Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Get up, get on, and get ready for the ride of your life! It's Christmas Ever, and you're about to roller-coaster up and down mountains, slip-slide over ice fields, teeter across mile-high bridges and be served hot chocolate by singing waiters more astonishing than any you can imagine. You're on "The Polar Express!" "Seeing is believing," says a mysterious hobo who rides the rails with you. You'll see wonders... And you'll believe. All abooooooard.

I know that Polar Express is based on a bestselling children's book, but I thought it was stretching it as a film. It just seems like they were doing a lot of gimmicks to make it feature length. The animation is motion-capture and reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Here and there, it looks great, but at other times it actually looks a bit creepy. Warner re-delivers this one time for the holidays but this time they are including a 3-D version of the film. So far I haven’t been impressed with the 3-D releases on Blu-ray. The glasses stink and cast horrible coloring on the image and this one didn’t hold up well at all. Until we get to the point where we can do digital 3-D with polarized lenses like they do in theaters, I think we should stick to traditional HD presentations. Overall, I think kids may enjoy this but at the end of the day, I just wasn't that taken with it.

I reviewed both versions of the film on this disc. The standard HD presentation is nearly identical to the previous Blu-ray release thought it looked a touch softer than the last time around. This was mainly noticeable with some of the character animations and the difference was very subtle. This animation style is never really razor sharp but it does provide a tremendous amount of depth and dimension. The transfer still has the same banding that the previous Blu-ray had, but it isn’t overly intrusive. The 3-D version was far more difficult to watch. Because of the glasses the color balance is horrible. The 3-D effects are good but the difficulty of watching them because of the headache inducing glasses and horrible color fringing just don’t make the experience worthwhile. Again, until we move toward polarized 3-D presentations at home, I think we should just skip the experience altogether. If people continue to think this is the only way to watch 3-D, they may even skip it in theaters not knowing that it is an entirely different experience altogether.

The previous Blu-ray release was limited to a legacy Dolby Digital soundtrack but this time Warner has included a 5.1 TrueHD mix. This is a great sound design with tremendous spatial design and low bass extension. I love the definition in the bass during the train sequences and especially the roller coaster like mountain passes and lake sequence. The dialogue blends in well with the animation and the balance of the elements is dead on. I used a couple of key sequences to compare the previous Dolby Digital mix to the new TrueHD one and while the difference wasn’t night and day there was definitely an increase in spatial resolution and fine detail. Now it is up to previous owners to decide if they want to take the small hit in picture quality to get the small improvement in audio.

Extras are identical to the previous release on Blu-ray with the exception of the two versions of the film. You get an extra musical sequence, some production features that look at the motion capture process, interviews and the trailer.

I really didn’t care for the 3-D presentation of this film on Blu-ray. While I’m sure it was quite the experience in IMAX 3-D it just doesn’t hold up well with the glasses used here. The video presentation is still quite strong but a touch softer than before. If you have the previous release, I would honestly just recommend sticking with it.