8.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.4 |
With the help of his mentor, a slave-turned-bounty hunter sets out to rescue his wife from the brutal Calvin Candie, a Mississippi plantation owner.
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. JacksonDark humor | 100% |
Period | 82% |
Western | 29% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
UV digital copy
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Django Unchained has been turning up in the strangest places lately. Just the other day quite by chance I heard a commentary by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews where he cited the film as proof that movies don’t romanticize the Antebellum South anymore. Why, yes, you could say that. And my local paper’s People column just recently had the supposed revelation from Will Smith that he turned down the title role in the film because it wasn’t the lead, and, according to this article at least, Smith requires playing the lead. But perhaps the oddest place Django Unchained made an appearance was on the winners’ podium at the Academy Awards. In a year dominated by such high profile fare as Argo, Lincoln and Life of Pi, few handicappers were willing to give Django Unchained much of a chance to claim any prizes, let alone two relatively high profile ones, Best Original Screenplay for Quentin Tarantino and Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz. (Here at least one may commiserate in an ironic way with Will Smith, for Waltz surely should have been nominated for Best Actor, but such are the vagaries of show business.) Though Tarantino is on record as stating he wanted to put his own decidedly unique spin on the Spaghetti Western, even co-opting work by Ennio Morricone to help with the music, Django Unchained bears a certain (probably unintentional) relationship to the 1971 James Garner-Louis Gossett, Jr. comedy Skin Game, for both films posit the unlikely collaboration between a white and black man in the timeframe surrounding (if not directly during) The Civil War, with the black man pretending to be something he isn’t. Django Unchained is another potent example of how deliriously whimsical Tarantino can be, as well as how seemingly deliberately changeable, contrasting cartoonish violence and disturbingly realistic violence with just flat out goofy humor and a rather serious subtext.
Django Unchained is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Starz/Anchor Bay with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. If you can get past the rather copious bloodshed (whoever provided the squibs for this film must be a newly minted multimillionaire), this is easily one of Tarantino's most scenic enterprises, reminiscent in its own glamorously decrepit way of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. With wonderfully evocative production and costume design, as well as brilliantly chosen locations, Django Unchained is often visually sumptuous despite its somewhat gritty subject matter, and that helps this high definition presentation to pop rather splendidly. There's the expected amount of color grading here, from the cool blue tones of the opening the probably ironic golden amber hues that infuse the Candyland sequence, but fine detail is exceptional throughout this presentation, with virtually every whiskered face and badly scarred back vividly on display. Within the context of the sometimes aggressive color timing, colors do look accurate and are very robust. Tarantino and his frequent collaborator cinematographer Robert Richardson sometimes favor a lightly diffused look, especially in some of the "candlelit" interior scenes throughout the film that give things a slightly gauzy, soft ambience, but the actual transfer here is razor sharp. (They also ape the omnipresent late sixties and early seventies fad of omnipresent zoom lenses throughout the film, so take your Dramamine before viewing if you're bothered by rapid shifts in perspective.) The lengthy film is seated comfortably on a BD-50 without a glut of supplementary materials and so compression artifacts are of no major concern.
Django Unchained's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is awash in robust surround activity as well as very consistent LFE. Tarantino as usual has stuffed this film to the gills with source cues and some original material, including the intentionally retro sounding theme song which is wet to the point of drowning with reverb as well as a kind of Tom Jones meets Elvis Presley vocal by Rocky Roberts. The wide open spaces that fill up large swaths of the film allow the surround track to usher the listener into a wealth of ambient environmental noise and of course the many shootouts offer some astoundingly visceral effects. Dialogue is cleanly and clearly presented, and the mix is generally superb. I personally could have stood a bit less reverb on some of the source cues, and I was a bit put off by the rumbly low frequency effect that is utilized in several key sequences to up the tension level.
If you love Quentin Tarantino, chances are you will at least like if not outright love Django Unchained. If you're not a fan of Tarantino, there's little doubt you'll be equally unimpressed with this very Tarantino-esque outing. You either go with the Tarantino flow, in which case you're willing to put up with (or actually exult in) Tarantino's quicksilver changes of tone and content, or you spend two and a half hours wondering what exactly you've gotten yourself into. Django Unchained is typically hyperbolic Tarantino fare, but it's also one of his most mature presentations, one that is graced both with some of his most brilliant use of locations as well as uniformly excellent performances. The film probably could have done with a bit less silliness (which might have made its central thesis more moving), as well as about a half hour or so of judicious editing. But this is yet another sterling example of a filmmaker who resolutely refuses to follow the rules, and the results are often breathtaking. This Blu-ray offers superior video and audio, and even without a lot of supplementary material, comes Highly recommended.
Western Line Look
2012
with Bonus Disc
2012
Exclusive Bonus Disc & Packaging
2012
2012
2012
2012
With Exclusive Bonus Disc
2012
Reel Synergy Box Set | Limited to 50
2012
2015
Limited Edition
2009
2018
2022
2013
2016
2010
20th Anniversary Edition
1998
The Immaculate Edition
1979
20th Anniversary
2004
1972
1995
1994
Unrated Special Edition
2009
Uncut Version
2000
2008
2019
2007
1972
2011