Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West Blu-ray Movie Review

Go west, young men.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 24, 2011

When you’ve lived most of your life in the Pacific Northwest as I have, you come to think of Lewis and Clark as your own kind of personal property. Colleges, streets, parks and businesses are named after the pair, and several key spots of their epochal trek west are of course located here, each with their appropriate plaque and often interpretive centers. It came as a little bit of a wake up call, then, when my wife and I took our sons on a cross country driving trip east and we kept encountering Lewis and Clark campsites and other historical markers as we got further and further away from the rain drenched pine tree covered west coast. Of course that’s part of what made Lewis and Clark’s journey so iconic to begin with: it covered a huge expanse of territory, territory that had never really been thoroughly explored by “the white man,” and which had never been adequately mapped. Anyone who has driven through the vast expanses surrounding I-90 and passed one Lewis and Clark marker after another has probably been awestruck by the sheer physical endurance the pair and their team had to have had at their beck and call as they pushed their way further and further into unknown territory, never knowing what was around the next bend. When President Thomas Jefferson appointed his aide Meriwether Lewis as leader of the newly formed Corps of Discovery in 1803, he had a multitude of goals in mind, not the least of which was a thorough exploration of the territory just acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. But Jefferson also hoped for the long sought after “Northwest Passage,” the fabled waterway which would hopefully connect the “civilized” world of the east to the Pacific Ocean and thereby to easy trade with Asian markets. Lewis and his personally chosen partner William Clark may have had other, more individually interesting, goals in mind, including mapping the territory and cataloguing a virtually uncountable array of new plant and wildlife species. This all embracing exploratory spirit is what has made the Lewis and Clark Expedition such a lasting testament to the early fortitude of our nation’s founders and first relatively “scientific” penetrators into mysterious and often foreboding lands.

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West was a 2002 IMAX feature before it matriculated to National Geographic Television, and like many of the largest of large screen format features, it excels in scenic majesty but may find some more persnickety viewers wanting a bit more information. When you consider the film clocks in at barely over forty minutes, long enough for the real Lewis and Clark and their team to have moved approximately a hundred yards on their 8,000 mile round trip, you start to get an idea of how much information a documentary like this needs to cover and how much time it needs to do an exemplary job. In generalist terms, though, Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West does a well above average job of presenting the major players and giving a sense of the trials and tribulations they endured as they forged their way into incredibly difficult environments.

More time is spent on various obstacles along the way than in really getting to know either Lewis and Clark, which is perhaps something of a shame, especially given the fact that the two were obviously very different, temperament wise, and yet there is absolutely no surviving record of the two having had as much as a minor squabble in their multi-year quest together. It’s especially sad that we’re not presented with some more emotional resonance and information about these two leaders, given the still not fully understood death of Lewis only three years after the expedition returned in triumph, a death many proclaim was suicide. We’re also given next to no information about Sacagawea, other than the rote recitations of her background and facility in helping the team with their encounters with various Native American tribes. The one element that might have been played for some real emotionalism—Sacagawea’s reuniting with her Shoshone tribe and realization that the Chief was her long lost brother—gets a quick depiction but doesn’t really have much of an emotional impact.

From a visual standpoint, this is certainly one of the more awe inspiring IMAX offerings, filled with wonderful aerial shots of the vast Great Plains, the Missouri River and some exceptionally lovely footage of the Pacific Ocean. (I can tell you from personal experience the documentary “cheats” a little as Lewis and Clark supposedly approach the Pacific on the Columbia. The Columbia where it meets the ocean near Astoria, Oregon is a mammoth, writhing river, not the quaint little stream the pair are shown floating down). The documentary also has excellent narration voiced very well by Jeff Bridges. There’s at least one great punch line included here, when Lewis and Clark are attempting to master some vicious rapids, and Bridges lets us know that according to historical documents, various Native American tribes gathered on the bluffs above the water in expectation that they would have a nice afternoon’s entertainment watching the expedition drown.

There’s simply no way a forty minute or so piece could do justice to such an overwhelmingly huge undertaking as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, so as I often recommend when reviewing IMAX features, I again suggest that a documentary like this be approached as an introduction or general review of its subject, not an exhaustively authoritative examination of it. While there may be a dearth of in depth information here, the stunning visuals more than make up for that lack and help to make this one of the most visually sweeping historical documentaries of the opening of the American west.

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. As is typical with these large format transfers, the image is usually incredibly clear and gorgeously well detailed. Colors are beautifully rendered, very robust and accurate looking. One of the best things about this piece, especially since it features so much aerial photography, is the often astounding depth of field it offers the viewer. Some shots certainly offer vistas of several hundred miles penetrating to the furthest visible horizon. There are a couple of niggling issues with artifacts, notably some omnipresent edge enhancement, especially visible in some of the backlit scenes which feature the actors in front of effulgent sunlight. There are also one or two moments of shimmer on some foliage. Otherwise, though, this is an extremely solid offering that boasts a very sharp and well defined image.

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West features a very nice lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.0 audio mix that has a wealth of surround activity, courtesy of many ambient environmental effects, as well as abundant LFE, courtesy of those same effects. Both the engaging music score, which traipses amid many genres from Coplandesque Americana to Celtic jigs, and Bridges' narration, are very clear and cleanly presented, and extremely well mixed. Water sounds fill the surrounds with gurgling and roaring activity, and the sequence by the great falls of the Missouri River should have most viewers' floorboards rumbling with sonic activity. Fidelity is top notch throughout this enterprise, a typically well realized soundtrack for an IMAX offering.

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Lewis & Clark (SD; 26:37) is a nice and well above average making of featurette, documenting how the huge 70mm IMAX cameras presented a lot of logistical challenges for this documentary, which sought to recreate up close and personal sequences in some very rugged territory.
• Trailers for other National Geographic Releases

Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

We're surrounded by Lewis and Clark and their legacy here in the Pacific Northwest where I've lived most of my life. And most people who do live here and have at least a passing acquaintance with the epochal journey the two made will tell you there is always something more to learn about them and their valiant efforts to catalog and map unknown lands and species. If Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West barely glances the tip of the information iceberg in its rather brief running time, it at least provides the grandeur of the amazing backdrops through which the Expedition made its way. This is one of the most visually stunning IMAX features in recent memory, which is saying quite a lot. While it's fairly light in informational content, the visual majesty of Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West more than makes up for that, and with this Blu-ray looking and sounding so spectacular, it's easy to rate this release Recommended.