Westworld: Season One 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Westworld: Season One 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

These Violent Delights—Upscaled and Remixed

Westworld is the latest watercooler series from HBO, the pay cable network that brought us The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and Game of Thrones. A re-imagining of Michael Crichton's 1973 thriller of the same name, the series is lavishly mounted, impeccably cast and produced with all the benefits of the latest in both digital and practical effects. According to HBO, Westworld was the highest rated inaugural season in their history of original programming.

The creators of this new vision are the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Nolan, who also directed the pilot and season finale, is the brother of director Christopher and the author of the story that inspired Memento, one of the twistiest puzzle films ever made. Nolan/Joy's Westworld is also a puzzle—more accurately, a series of puzzles, one after another and one inside another. Fans and newcomers alike can now revisit (or discover for the first time) the season's many mysteries in a choice of formats from Warner Brothers Home Entertainment: a standard Blu-ray and this 4K presentation, which arrives in a six-disc set of three Blu-rays and three UHD discs, making Westworld, as far as I know, the first TV drama to be offered in the latest home video format.

Westworld: Season One 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

(Note: Screenshots accompanying this review are 1080p captures from the standard Blu-ray. Additional 1080p images can be found here.)

As discussed in the standard Blu-ray review, Westworld's cinematography was widely covered in industry publications, because the show is among the increasingly rare projects shot on film. However, post-production was performed digitally at 2K, and the UHD discs are the result of an up-conversion that has added no additional detail and not even the refinements in sharpness that we sometimes see with 4K conversions of 2K sources. The HDR encoding is modest and restrained, leaving the original source's colors largely unchanged, except for tiny improvements in gradation that are sometimes evident in such scenes as the long vistas of mountainous Utah landscape. If one compares the UHD image to the standard Blu-ray, the former is a touch brighter, but overall Westworld's presentations in 4K and 1080p are so close that I am hard-pressed to recommend the additional investment for the UHD version. While working on these reviews, I not only compared specific scenes, but I also alternated watching entire episodes between UHD and standard Blu-ray. When "falling back" to the Blu-ray, I never felt like I was giving up something, and in switching to the UHD, I never felt like I was seeing the series' stylish photography in a new light. Leaving aside the audio differences discussed below, I could have been watching the same format throughout.

Although it is nowhere reflected on the disc labels or packaging, the Westworld UHDs offer the option of playback in Dolby Vision, which Blu-ray.com cannot yet review but is exploring equipment options for a future upgrade.

[System calibrated for UHD using a Klein K10-A Colorimeter with a custom profile created with a Colorimetry Research CR250 Spectraradiometer, powered by SpectraCal CalMAN 2016 5.7, using the Samsung Reference 2016 UHD HDR Blu-ray test disc authored by Florian Friedrich from AV Top in Munich, Germany. Calibration performed by Kevin Miller of ISFTV.]

Westworld: Season One 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Westworld's already-impressive 5.1 soundtrack has been remixed in Dolby Atmos for UHD, confirming the creative team's determination to offer every possible benefit to viewers who have upgraded their systems to the latest technology. Compared to the DTS-HD MA track on the Blu-rays, the UHDs' Atmos offers notable improvements in the localization and individuation of specific audio elements in the show's detailed sound mix. Environmental background noises are more distinct from each other, while foreground action is more noticeably separated into individual components, without losing the sense of a coherent soundfield. Some of the most interesting enhancements occur in the rendering of Ramin Djawadi's memorable score, where specific instruments were already being nudged to left or right in the 5.1 mix. In Atmos, these shifts are accentuated. Listen, for example, to the placement of the urgent piano that dominates the opening theme, which is sometimes centered, sometimes pushed to the left and occasionally slides from one side of the room to the other.

The Atmos remix is also noticeably louder than its lossless DTS-HD MA counterpart. In movie and TV soundtracks, "louder" is often mistaken for "better". In this case, however, the increase in volume is accompanied by refinements in placement and clarity that enhance the viewing experience.

Westworld: Season One 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

In a noteworthy departure for Warner, the disc-based extras from the standard Blu-ray have also been included on the UHD discs, in 1080p and without HDR encoding. The extras are listed here. In the current edition, the UHDs arrive with a set of standard Blu-rays in a metal tin that houses a six-disc case and the mock "handbook for new employees" of the Westworld theme park.

Westworld: Season One 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The UHDs of Westworld reflect the same commitment to melding the old with the cutting-edge that is evident in the design of both the TV series and the theme park of the title. Perhaps when Season Two arrives (and it is now in production), the creative team will take the extra step of finishing the show at 4K resolution, which can be downconverted for broadcast but should also provide a UHD presentation worthy of the format. As things stand, Westworld in 4K offers only minor video improvements over its standard Blu-ray presentation, but that may be enough for the growing contingent of 4K fans hungry for new content. The differences between the UHDs' Dolby Atmos and the standard Blu-rays' DTS-HD MA are more perceptible, but not so much as to make the remixed track a must-have. Buyer's choice.