Battle 360: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Battle 360: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie Review

These are the voyages of the Starship. . .er, Aircraft Carrier Enterprise.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 19, 2010

The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard may be the largest facility of its kind on the west coast, but it’s also a curiously unadorned affair and is strangely uncelebrated by people not familiar with its storied past. In 1943 the shipyard was home, at least for a while, to the USS Enterprise, the most honored aircraft carrier of the Second World War, which came in for drydock repairs and left some time later completely refitted and upgraded, able to make it through the rest of the epochal conflict despite being severely damaged by among other things several kamakazi attacks. Anyone who has ever set foot on an aircraft carrier, or stood next to them while they were in port, knows how improbably massive these structures are, and indeed this first season of Battle 360, which focuses pretty much exclusively on the Enterprise, calls the ship (quite rightfully) a “city of steel.” I myself stood next to some aircraft carrier whose name I can’t recall anymore at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at some sort of official shindig that my father, a U.S. Army General, was invited to when I was a kid. I still remember being awestruck at the sheer size of the ship, something that seemed to tower as high as any skyscraper I had ever seen, and perhaps even more impressively, stretched from side to side several times the mass it attained in height. Battle 360 does an excellent job of recounting the Enterprise’s storied history from Pearl Harbor to the doorstep of Japan, four years of incredible conflict and a series of battles which helped define the Pacific campaign. If it’s not always easy to get a real feel for the physical size of the Enterprise, the more figurative scope of the ship’s contributions to the Allied victory in the War comes through loud and clear.

You were expecting Pixar?

Battle 360 follows the established History Channel tradition of mixing in copious segments of at time pretty basic looking CGI with first hand interviews and expert commentary, as the series moves through Enterprise’s history. In fact while the series emphasizes the visual bells and whistles (to mix metaphors) of the computer generated scenes, it’s really the interview segments where this series comes fully alive, as some of the few surviving crewmen who once numbered around 2800 on board the ship recount their adventures in several of World War II’s most famous battles. Listening to these now quite elderly men discuss coming to terms with fear, or rising above their preconceived notions of what they could accomplish, is a lesson in humility and grace, and is yet another perfect example of why men of this era are so suitably called The Greatest Generation.

Among the epochal battles Enterprise engages in are Midway, where the massive ship’s aircraft helps to sink two Japanese ships, the Kaga and Akagi. The Enterprise is accompanied by the Yorktown and Hornet. The Hornet will perish several years later in another battle essayed by the series, the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. But of course the Enterprise’s story begins, at least with regard to World War II, a bit earlier with the attack on Pearl Harbor, whose carnage the Enterprise escaped by being out to sea on December 7. The ship hauled into port, or at least what was left of it, on December 8, and some of the first hand accounts of witnessing the horrible destruction 24 hours after the “day which will live in infamy” give the episode a really visceral power.

Though the Enterprise was nicknamed “Lucky E,” the fact is the ship suffered its own series of misfortunes over the course of the several years it saw action in World War II. Not only was it struck by a devastating bomb in the Battle of Guadalcanal, it later became the victim of Japanese suicide bombers toward the end of the War, when the Land of the Rising Sun became increasingly desperate in its use of tactics, hoping against hope it could cling onto control of the Pacific islands which the Enterprise, along with several other carriers and Marine and Army battalions, were slowly claiming one by one.

While Battle 360 does an artful job of depicting the strategies the Enterprise and her sister ships utilized in various Pacific campaigns, strangely that is not ultimately what most viewers will probably remember once the series comes to a close. While watching various encompassing views of how battles played out is fascinating, and helps to give a literal bird’s eye view of huge swaths of area, it’s really in the personal stories that the series comes fully alive. While the vets who are interviewed may be close to the end of their lives, their memories are sharp as a tack, no doubt magnified by the traumatic events they lived through. While it’s somewhat ironic that Battle 360’s sister series, Patton 360, actually tended to focus more vibrantly on the actual battles than the personalities involved (even Patton’s famously volatile one), here in Battle 360 while we’re still privy to seeing how exactly individual campaigns played out, it’s actually how these campaigns affected their participants that becomes the most compelling part of the viewing experience.

Battle 360 offers 10 episodes spread over three Blu-rays:

Call To Duty
Vengeance at Midway
Jaws of the Enemy
Bloody Santa Cruz
Enterprise vs. Japan
The Grey Ghost
Hammer of Hell
D-Day in the Pacific
Battle of Leyte Gulf
The Empire’s Last Stand

Battle 360: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I used to take History Channel to task, back in the "olden days" of SD-DVDs, for not anamorphically enhancing their releases. They finally took my advice (no, really, I'm sure of it) and came to their senses, but now they're making the equal and opposite mistake. On both this AVC encoded 1080p release (in 1.78:1) and its sibling Patton 360, virtually all the archival footage has been anamorphically stretched to fit 16:9 screens. Really, do the producers and distributors of these product not realize that the vast majority of viewers are educated enough about aspect ratios to realize when a brigade looks wide enough to be at least a brigade and a half? Of course, I'm joking, but the odd stretching is completely annoying and unnecessary. Future seasons of any 360 series simply need to blow up and matte 1.33:1 segments as needed, or, preferably, simply pillar box them and show them as they were intended to be seen (which of course used to be the mantra of the widescreen fanatics). On the whole, Battle 360 looks decent enough, and better than that in the contemporary interview segments, which feature excellent detail against some great, inky black backgrounds. CGI is laughably bad at times, almost like an analog to the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons—simple, basic and not very well developed. Stock footage has a slew of problems, from scratches, dirt and debris to the odd decision to frequently superimpose maps and other graphic data on top of the footage, making it even harder to decipher.

Battle 360: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Battle 360 really could have benefited from a 5.1 mix in light of its many exciting battle sequences. But at least we're given a rather respectably robust DTS-HD 2.0 mix which helps to beef up those action segments with some really excellent and thundering LFE. I kept hoping for more directionality, however, especially as planes zoomed overhead or the gigantic aircraft carriers plowed through the turbulent ocean waters. What is here is remarkably vivid, however, with crisp fidelity and some really great dynamic range. The voiceover narration by Wally Kurth is always clear and authoritative, and the onscreen interview segments are also clean and easy to hear. Sound effects abound in this series, as is probably to be expected, but they never overwhelm the spoken material. History really should up the ante, though, and provide a full lossless 5.1 mix for any future seasons of this battle-centric series.

Battle 360: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

A middling to pretty good Making of featurette (SD; 29:12) is included on the third disc. It features some interesting interviews with the CGI house as well as some in depth looks at various segments.

Battle 360: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The USS Enterprise is obviously one of the most storied names in the history of United States warfare. There's a reason Gene Roddenberry chose it for Star Trek. This excellent overview of the Enterprise's birth in 1936 through the close of World War II hits all the high points, giving some great accounts of the many important battles in which Enterprise played a leading role. But it's the interview segments with the Enterprise's surviving crew that really hit home here, and make Battle 360 such a gratifying and worthwhile. . .enterprise. Recommended.