A Few Words About A few words about...™ Kingdom of Heaven -- in BD (1 Viewer)

When Ridley Scott creates a world on film, you know that you're in for a treat.

In the Director's Cut of Kingdom of Heaven, a work that seemed less than stellar in theatrical release, took on an entirely new life.

When released as a beautiful SD transfer, I personally couldn't wait to see what Fox would do with this in high defintion.

Now in BD, Kingdom of Heaven is everything that I hoped it would be.

Miraculously beautiful, and a perfect work of compression and authoring, Kingdom of Heaven is one of the highest ranking members of my Best DVD List of 2006.

Home theater of this quality would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

Kingdom of Heaven in BD is Extremely Highly Recommended. My praise of this disc could only be higher if Fox had included the myriad of extras on their recent SD special edition.

RAH

From the moment I popped in this disk and the menu was playing, I knew that the presentation would be phenomenal and yes, the DC brings a new life to this film. A must have for me.

I watched this a couple weekends ago and have to agree it looked stellar. There was a scene where I thought I saw mosquito noise and then realized it was sand blowing!

It was the first Blu-Ray I watched, so now I'm afraid I've set the bar high for the rest. Devil Wears Prada is my next planned Blu viewing, which I hear does not disappoint as well.

As far as the film, I found I liked it more after I thought about it for a couple days. I never saw the theatrical cut, or I suspect I may have appreciated the DC even more.

Now if we could only get some more Scott on Blu.....Alien would be VERY nice.

Indeed. Which is why I used a $10 coupon and picked up the SD special edition after watching the Blu-ray Disc. So now I have a 5-disc special edition in both SD and HD!

Thanks for the review!

- Steve

sounds great!
Should arrive from netflix today. PS3 should also arrive today, but this IS UPS we're talking about...

Mr. Harris- any idea why Fox left out the Overture and Intermission that was on the 4-disc standard version?

Sounds Yummy!
Happy Holidays, Mr. Harris.

I'd love to hear an official answer. If I had to guess it's because that intermission was created specifically for the DC DVD set and never appeared in theaters. Since the movie is all on one disc for Blu-Ray they probably deemed it unnecessary. At about 3h10m, I'm not sure they'd really need it. I never felt like I needed a break.

So I take it the BD is the DC?

It is the director's cut!

Cool! I'll pick it up. Plus, Eva Green in HD...yummy!

I picked up this release myself, and while I did not like the theatrical release of this movie much I had more mope for the BD release's Director's Cut.

I had been led to believe that this was to be a show piece release from Fox, but only a trailer as a bonus feature makes it a bit of a dissapointment. What a waste of all that data space.

They may have actually needed most of the space for the movie. Most of the Fox BD's are MPEG2 @ 18Mbps, or in some cases AVC @ 18 Mbps. Since KoH is MPEG2 @ 24Mbps, along with it being on of their longest BD titles, and I would guess they used most of the disk's capacity on the feature.

If that's what it takes to get the kind of PQ KoH has, great. But this could have been an awesome 2-disc BD set.

Let me get this straight: The Director's Cut DVD has an overture, intermission and entr'acte. The Director's Cut Blu-ray has none of the above. So it is not the director's cut. Why is it promoted as such? I purchased the Blu-ray edition, thinking, as a consumer of the DVD release, that it would be the same version, only mastered for Blu-ray. It does state "Directors' Cut,” doesn't it? False advertising. Law suit? I am being facetious here, but obviously when it comes to easily consumable visual media, an anything goes attitude exists in the minds of the studios releasing this product. Give me a break. I am tired of spending my hard earned dollars only to learn that a DVD/Blu-ray release of a title, with advertising text emblazoned on the front of the keepcase indicating director's cut or special edition, is not indicative of what a buyer is actually purchasing! Witness the 1776 DVD debacle. So caveat emptor. In 2012? Greg

Greg, Amazon Italy has the Roadshow version of KIngdom of Heaven BLU RAY -- there its called Le Crociate released by Medusa video (do not get the italian Blu ray released by fox !!) Its an AVC encode and looks better in motion than the US blu ray (mpeg 2) The Italian Blu Ray was released a few months back and has the overture, intermission and entr'acte. Screencaps can be seen at caps-a-holic

I saw the theatrical edition on DVD, the director's cut streaming in HD, now the roadshow ultimate edition on Blu-ray (two discs, $6 at Amazon) and it's, by far, the best version. Thank Ridley Scott & his team for fitting the extra scenes into the budget without the studio realizing. The ultimate edition has the advantage of a beautiful AVC encode. I assume it will not look much better in 4K because CGI was limited to 720p or 1080p at the time of production. Highly recommended.
The roadshow is a very long film but there is a natural break at 75 minutes, so do as I did, watch it two sessions!

David Weicker said:

I saw the theatrical edition on DVD, the director's cut streaming in HD, now the roadshow ultimate edition on Blu-ray (two discs, $6 at Amazon) and it's, by far, the best version. Thank Ridley Scott & his team for fitting the extra scenes into the budget without the studio realizing. The ultimate edition has the advantage of a beautiful AVC encode. I assume it will not look much better in 4K because CGI was limited to 720p or 1080p at the time of production. Highly recommended.

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Bartman said:

The roadshow is a very long film but there is a natural break at 75 minutes, so do as I did, watch it two sessions!

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Thanks for highlighting this. I saw the film in theaters twice. I found it dramatically so so, but the action was spectacular. Particularly enthralling was the recreation of medieval siege techniques for those interested in such things. I’ll pick this up.

Assuming that there was a full 2K DI (IMDb says so, but grain of salt with them), there's plenty of material in the film that doesn't involve effects work. If Fox still existed and cared, or if Disney cared about Fox or pretty much anything else, the negatives could still be scanned at 4K for a good chunk of the running time, even if the composites weren't redone. To be fair, though, the odds that they would get a return on investment for spending the money to do so are negligible. It would be worth doing from a preservation perspective, but Disney really hasn't shown much concern in that regard where the Fox catalogue is concerned.

But even using an existing 2K DI, this is one film that would still benefit from a quality encode in 4K, and a judicious HDR grade could work wonders with the contrast. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that happening, either.

Even if disney rescanned the film sections at 4k , wouldn’t that make the effects sections stand out?

willyTass said:

Even if disney rescanned the film sections at 4k , wouldn’t that make the effects sections stand out?

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No worse than traditional optically composited effects being scanned from an IP while the rest of the film comes from the negative. In fact, they'd probably stand out less.

But if the argument is that it's best to cripple the look of the majority of a film in order to make it blend better with effects that came from dupe elements or lower-resolution digital composites, then you're going to have an uphill battle on that one.