The Captain Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

The Captain Blu-ray Movie Review

Airport '20?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 28, 2020

It may be harder for younger movie fans to understand what a phenomenon Airport was when it hit theaters in 1970, but here’s a little clue that may offer a hint as to how successful it was: it was followed by Airport 1975, Airport '77, and The Concorde: Airport '79, though most folks would probably not argue with the assessment that the law of diminishing returns definitely set in through the years vis a vis the supposed "Airport franchise". The kind of funny thing about the whole “disaster film” craze of sorts that Airport helped to spark (and which its sequels often took to absolutely laugh worthy lengths at times) is that the “disaster” in Airport comes relatively late in the story and is in fact offered as the climax of a bunch of intersecting personal tales, rather than the raison d’etre of the entire film (and, yes, I just used raison d’etre and Airport in the same paragraph). If The Captain is somewhat more dependent upon its disaster for its ultimate plot mechanics than Airport was, it at least attempts to invest the film with enough character content in the early going that viewers will hopefully care about who survives a calamitous cracking of a cockpit windshield which leads to all sorts of turbulence (in more ways than one).

Perhaps incredibly given some of the more seemingly preposterous elements at play in the disaster documented in The Captain, the film is at least based partially in fact, a harrowing 2018 incident which saw a Chinese Airbus encounter a windshield failure, which resulted in cabin decompression and (here’s one of the more seemingly preposterous parts) the co-pilot being sucked partially out of the damaged windshield (see screenshot 3 for the film’s recreation of this sequence of events). As if that weren't enough, the plane was attempting to fly above a vicious storm, which the windshield disaster made impossible, since the plane had to lower its altitude after its decompression event. With a bit of a spoiler warning but with an understanding that it’s part of the historical record, and perhaps also to calm rising blood pressure from the above description (and/or screenshot), I'll mention that the real life plane landed more or less safely, with no fatalities, something that The Captain's depiction of events also offers.

While I jokingly referred to the film as Airport '20 in the "deck" above, it might be more appropriate to compare this "ripped from the headlines" account to Sully, not only due to the fact that heroic measures on the part of a flight crew, and notably a captain, prevented a horrifying incident from spiraling into an even worse disaster, but also due to the fact that from what I've been able to glean from online sources about the true life incident behind the film, at least some of the real life character names are used here, including Captain Liu Chuan Jian (Zhang Hanyu) and first officer Xu Yichen (Oho Ou), the unfortunate crew member who got to ride "outside" of the plane for a few minutes. I'm assuming that many of the passenger and flight crew stories are at least partially fictionalized, and it's in that element that The Captain probably comes closest to Airport's approach, with various soap operatic subplots wending their way through the midair mayhem.

The Captain Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Captain is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Digitally captured with a variety of RED cameras and finished at a 2K DI (both datapoints courtesy of the IMDb), The Captain is a sharp and well detailed looking presentation throughout, with just a couple of exceptions mostly revolving around slightly soft looking CGI. The first part of the film is decidedly earthbound, introducing various characters and getting the general context developed, but even here fine detail on elements like the flight attendants' uniforms is excellent, and the palette pops very expressively. Some of the flight material features skewed angles with lenses that can slightly distort the imagery, but detail levels tend to be consistently high throughout. Contrast is solid and aside from some typical slight banding during the Well Go USA masthead, I noticed no major compression anomalies.

The Captain Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Captain features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix in the original Mandarin that really takes off (sorry) after the film gets into the air and especially after the windshield cracks and disintegrates. There's good surround activity even in the opening "grounded" scenes, though, with nice attention paid to effects like the shower the captain takes early in the film. The flight scenes, though, really offer the best surround activity and especially use of LFE, and everything from the horrifying whistling winds to the clamor of panicked passengers is nicely disbursed throughout the side and rear channels. Dialogue is cleanly and clearly rendered throughout this problem free track.

The Captain Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailers

  Teaser (1080p; 1:06)

  
  

  Trailer A (1080p; 1:40)

  
  

  Trailer B (1080p; 1:42)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the supplements have been authored to follow one another automatically (so that clicking on the Teaser is essentially a Play All button). After Trailer B for this film plays, the disc has been authored to automatically move on to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

The Captain Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This review is going live as global travel restrictions are in place due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and that may actually be a good thing (in a manner of speaking), since my hunch is few people are going to want to run out and jump on a jetliner after having seen The Captain. The really good news, though, is that this film demonstrates the calm, collected demeanor of those people we trust with our lives both in the cockpit and out in the main fuselage. Parts of this story are kind of unabashedly hokey, but the underlying truth of the tale gives The Captain an undeniably visceral impact. Technical merits are solid, and The Captain comes Recommended.