, almost like what you’d expect from some early TV show like Playhouse 90.

I’ve calibrated—and recalibrated—my system to rid it of any artificial enhancements and to ensure that film looks like film. And just to make sure my perceptions weren’t distorted, I went back and spotchecked HDR titles like Shadow of a Doubt and Citizen Kane and the recent UHD release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all of which looked as I remembered—like film.

The wide shot of the office floor two minutes into The Apartment was pleasant, encouraging, and the first shot of Lemmon at his desk was startling, whetting my appetite for a whole film that looked that good. And there are long stretches where, even if everything doesn’t look exceptional, the transfer can in no way be said to be bad. But those overly emphatic highlights pop up randomly like gophers throughout, usually in scenes with bright accents, like the tinsel and lights on the Christmas tree in Lemmon’s apartment.

This has become a cliché, but some of the wide shots have so much depth you feel like you could reach into them, an effect that seems to come from a combination of sharpness and dynamic range, but something I’ve, until now, only seen happen with HDR titles, not UHD—which is why I’ve got to wonder what’s up here.

The whites are so hot in some places that parts of the image get blown out. The Kleenex that gets away from Lemmon as he stands outside the Majestic Theater becomes a featureless blob, a drifting ectoplasm, and Shirley McClaine’s face gets so blown out during parts of her Christmas Eve scene with Fred McMurray that it looks like she’s doing kabuki. (There’s evidence in the Amazon transfer that these same shots could get blown out, but they’re far better balanced there.)

That the transfer is derived from various elements is more evident here than in lower-res releases, which is what you would expect. The blacks, for instance, are pretty consistent up until the first scene in the Chinese restaurant where the image becomes flatter and grayish, almost brownish. While the first scene in Lemmon’s apartment has that early-TV look, it’s also sharp with a decent tonal range. But the Christmas Eve scene with McMurray and MacLaine in the same space is contrasty, grainy, and not so much soft as gritty. At other times, blacks can look smudgy, in a way that’s not at all filmlike.

But, again—quibbles, gripes, nits, not dealbreakers. Seeing this in the original 2.35:1 is so crucial to conveying not just the massiveness of the office space but also the stage-like blocking in Lemmon’s apartment that it becomes almost impossible to conceive ever again watching this movie cropped. And one advantage of the 4K was that I could finally confirm that that’s Ella Fitzgerald’s The First Lady of Song sitting in the pole position in Lemmon’s record rack.

Watching a movie in 4K on a well-calibrated reference-quality display can be a lot like putting it under a microscope. Recent films tend to fare well because they’re mostly digital releases and the flaws, aside from a tendency toward a certain clinical sterility, tend to be in their execution, not their presentation. Older films—classic and otherwise—are at the mercy of the guys at the knobs, who may or may have the sophistication to know how a film from a certain era should look or to know how to compensate for the inevitable flaws in negatives and prints. And there’s always the risk of being exposed to someone caught up in the current zeal to make everything look shiny and new, which without exception results in travesty.

The Apartment hasn’t been brutalized or sullied, just curiously handled. This release is less an assault than a mystery. And you can’t call the harm done inconsequential, but you can call it excusable.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

ORIGINAL REVIEW

Review: Top Gun: Maverick

review | Top Gun: Maverick

also on Cineluxe

Kaleidescape | Top Gun

Kaleidescape | The Batman

Kaleidescape | No Time to Die

Kaleidescape | No Time to Die

Living up to all the hype and expectations, Cruise et al. deliver a guaranteed crowd-pleaser that’s true to both the memory and impact of the original

by John Sciacca
August 26, 2022

I can’t remember a movie in recent times I’ve been as excited to see as Top Gun: Maverick. Maybe it was because it was delayed for what seemed like forever during the pandemic. Maybe it was because Tom Cruise went on and on about how they used specially fitted Sony Venice 6K IMAX-certified cameras to film the actors inside the cockpits of actual fighter jets to truly capture what it was like to fly and pull high-G maneuvers. Maybe it was because the original Top Gun came out in 1986 when I was a junior in high school and it just hit me right in the feels. Then when it was finally released this past summer and critics and fans started losing their minds over how good it was—scoring a 96% critics’ rating and 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes—I was even more excited to see it.

And I’ll be honest, I had every intention of seeing Maverick at a commercial theater—apparently the way Tom Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer, and God intended—but after my lackluster experience seeing The Batman in a theater here in Myrtle Beach, with subpar black levels and anemic audio, I decided I’d just hold off until the home release where I could enjoy it in the full 7.3.6 Trinnov Audio-processed 4K HDR splendor of my home theater. And, boy, was it worth the wait! Seeing Cruise’s cocky Maverick swagger up on screen again was just fun.

Maverick is like a master class in how to make a blockbuster sequel. The casting and acting are great, the cinematography is fantastic, the plot is simple but compelling, and the action is fast-paced and (mostly) believable. It also totally understands exactly how to employ fan service. Remember, it’s been 36 years since Maverick (Cruise) jumped in his F-14 and shot down all those MiGs, and Ice Man (Val Kilmer) said he could be his wingman any day. Maverick employs so many cool callbacks, beats, and nods to the original film, you can’t help but revel in the nostalgia of it and smile at the warm fuzzies. But at the same time, you don’t have to be a fan of the original to enjoy Maverick. It serves up just enough backstory and exposition on Cruise’s character for you to understand who he is, even if you don’t already know.

The film picks up 30 years after the first, but the opening will immediately take you back to the original film, with the same text, music, and even Kenny Loggins taking you to the “Danger Zone.” Maverick is still in the Navy but due to his, err, maverick ways, has only managed to achieve the rank of Captain. His career has been somewhat protected by his friend—now Admiral—Ice Man, and he is now a Navy test pilot for experimental planes, but due to his unique real-world dogfighting experience, he is ordered back to TOPGUN to select and train a group of former graduates to execute the attack on this nuclear facility. Among the students is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of Maverick’s former RIO (Radio Intercept Officer) “Goose” (Anthony Edwards). Jon Hamm plays Maverick’s new skeptical “boss” Admiral “Cyclone” Simpson, using his Mad Men sneer and contempt to perfection, and Ed Harris gives a brief but quintessential Ed Harris performance as Rear Admiral “Hammer” Cain. Maverick’s love interest this time around is Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), who was name-dropped in a throwaway line during the first film but who helps to round out Maverick’s character.

Maverick also does a terrific job of staying in its lane and knowing what it is. It doesn’t try and get overly complicated or introduce side and sub plots. Someone else compared the film to a Star Wars movie that was just about the Death Star trench run, watching the Rebels assemble a team to make the strike, then watching them train over and over to make the strike, then making the strike, and then escaping. Turn Luke Skywalker into Maverick, turn X-wing fighters into F/A-18s, turn the Death Star into a hostile enemy nation trying to bring a nuclear enrichment plant on line, turn proton torpedoes into laser-guided bombs, and turn the ill-designed exhaust port into a, well, I think they even call it a “port.”

Shot on 6K and taken from a 4K digital intermediate, Maverick looks fantastic throughout. One thing you’ll either love or hate is that the image switches pretty regularly between 2.39:1 widescreen and 1.90:1 IMAX aspect ratios. Now, if you own a widescreen front-projection system, you’ll likely not love this choice. But if you have a traditional 16:9 aspect-ratio TV, what you’ll notice is that the screen fills vertically—gets larger—during the IMAX scenes which are nearly all when they are flying. Usually I’m not a fan of these changing ratios but the IMAX footage just looks so good and the footage is so exciting, it really does pull you into the action.

With far more access and cooperation from the US Navy—and paying the Navy $11,374 per flight hour for actual F/A-18’s and Naval aviators—along with the aforementioned suite of in-cockpit IMAX-certified cameras, Maverick features some of the best aerial filming ever. When an actor is performing some intense maneuver, you see the strain and effort on his face and body because they’re actually in the seat feeling the effects of those G forces. And this adds immeasurably to the realism and intensity of the moment and the scenes. You really get a sense of whipping through a canyon doing a low-level bombing run at 600 knots, and it’s exhilarating.

Images are sharp, clean, and clear, and while I wouldn’t say that the 2.39:1 images had that hyper-detailed overly crisp “digital” look, they instead looked like the best of what a great film transfer can deliver, without any of the grain but still providing plenty of fine detail like the gold braid in Maverick’s uniform hat or the pattern in Ice Man’s ascot/scarf. The IMAX footage is often closeups, and you can see every line, whisker, and pore in the actors’ faces. The HDR grade delivers natural-looking images, and bright, punchy colors in the pilots’ helmets, the blue lighting in the aircraft carrier’s combat information center, the flashes of sunlight, or the gleam of sweat on faces.

The Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack on the Kaleidescape download sounds fantastic, with the thunder and roar of F/A-18 engines as they fire up producing bass that hits you in the chest. There are loads of overhead flyovers, with the sound of wind racing and ripping past on all sides or planes flying past and out into the back or sides of the room. Even in the non-flying scenes, there are the backgrounds sounds of jets flying around the air base off in the distance or using the overhead speakers for Mav’s voice talking to a ground station. There were a few moments where understanding dialogue was a bit challenging, when pilots are flying/dogfighting with jet engines shrieking, music playing, and they are speaking under the literal stress of flight behind oxygen masks.

Top Gun: Maverick plays terrifically in a luxury home theater. It looks and sounds great, is a near-guaranteed crowd pleaser for your next get-together, and has great replay value. In fact, I already can’t wait to watch it again, and it will likely have heavy rotation in your theater’s demo showoff reel! It is available now from Kaleidescape and other digital retailers—a full two-months before its November 1 disc release—making this a total no-brainer to recommend.

PICTURE | Images look like the best of what a great film transfer can deliver, providing plenty of fine detail

SOUND | The TrueHD Atmos soundtrack sounds fantastic, with the thunder and roar of F/A-18 engines as they fire up producing bass that hits you in the chest

Review: Elvis

review | Elvis

also on Cineluxe

Kaleidescape | West Side Story

Kaleidescape | Speed

Kaleidescape | Full Metal Jacket

Fans of The Great Gatsby will likely enjoy the way director Baz Luhrmann deploys his trademark visual dazzle to update the Elvis legend

by John Sciacca
August 22, 2022

I’ll admit, I’m not a huge fan of Elvis Presley and don’t really know much about him or his life. I was aware of him growing up, but Elvis wasn’t really music that I “discovered” like The Beatles or Led Zeppelin. I think I remember my parents talking about watching his Aloha From Hawaii concert in 1973, the world’s first live concert via satellite, and I definitely remember when he died in 1977, but beyond that, I’m more familiar with Elvis from the caricatures of Las Vegas entertainers, the stories of his late-life weight gain and drug abuse, and the unfortunate truth of him dying on the toilet. Which is to say, I went into watching this movie with no preconceptions, expectations, or ideas on what it would be about.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Knowing that the movie was written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, I had an idea that Elvis—like Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and The Great Gatsby—would be a visual feast, with a penchant for blending a modern soundtrack into an older story. And literally from the opening gold-and-diamond-sparkling title screen, you could tell this had Luhrmann’s fingerprints all over it.

Before I even get into my review, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that Gatsby is a pretty good touchstone to see if Elvis would be right for you. If you liked the visual flash and style of that film, with its combination of frenetic action and slow, dreamy sequences, or the way he used Jay Z to executive produce the music, then you’ll probably like Elvis.

Now, as little as I knew about Elvis, I knew absolutely nothing of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager. I imagine if you’re an Elvis fan, you’ll have strong feelings about Parker, but I didn’t.

It feels like Elvis’s life story was big, exciting, and cinematic enough to stand on its own, but Luhrmann chose to tell the story through the eyes of Parker, who “narrates” this film and has a near equal billing on screen time. The Kaleidescape synopsis perfectly sums up the lens of this film with, “In his final hours, Colonel Tom Parker reminisces over his volatile relationship with the King of Rock and Roll.”

Whether this is because Luhrmann found that angle a better way to tell the story or he thought Tom Hanks playing Parker would be a bigger draw than the relatively unknown Austin Butler as Elvis, I can’t say.

The movie opens with voiceovers telling us Colonel Parker is a liar, a cheat, a con man, accused of massive fraud and mismanagement, that he received as much as 50% of Elvis’s earnings, he worked him like a mule, and was responsible for Elvis’s death. Parker then steps in to tell us that’s all wrong, and begins telling Elvis’s story, which starts with him as a young boy and progresses up through his battles with censorship and segregationists, (briefly) his time in the Army, falling in love with Priscilla—though they don’t go into the fact that he was 24 and she was 14-years-old when they met—his stint in film, and into his final years of his Vegas residency at The International Hotel (which became the Las Vegas Hilton and is currently the Westgate, which still prominently features a life-sized bronze statue of Elvis in the lobby).

A theme that runs through Parker’s tale is that of being a “Snowman,” something he claims to have learned while working at the carnival. A Snowman can empty “a rube’s wallet while leaving them with nothing but a smile on their face,” and the best snow jobs “had great costumes and a unique trick that gave the audience feelings they weren’t sure they should enjoy—but they do.”

Butler is terrific as Presley, with a ton of energy and stage presence, especially as he gets a bit older. Not only does Butler have the moves and sneer down, he hits the right notes for Elvis’s speaking voice, he does his own singing for the early years, with his vocals mixed with the actual Presley during the later years. Hanks is often nearly unrecognizable in loads of makeup and prosthetics with a look that reminded me of President Lyndon Johnson. My biggest issue with Hanks’ performance is the accent he adopted. At first I thought it was a Louisiana Bayou affectation, then at other times it felt like Irish. After we looked up that he was trying to affect Parker’s Dutch accent, I kept getting flashbacks of Mike Meyer’s over-the-top voice for Goldmember.

Luhrmann keeps things visually interesting throughout, using a variety of different techniques like flashbacks to Elvis’s childhood presented in a series of animated comic-book panes, cuts to black & white, and dividing the screen into multiple blocks showing different images. He also does a good job capturing the energy and excitement that seeing Elvis live must have been like and gives a glimpse into his stage presence and command of the audience. Though Luhrmann’s parallel of Elvis’s earliest performances—with girls involuntarily drawn into near orgasmic ecstasy over his moves—to him getting the Spirit as a child at a church revival come across as a bit silly. As expected, the soundtrack also keeps things modern and fresh, including a song by Doja Cat that samples Presley’s “Hound Dog,” as well as Eminem, Diplo, Måneskin, and Kacey Musgraves.

Shot at a combination of 4.5 and 6.5K resolution, the home release is taken from a 4K digital intermediate, and the image quality is clean, sharp, and detailed. Closeups have tons of details, including every enlarged pore on Hanks’ made-up face, or the fine patterns, detail, and texture in Elvis’s outfits or the Colonel’s jackets. One scene later in the film has Parker wearing a hat, and you can see every bit of the thin construction around the brim. There is also great focus and depth of field letting you see all of the crowd at Elvis’s early shows or as he looks out into his Vegas crowds.

The HDR grade also really lets the bright neon lights of Vegas pop, the bright white highlights of the stage lights, the colorful explosion of fireworks (another Luhrmann hallmark), the vibrant outfits, colorful stage lights, or with sunlight streaming through windows into darkened interiors. There are several sun-drenched outdoor scenes at a carnival that also look terrific.

The Kaleidescape download features a lossless Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack that puts the focus on the dialogue and music, as it should. Dialogue is always clear and intelligible, even when music is playing, and depending on the venue, music can be room-filling, with sounds spreading out into the sides, back, and overhead. There are also lots of little ambient moments like crowds cheering and clapping, fans shouting, and the snapping of camera bulbs around the room.

I can’t comment on how closely the film hews to actual events, or if Parker was truly as controlling and influential on Elvis as the film portrays, but I did find Elvis entertaining, though a bit long at 2 hours 39 minutes. If you’re a fan of Presley or Luhrmann, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Elvis has left the building.

PICTURE | The image quality is clean, sharp, and detailed, with the HDR grade really letting the bright neon lights of Vegas pop

SOUND | The lossless Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack puts the focus on the dialogue and music, as it should, with the dialogue always clear and intelligible, even when music is playing

Review: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

review | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Calling this roguish Sergio Leone romp a classic western kind of misses the point—it’s something so much bigger and better than that

by Michael Gaughn
August 18, 2022

Most movies, especially contemporary ones, are first and foremost about genre, about making the audience feel snug within a certain set of expectations and conditions and never too radically disrupting the womb-like sense of security that induces. Sergio Leone is, of course, the guy who created the spaghetti western but by the time of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he had moved well beyond the genre into a realm that can best be described as, for want of a better term, pure film.

While GBU has elements of the American western and its Italian offshoot, it’s just as much a war movie, an epic, and an action film; but it subsumes all of that into a much greater whole. It never stops to do a set piece and then smugly nudge the audience with a, “Hey, look what I just did.” Instead, Leone shows throughout an incredible, seemingly naive, love for making movies in that place beyond genre—and, like all the best films, beyond time. And it all just seems to pour out of him like a rustic but still elegant wine.

This movie is undeniably part epic but it’s an intimate one. Like Lawrence of Arabia, it’s about, first, the individual and the consequences of individual action and, second, about the larger stage those actions play out on. It doesn’t rise or fall based on its battle scenes or creating a sense of grandeur but on the crafting of the three principals. But there’s far less of a one-to-one relation between the individual and that larger stage here than in Lawrence. GBU is far looser, more picaresque, roguish, puckish. (It’s like a Cormac McCarthy novel—if McCarthy had a sense of humor, didn’t have an adolescent fixation on depravity, and allowed even a smidge of humanity into his work.)

Like all of Leone, this is 100% a director’s movie. The actors are basically marionettes to be positioned and manipulated, no more or less important than the settings, the score, and the endlessly inventive, often sinuous camera moves. His ability to so carefully and completely devise the action underlines just how little most actors’ performances have to do with their abilities and far more with how they’re shot, cut, and above all, directed.

Find me a great Lee Van Cleef performance anywhere outside this film—it can’t be done because he never worked with another director this good. Clint Eastwood has the acting range of a doorknob but he was savvy enough to surrender completely to Leone, who created the terse, snarling persona Eastwood was able to exploit throughout a long and lucrative career. The only real actor here is Eli Wallach—which explains why he gets almost all the lines and all the big scenes. Peer beyond the Eastwood aura and you realize this is really Wallach’s film.

Because GBU is more than anything an exceptionally pure projection of Leone’s imaginative world and not just an excuse for actors to strut in front of the camera, every aspect of the film carries equal weight. But first among those equals is probably atmosphere. The depiction of the fringes of the Civil War might not be authentic but, as far as creating the most evocative stage possible for the action, it feels authentic—in the same way John Ford’s vision of the west in My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache and (although there’s probably some kind of law against my saying this) D.W. Griffith’s portrayal of Civil War battles in The Birth of a Nation may or may not be accurate but are so compelling they become how we want that period to feel and be.

That ability to make atmosphere enthralling helps explain why this film was such a huge influence on Full Metal Jacket—in particular the odd commingling of silence and menace in the sequence in the abandoned town still being hit with cannon fire. Both Leone and Kubrick were masters of summoning up a palpable mood, so it’s not surprising they stole from each other shamelessly.

This is essentially a silent film—you could watch it with the sound off and still know everything that’s going on and, more importantly, feel the emotion. It’s also a deliberately paced film—surprisingly so for a western—and while Leone makes that work for the most part, the material is just too thin for those kinds of larghetto beats to be sustained throughout the extended cut here. With most films that would be a dealbreaker; here it’s just a quibble.

The transfer is astonishingly, seductively good. This is the way older films should look in 4K. The images are alive with grain, which is so essential to Leone’s style that it’s scary to think anyone would ever think of scrubbing any of it away—let alone all of it, à la The Godfather. This release is sans HDR but it’s hard to see where going there would do much to enhance its impact. It would likely result in the usual tradeoff of grit for polish, and if The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is about anything, it’s grit.

(I have to harp on this string again: If the main titles are any indication of what HDR would yield, then we should all pray that day never comes. There’s the usual attempt to enhance the title cards and turn them into a slideshow instead of doing the obvious and right thing of having them feel like they’re being run through a film gate—in other words, make them feel like they’re part of the movie. Fortunately, so much of the sequence depends on animation that some of the analog feel is still there, but it just makes the cleanup look that much more alien. And someone deserves to be eviscerated for ruining the film’s last, lingering shot by making “The End” look like something out of an iMovie project.)

There’s nothing wrong with the stereo and 5.1 mixes; they’re just not appropriate. And it continues to be a bone of contention that the original mono tends to get kicked to the curb with 4K releases of older movies that supposedly represent the filmmakers’ intent.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is, of course, a classic film, but not a perfect one—but its rough edges have a lot to do with its power. For as long and epic as Once Upon a Time in the West is—and that film doesn’t waste a single second of screen time—GBU actually has a more drawn-out pace, which sometimes drags, but more often than not is languorous in the most generous sense of that word. And there are moments when style lapses into affectation, like during the final showdown, where Leone cuts about five times too often to extreme closeups of shifting eyes and twitching eyebrows, to the point where it starts to feel like a Monty Python sketch. But you forgive him because of his Rabelaisian drollery and because he made it clear from the moment Eli Wallach crashes through the window at the beginning of the film that this was going to be a very tall tale indeed.

PICTURE | The 4K transfer is astonishingly, seductively good, with the images alive with the grain that is so essential to Leone’s style

SOUND | There’s nothing wrong with the DTS-HD stereo and 5.1 mixes but where’s the original mono?

Review: Lightyear

review | Lightyear

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Although it’s got a distinct straight-to-streaming feel, the latest Pixar offering does raise the bar on photorealistic animation

by John Sciacca
August 6, 2022

Pixar Animation changed the world of filmmaking in 1995 when it released Toy Story, making it the first entirely computer-animated feature film, and creating a new frontier for storytellers to explore. Beyond that, they proved that animation didn’t have to be a forum reserved for kids’ movies. Through rich storytelling, character development, smart humor, and broad themes that transcend ages, Pixar showed that animated movies could be enjoyed by kids and adults alike.

Since then, we’ve seen three followups in the Toy Story franchise, with the most recent, Toy Story 4, released back in 2019. And along with watching these beloved characters grow, evolve, and change, we’ve also witnessed continual improvements in the quality and detail of Pixar’s animation, which we can appreciate now more than ever with modern 4K HDR displays.

While Toy Story 4 was kind of a sendoff and farewell of sorts to Woody, with Lightyear, Pixar gives Buzz a spinoff of his own with a bit of an origin story. As the opening titles proclaim:

In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday.
It was from his favorite movie.
This is that movie.

So, don’t expect any of Woody’s roundup gang here as this is a completely separate animal about the character Buzz Lightyear, not the toy Buzz Lightyear based on that character. (Kind of like if we had been watching a movie called Skywalker Saga for years where a boy played with his Kenner Star Wars action figures, and now we are seeing Star Wars about the actual Luke Skywalker. Make sense?)

This is also why we don’t have Tim Allen returning to voice Buzz, rather having him voiced by Chris Evans, who sounded more like George Clooney to me. According to Lightyear producer Galyn Susman, “Tim Allen is Buzz Lightyear the toy, and he’s the embodiment of Buzz Lightyear the toy. We weren’t making a Toy Story movie. We’re making Buzz Lightyear’s movie, the Lightyear movie. And so first and foremost, we just needed to have a different person playing that Lightyear, separate from the toy.”

More than anything else, Lightyear is a sci-fi adventure that takes place on an uncharted planet 4.2 million light years from earth that just happens to star a version of a character we’ve become pretty familiar with over the past 27 years. There are scenes, designs, and moments that are reminiscent of Wall-E, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, 2001, Alien, and more.

While it is a wholly different kind of movie, you can expect Buzz’s familiar gadget-laden spacesuit, and callbacks to some of his popular Toy Story catchphrases and quirks like “To infinity and beyond” and “Buzz Lightyear to Star Command, come in, Star Command.” Or, you know, the kinds of things that would make a Buzz Lightyear toy really cool and fun to play with.

After landing on an uncharted planet, Space Ranger Captain Buzz Lightyear and commanding officer/best friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) begin exploring, only to discover the planet is filled with hostile vegetation and lifeforms. After damaging their ship during retreat, the crew is forced to stay on the planet while performing repairs and while also trying to develop the formula for the crystallic fusion fuel necessary for hyper-speed travel so they can leave the planet.

While testing the fuel, Buzz discovers he is gone one year for every minute of space travel, meaning the lives of his friends back on the planet blink past in time-lapse moments with each subsequent test. After many years of failed testing, a new formula has Buzz returning after 22 years have passed, during which time the planet has been invaded and overrun by robots, and Buzz must work with a new team to try and take back the planet.

Lightyear gives Pixar a chance to introduce us to a new set of characters, including Mo Morrison (voiced by Taika Waititi), a clumsy, accident-prone member of Buzz’s new crew, and SOX (voiced by Peter Sohn), an emotional-support robot cat given to Buzz to help him cope with being alone after so much time away, which I found to the most entertaining and humorous character.

Visually, Lightyear is stunning and continues Pixar’s tradition of raising the bar of what is possible with computer animation. While the studio has kind of settled on a look for human characters, the remaining visuals of backgrounds, ships, textures, and clothing can be near photorealistic. When you remember that every pixel up on screen was deliberately drawn/shaded/rendered/lit by a digital artist, it is even that much more stunning to appreciate all the fine details that are visible.

Instead of a glossy and shiny digital look, there is an almost film-like grittiness or softness to some of the images. (Remember, according to the opening, this movie happened back in 1995 . . .) But this gives the film a more cinematic look. Color is also used to define different environments, with the planet exterior shots having a rusty color palette by day and a blue-ish purple by night, with interiors of the space port and ships leaning grey and blue.

Taken from a 4K digital intermediate, there is incredible detail in every frame. Look at the thick metallic texture and detail on the space suits, with bits of wear and scratches, or the flaking and pebbling in the paint or the texture on buttons in the space ships or the scape and scale of some of the colony facilities or the massive external shots of spaceships.

The visuals also greatly benefit from the HDR grade, giving us not only true, inky blacks but also with many scenes producing bright, often eye-searing, visuals. Whether it’s red-hot balls of stars, the glowing streaks of hyper-speed travel, fire-orange sparks and flames, gleaming blue-white lights, raging red robot eyes, or probing lights in dark nights or interior corridors, Lightyear pops off the screen in HDR.

The Dolby TrueHD Atmos audio mix on the Kaleidescape download is one of the biggest arguments for buying Lightyear over just streaming it on Disney+. Right from the get-go, you experience big, furniture-rumbling bass, with the big spacecraft engines letting you feel their massive power or loud cracks and groans as things collide. The sound mixers also use the sound to establish different environments, like the really expansive nature of the planet’s soundscape and atmosphere, letting you hear the subtleness of the large, open outdoor space or the spacious, echoing sounds in the large hanger bays or the heavy whirr and whine of machinery as big launch doors open up. There are also plenty of moments with creatures and ships flying about overhead or high up on the front walls.

Any time you’re dealing with time travel, the plot can get a bit shifty and complex, and there are a lot of scary-ish scenes that might be a bit much for a younger audience. (My six year old took a pass.) While it was generally entertaining, the plot and whole of Lightyear just feels a little thin, and doesn’t really tread any new ground or give us any real insight into the Buzz Lightyear character we’ve grown to love, or produce the heart and feels Pixar usually delivers. Honestly, it feels a bit more like a straight-to-streaming film rather than the latest big feature in Pixar’s canon. Which is probably why it is the lowest-rated Pixar film that doesn’t have the word Cars in its title.

For me, a Pixar movie is as much about the technical merit and evolution of computer animation, and for that reason alone Lightyear deserves a watch. Whether you’ll want to go back and visit it a second time remains the question.

PICTURE | Lightyear continues Pixar’s tradition of raising the bar of what is possible with computer animation, displaying incredible detail in every frame and with the whole greatly benefitting from the HDR grade

SOUND |The TrueHD Atmos mix on the Kaleidescape download is one of the biggest arguments for buying Lightyear over just streaming it on Disney+

Review: Jurassic World Dominion

review | Jurassic World: Dominion

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Expect to see lots of dinosaurs, cast members, and action-scene mayhem in this latest entry in the Jurassic franchise

by John Sciacca
July 18, 2022

Can you believe it’s been nearly 30 years since Steven Spielberg first threw open the gates and welcomed us to Jurassic Park? It’s no surprise that monster hit spawned two sequels; and then, after lying dormant for 14 years, the franchise saw a reboot in 2015 with Jurassic World, featuring a new cast and—of course—bigger and meaner dinos.

I was in the theater opening night in 1993 for Jurassic Park’s debut, and what I remember about that movie is the wonder, mystery, and magic of seeing dinos up on the big screen, more realistic and believable than ever before. Similar to how he handled Jaws, Spielberg showed his digital (and practical) dinos somewhat sparingly, using what you heard off camera and just caught glimpses of to keep the tension and making the moments with the dinosaurs that much more exciting.

Since that movie, it seems the filmmakers have come to rely on the dinosaurs and visual effects as the crutch, and in Dominion we have dinos of all types and sizes everywhere and in nearly every scene, with almost all ready to attack. Perhaps I’m jaded, but 30 years after the original film, the wonder of seeing dinosaurs on screen has passed, and I now expect them to be wrapped in a compelling and somewhat believable story. Just giving me some new, bigger, faster, meaner genetically modified apex predator isn’t enough.

With Jurassic World: Dominion, the sixth entry in the franchise, we have the stars of the original Park—Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and everyone’s favorite chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)—united for the first time with the World cast of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). If that sentence alone suggests Dominion has a lot going on, you’re right.

Trying to bring all of these sub and side stories and plotlines together leaves Dominion jumping around a lot, and trying to pack as much as possible into its 146-minute runtime. It also features a franchise-low Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 30%, dropping from the original Jurassic Park’s 92% and reboot Jurassic World’s 71%. On the flip side, it is nearly tied with the second highest audience score of 77%, just a nick behind World’s 78%, and with some nice, nostalgic call-back moments to the first film, you could say director Colin Trevorrow gave the people what they wanted.

Taking place four years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the opening documentary-style footage tells us dinosaurs are now freely roaming the world and people are “learning” to live with them. This has created some obvious issues, and in an effort to control the dinosaurs, a company called Biosyn Genetics has been assigned global collection rights and created a dino sanctuary in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains where they are studying dinosaur DNA to look for ways to improve human life.

In one major storyline, Grady and Dearing are living together in a remote cabin, where she works to save dinosaurs from a growing black-market industry and he wrangles and relocates stray dinos. They’re also hiding and secretly raising 14-year-old Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a genetic clone of Charlotte Lockwood, the daughter of Jurassic Park’s co-founder, who scientists want to study for her DNA.

And in the other, Sattler is investigating a series of devastating mutant-locust attacks that are wiping out crops around the globe, except these super-sized locusts are sparing any Biosyn-enhanced crops. When one of the locusts is captured alive, she takes it to Dr. Grant and asks for his help. They decide to visit Biosyn in Italy, where they meet CEO Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who gave me a very Apple CEO Tim Cook vibe, and are reunited with Dr. Malcolm. (You might recall that Biosyn and Dodgson—played by a different actor—had a brief but important role in the original Jurassic Park, where he recruited Dennis Nedry [Wayne Knight] to steal dino embryos from rival InGen and deliver them in a special Barbasol shaving can.) These stories develop separately until about 105 minutes into the film, when they almost literally crash into each other and the casts are brought together to save each other and ostensibly the world.

My daughter Lauryn best summed up the film about halfway through by saying, “I’m equally bored and excited.” To me, Dominion is really a series a great-looking and -sounding demo scenes with a thin filament of story binding and stringing them together. My guess is that after the initial viewing, you’ll be more likely to turn to one of the six pre-bookmarked scenes on the Kaleidescape download to wow guests than to actually rewatch the movie from start to finish.

The technical specs show that Dominion was filmed on 35mm and 65mm stock, along with Red cameras at 8K for some scenes. The home transfer is taken from a 4K digital intermediate, and for most of the movie, the images are reference-quality. There’s some light grain present from the film stock in some scenes, but it was never objectionable.

For the most part, what I noticed was tons of sharpness and detail, with clean, clear images. There was also a lot of depth to images while still retaining sharp focus. Closeups revealed loads of textures, such as the scales, claws, teeth, and scratches on the Velociraptor Beta or the grain and stitching in Malcolm’s black leather jacket. You can also see fine facial detail in actors’ faces and clearly see individual strands of hair.

One of the more visually compelling scenes was the bright, gleaming sun-drenched outdoor vistas of Malta. Here, long establishing shots show beautifully clear and razor-edged rows of buildings and roofs, with closeups showing the stonework and mortar lines, letting you appreciate the fine cracks and weathering in the stone blocks and floors.

There are loads of dark scenes, whether at night or creeping around inside of caves, giving the HDR grade plenty of room to deliver. Black levels are dark and clean, with nice shadow detail for natural images with lots of depth. There are quite a few instances of bright headlights and flashlights probing the dark, or bright, red-orange fiery torches lighting a cave system, and other fiery, burning objects, and bright glowing buttons and screens that all receive extra pop from the HDR pass.

Other than a brief, almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, scene near the beginning shot underwater where a bit of banding is visible in the water layers, the video was impeccable. There were several scenes—one where multiple shafts of light are over a forest and another with bright lights and flames in a cave—that could have easily been video torture tests but looked terrific. Visually, Jurassic World Dominion will make your home theater shine.

Another interesting “nerd fact” is that the original Jurassic Park was the first theatrical film to feature an audio mix from DTS, a competitor to Dolby Digital. To this point, none of the Jurassic films released to the home market have included an immersive Dolby Atmos mix, instead opting for the DTS:X surround mix. But for Dominion the Kaleidescape download does have a Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix. (Whether that will be the audio format featured on the disc remains to be seen.)

I found the mix immersive, engaging, and exciting, with near constant use of the surrounds and height speakers for either ambient sounds that open and expand the listening space, or big, dynamic sounds during the action. Frequently you’ll hear sounds of dinosaurs growling, skittering, or making other noises from all around the room, alerting you to danger, or have the sounds of soft blowing breezes rustling leaves, with birds and insects off in the distance in jungles and forests, or city street and traffic sounds. Height speakers are frequently called into play, such as when dinosaurs fly and roar past overhead, leap over vehicles, or during a locust swarm that engulfs the room, when characters are plunged underwater, and during a plane crash.

Bass is also quite deep, room-filling, and tactile. Whether it’s the thundering herds of running dinosaurs, the collision of vehicles, or dino growls and roars that will hit you in the chest with authority, expect Dominion to give your subs a workout in the best way. Even with all of the sonic mayhem, dialogue remains clear and locked into the center channel.

One of the best audio demos is during a chase in Malta involving vehicles, a motorcycle, dinos, and a plane. There are engines revving, tires squealing, dinosaurs leaping overhead and charging, collisions with impacts and debris spilling and crashing all around the room. It’s exciting, intense, and a little ridiculous, but it looks and sounds great. And that kind of sums up the film—go in expecting to have a big, loud, fun time with your family and friends, where you’re wowed by the picture and sound, and you’ll likely enjoy it.

I’m a fan of the franchise, and even though this film had its flaws, Jurassic remains the surest bet for a big summer blockbuster featuring a spectacle of big VFX, a killer surround mix, and the best digital dinosaurs you’re likely to see. Even though they didn’t share much time on screen, it was great to see the old Park crew united with the new World bunch, and if they decide to return for another, I’ll surely come along for the ride.

PICTURE | Aside from some light, unobjectionable grain present from the film stock in some scenes, the images are reference-quality

SOUND | The Atmos mix is immersive, engaging, and exciting, with near constant use of the surrounds and height speakers

Review: Ralph Breaks the Internet

review | Ralph Breaks the Internet

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The sequel lives up to the original, giving the characters a new, Easter egg-strewn, adventure

by John Sciacca
February 17, 2019

Ralph Breaks the Internet, the followup to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph, is one of those rare sequels that, if not better than the original, stands equal to it. Like many modern Disney (and Pixar) films, even though it’s animated, Ralph’s story and themes are designed to appeal across a wide range of ages, and offers plenty of laughs and emotion for everyone in the family.

About six years has passed since the end of the first movie, and life remains mostly unchanged in the arcade for Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman), who spend their days playing as characters in their video games, and their nights hanging out together, traveling to different games and throwing back root beer at Tapper’s.

When the steering wheel in Vanellope’s racing game Sugar Rush breaks, the machine is unplugged, leaving all of the characters “gameless” (in other words, homeless). Ralph and Vanellope turn to the Internet to find the part needed to repair the game, starting our heroes on their quest. But the film is really about friendship enduring as people grow and change, and the insecurity one person feels when they are totally happy with the status quo and want nothing to change and the other wonders what more the world has to offer and feels like they need to move on. Ultimately, your friends don’t need to be exactly like you to be your friends and we need to let the ones we love be free to pursue their dreams, even if that means potentially losing them. Heady themes for a kid’s movie.

Ralph checked all the boxes for me: video games, nostalgia, technology, Disney, and Easter eggs aplenty, rivaling Ready Player One for things hidden in the background. (Google the license plate in the shark’s mouth for one great one!)

The film does a great job of visualizing how technology works—from the concept of packetizing data and sending it through a router and off to the Internet, how searches, viral videos, and pop-ups work—what causes the Internet to drop, and imagining what it might look like if it were a physical place that data actually visited.

Without a doubt, the scenes at OhMyDisney.com were my favorite parts, and quite possibly some of my favorite scenes from any movie in recent years. This area of the ‘net brings together virtually every Disney property—classic Disney, princesses, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, hidden Mickeys —into a lengthy segment featuring some fantastic Easter eggs throughout that had me smiling until my cheeks hurt. Instead of just being a cheap franchise tie-in, this scene brings these franchises together in a fantastically organic and entertaining manner. And kudos to Disney for getting all of the original actors back to reprise their voice roles. Great stuff!

Similar to how the first film used different animation styles to differentiate between the worlds of Fix-It Felix (Ralph’s game), Sugar Rush (Vanellope’s game), and Hero’s Duty (Calhoun’s game), Breaks has different looks and styles depending on where we are in Ralph’s world—the arcade, inside different games, the Internet, or the Dark Web.

One of the marquee locales is Slaughter Race, a gritty, smoggy, bathed in eternal dusty-golden-light, crime-ridden world à la Grand Theft Audio. Here we meet ultra-racer/gang leader, Shank (Gal Gadot), who ends up becoming an unlikely mentor and pivotal in Vanellope’s journey as well as contributing to a big-time song & dance number that’s an homage to classic Hollywood pieces of old.

Animation generally looks fantastic in 4K HDR, and Breaks definitely doesn’t disappoint. Colors are incredibly bright and punchy, almost neon when called for, especially in the Internet. Blacks are also deep, with a lot of detail.

Breaks sounds as good as it looks, with an aggressive Dolby Atmos soundtrack that’s used effectively throughout, both to create environment and to add impact to the onscreen action. The overhead speakers are smartly used to create a wonderfully immersive experience, such as the echoing, swirling sounds when Ralph and Vanellope travel into the Internet or the multiple announcements that occur throughout. The carjacking scene in Slaughter Race also sounds great, with a lot of dimensionality and solid bass accompanying the crashes.

While mostly family friendly, there were a couple of scenes in the film’s final act—notably Ralphzilla and Double-Dan (you’ll know him when you see him)—that were a little too intense and frightening for my almost three year old. Definitely continue watching through the end credits for one last great Ralph meme—probably the most perfect end-credits scene a movie about breaking the Internet could possibly have.

PICTURE | Colors are incredibly bright and punchy, almost neon when called for, especially in the Internet, and blacks are deep with a lot of detail

SOUND | The aggressive Dolby Atmos soundtrack is used effectively throughout both to create environment and to add impact to the onscreen action.

Review: Toy Story 4

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Pixar adds a new chapter to the series without feeling like it’s succumbing to sequelitis

by John Sciacca
October 2, 2019

When I initially heard about the plans to release Toy Story 4, I was actually upset. Not because I’m not a fan of the franchise—rather, exactly the opposite. It’s because I’m such a big fan and I felt the story arc had been so wonderfully and perfectly completed in Toy Story 3 that I feared any additional movies would only dilute the emotional conclusion of that film, one that never fails to cause me to tear up no matter how many times I watch it.

Sure, give us some further exploits of our toy friends playing with Bonnie such as the Toy Story Toons Hawaiian Vacation, Small Fry, and Partysaurus Rex or the longer shorts Toy Story That Time Forgot or Toy Story of Terror, but let Toy Story 3 remain the perfect end note to the main story. However, with its early release in 4K HDR at the Kaleidescape Store (a week prior to the UltraHD Blu-ray), I decided to take the plunge and complete my Toy Story film collection.

I’ve watched Toy Story 4 twice now, once in theaters and once at home in 4K HDR, and my heart has definitely softened to this latest entry in the series. While much of the story feels more forced than the more organic events of 1—new toy, Buzz, comes in and shakes up things in the toys’ world; 2—Woody is stolen and discovers he is a celebrity; and 3—the toys come to terms with Andy growing up and leaving them behind, it gives our toys another great adventure while advancing Woody’s story and ultimately giving his character some nice closure (and a new beginning).

The movie opens nine years in the past, showing us what happened to Sheriff Woody’s true love, Bo Peep, when she is given away to another child. We then cut back to the present where, following the events of Toy Story 3, young Bonnie is growing, and Woody finds himself being played with less and less. On the first day of kindergarten, he sneaks into Bonnie’s backpack to make sure she has a good first day, and while at school, Bonnie crafts a new friend, Forky, from miscellaneous scraps of trash. When brought into Bonnie’s room, Forky magically comes to life and spends much of the movie trying to throw himself in the garbage.

When Bonnie’s family takes a road trip, Woody tries convincing the other toys—and Forky himself—that Forky is important to Bonnie, but Forky throws himself out of the RV’s window and Woody goes after him, setting the stage for a variety of adventures, and the reunion of old friends and new acquaintances.

All of your favorite characters from the previous films are here including Buzz, Jessie, Dolly, Trixie, Rex, Hamm, and Slinky Dog. Significant among the new characters are Gabby Gabby, Ducky and Bunny, and ultimate stuntman Duke Caboom.

Toy Story 4 is Pixar doing what Pixar does best, which is putting a bunch of interesting characters together in humorous situations and milking each scene for maximum humor and heart. They nail the little moments like Rex being impressed with how long Forky’s pipe-cleaner arms are or Snow Combat Carl (Carl Weathers) missing out on a high five. This is definitely not the best of the Toy Story films, but it is still a lot of fun to watch.

We’ve been having a bit of a resurgence of Toy Story watching in our house, as my three year old has become obsessed with the first three films, wanting to watch them on our Kaleidescape system over and over. What you really notice is the generational leaps in animation improvement from film to film. Whereas the first movie now looks almost like a student project, this one has many moments that border on photorealistic. The opening scenes look stunningly real, with incredible depth and detail in every frame. Taken from a 4K digital intermediate, there is striking micro detail in every closeup, a testament to the fanatical level of attention paid by the Pixar team. From the ultra-fine texture in Bo’s bonnet to the detail in every one of Bonnie’s eye lashes to the scuffs and scrapes on Woody’s hat (visible only in certain lighting and angles, mind you), each frame is bursting with detail. Just sit and watch as each rain drop in the beginning hits, splashes, and ripples. It’s amazing work.

The outdoor scenes all look unbelievably real—from the exterior of Bonnie’s school to the road and landscape while Woody and Forky are walking to the interior of the Second Chance antiques store, it’s all 4K eye candy. One scene in the antiques store where Bo and Woody look at a variety of illuminated chandeliers is especially fantastic-looking.

The colors throughout were a bit subdued and muted. Whether this was to give it a more grownup, filmlike, and realistic look or due to some other creative choice, colors aren’t as overly saturated and pumped up as they are in many animated titles, including the other Toy Story movies. There are still scenes where colors pop, such as the shimmer of Bo’s deep purple cloak, the flashing colored lights in the secret club inside an old pinball machine, the midway at the carnival, and especially the carnival lit up at night. This film is gorgeous to behold throughout and reference-quality video in every way.

The Dolby Atmos audio track was mostly restrained, with the vast majority of the audio action happening in the front of the room. There were some nice moments where the height speakers were called into creative use for some expansion of on-screen dialogue—for example Woody hearing things inside Bonnie’s backpack or Ducky and Bunny talking off screen—or where the audio soundstage is expanded with a variety of ticking clocks in the antique store, but Toy Story 4 is not really an audio showcase. Having said that, this is frequently a dialogue-driven film and the dialogue is always clear and easy to understand, and there is appropriate use of surrounds when called on, but just not aggressively.

If you have kids or grandkids, or just want a fantastic-looking movie with a bunch of heart, Toy Story 4 is sure to please.

PICTURE | The photorealistic animation is filled with detail, and while the color palette is a little subdued, there are plenty of moments that pop

SOUND | The Atmos mix is mostly restrained, with most of the audio happening in the front of the room, but there are some moments where the height speakers are called into creative use

Review: Incredibles 2

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