A Few Words About A few words about...™ National Treasure(s) -- in Blu-Ray (1 Viewer)

[Robert Harris]

As part of my playing catch-up with new releases, this Few Words will deal with two of Disney Home Entertainment's latest as a pair.

Jon Turteltaub's National Treasure (2004) and National Treasure 2 (2007) are delightful entertainments.

Nicolas Cage is perfect as the occasionally put-open adventurer / archivist / researcher. His demeanor somewhere between Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones and Noah Wyle's Flynn Carsen.

Even as someone who is into American history, detailed research and the archival ethic, I don't believe that I'm the only one enjoying these films. Especially since IMDB lists a current worldwide gross in excess of 800 million dollars.

Disney has done a superb -- might I suggest perfect -- job bringing them to Blu-Ray.

Image quality is proper from start to finish, with just a couple of shots that appear to have less than matching black levels. With the cohesive look of the rest of the film, I'm inclined to believe this to be a production artifact and not anything in the process of porting over to HD.

Audio is also superb, with a full proscenium, pin-point placement and enough low frequency information to clean the lint out of one's speakers.

Make no mistake.

The National Treasure duo is far from art house or high brow entertainment. Strangely finding theatrical release in late fall and early winter as opposed to summer, these films gave a swift kick in the butt to the dark days of winter, and served their purpose beautifully.

The National Treasure films are both terrific entertainment, beautifully served up in Blu by Disney, with all of the extras previously part of SD special editions intact on Blu.

This is the way that its supposed to be done, and hopefully the success of these releases will send a message to the rest of the industry.

For those seeking only "serious" drama, keep in mind...

Entertainment alone can be a good thing.

As Samuel Goldwyn has been noted as saying, "If I want to send a message, I'll call Western Union."

These are great discs!

Highly Recommended.

 

[Dave_P.]

Looking forward to these on Blu

 

[DavidJ]

Thanks for the review. I've had mine on order for a while and I look forward to watching them. I'm glad that they ported the extras too (and I hope other studios take notice and follow suit).

 

[Robert Harris]

Amazon announced a sale this morning, pricing the pair of Treasures at $39.99. This places them below the cost of their standard definition counterparts.

This is the way to move high definition (BD) software into the marketplace.

A great deal from Disney!

 

[Peter Overduin]

Thanks for the comments....in Future Shop, they will be 29.99 and have 9 bucks movie cash for Prince Caspian, bringing it down to almost the same price. A good deal indeed for a couple of nice action flicks. One of the things that struck me, especially about the first one was the almost total absence of vulgarity, not even sure there was a 'damn' in there. My kids were still at an age where I felt language was an issue, and it was great to be able to take them to the theatre to watch that one.

 

[Jason Seaver]

I think that also took the producers by surprise, too - the first movie was originally planned as a big ol' PG-13 Bruckheimer/Touchstone movie, and the PG rating sort of caught everyone by surprise. They wound up rebranding it as a Disney release and marketing it more to kids, and did pretty well by that.

 

[Ric Easton]

Has anyone had trouble with the Special Features on NT1? I could not get the alternate ending to play. I've got a Panny DMP-BD30K. The video would not stablize, the lip synch was way off and the whole thing would seize up.

 

[TonyTone]

I'm not too entirely familiar as to how the special features on the BD version of NT1 are accessed/played (shame on me, as I have a copy of NT1 but have yet to view it), but given that you mentioned using a Panny BD30...may I suggest that you check to see in the BD30 setup menu if "BD Video Secondary Audio" is enabled (ON)? If it's off (which it should otherwise normally be set to in order to listen to the main soundtrack in HD--e.g., Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA), then change it to ON and then try accessing the special features to see if that does the trick. I suggest this because the same is required if you want the D-Files feature on the BD version of Enchanted to work correctly on a Panny BD30; I suspect that a similar underpinning is used for the special features on NT1.

If that doesn't work...then I suspect either a defective/dirty disc or an issue w/ your player...leaning towards the former if your player doesn't have any issues w/ any other BD discs in your collection.