Blu-ray Movie Reviews

In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. Fifty years later, a new generation of students examines the capsule's contents and the girl's cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler. But it's Caleb's father, professor John Koestler, who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years. As John further unravels the document's chilling secrets, he realizes the document foretells three additional events - the last of which hints at destruction on a global scale and seems to somehow involve John and his son.

MGM bypasses the single release route for the popular Michael Mann hit Manhunter and Ridley Scott’s controversial Hannibal and instead delivers them with the already released The Silence of the Lambs. This kind of sucks for those that already bought the standalone release of Silence, but the package comes out at a decent price point for the three films. Unfortunately the quality of this release is a bit hindered by Hannibal. Despite the great photography and direction by Scott, the Blu-ray transfer suffers. I was overjoyed to see Mann’s early adaptation of Red Dragon though, a film that has had a hard time with video releases in the past.

The eye sore here is Hannibal. The transfer looks pretty old and is encoded as a low bit rate MPEG-2 encode. Honestly, it doesn’t look like anything more than a poorly upscaled DVD. There is obvious ringing throughout and depth and detail are pretty sad. The image is quite soft and dimensionality suffers. This was a great looking film in theaters that was very sharp and quite stylized. Why it didn’t get the attention it deserves here I have no idea. Manhunter probably looks the best of the group, though its older photography doesn’t lend to a super crisp look. But dimension is still strong and the film element has held up quite well. The Silence of the Lambs is the same transfer as the standalone release, which is decent, but not mind blowing. I would be far more inclined to recommend a purchase of these outstanding movies if MGM would have shown a bit more care in their transfer of Hannibal. But when the studios don’t feel like putting forth the effort, why should we make the effort to buy or recommend them??

All three films feature a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack and all sound quite good. Manhunter definitely has a dated sound in comparison but the synth heavy soundtrack still does a decent job with atmosphere and range. Hannibal is the most impressive with its use of soundstage and dynamic range.

No extras on this one.

I really wanted to give a strong recommendation to this set given the quality of the films included. But the mishandling of Hannibal is nearly unforgivable and is bad enough to recommend skipping this one. Hopefully they will release these individually or revisit Scott’s worthy contribution to the series. Until then, PASS.