Re: A few words about...™ Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - in Blu-ray
Came early as anticipated so saw the whole lot today.
PQ I would only give 9.5/10 not quite perfect as intentional grain is everywhere in the night scenes and first half of the movie. Spielberg loves the grain texture of film as opposed to digital so this is as good as his movies get until (if ever!) he uses digital cameras & film.
Audio is 10/10 reference quality. Very deep bass (had to turn down from the THX reference levels!!) and good directional effects. Ben Burtt demonstrates he is a master of sound design. This should be an oscar winning sound mix but as its a sequel not sure if it will be.
With regards to people talking about what is obvious CGI and hating on it (Prairie Dogs, Monkeys & Jungle) it all looked a lot more natural on Bluray and TBH the Prairie Dogs looked very real to me. The monkeys I noticed 1 quick cut where some of them in the background were not rendered with as much detail as the foreground but unless you were looking for it not that bad at all (the thing that compounds it is that the CG lighting was slightly oversaturated and needed more work to look natural).
The Jungle I cannot understand why people are moaning about as its a real location in Hawaii!! according to the Extras on Disc2 and almost the entire chase is not CGI but I admit looks like it due to the set background lighting choices made on location.
The extras are spread out over both discs and some of it has already appeared in low res on
:: INDIANA JONES - OFFICIAL SITE :: but its all in HD here and some are longer. Best docs to me were the ILM & Ben Burtt ones (which are not on the official website) the rest were ok but mainly typical recent Spielberg DVD EPK level stuff with no real depth to them beyond the sound bite.
This movie is very solid and entertaining once you can adjust to the 1950's era Indy.
Spielberg hits it out of the park with his smooth shooting & editing styles. Ford is so natural in the part that you forget its been 19 years since TLC.
I hope that Indy5 comes sooner rather than later as there is just about enough mileage left for the years!!