Published at: March 20, 2008, 11:38 p.m. CST by headgeek
UNBREAKABLE is my favorite M Night Shyamalan film. UNBREAKABLE is a comfort film... a movie that I love so much that when I watch it - I turn my computer off... I don't answer the phone and I just get absorbed, completely by the film. It's also a film that I am furious at the world not making it an enormous gigantic success. I want the original trilogy that M Night said this was the first part of. It is strange - watching UNBREAKABLE now that HEROES is on T.V. and oddly - this is the first time I've watched UNBREAKABLE on the other side of Kring's HEROES.
UNBREAKABLE feels like a style guide to HEROES. And now that I've come to grips with the fact that I'll never see the continuing story of David Dunn and Mr Glass. I've had so many dream conversations about the next step for these characters. And I still feel that the best thing that M. Night could do is to complete his trilogy - that UNBREAKABLE has become a film that is has grown in estimation exponentially in comparison to any of his other films on DVD. And on Blu Ray... wow... this film is astonishingly beautiful.
The uncompressed sound and the image are absolutely stunning. In fact - having just watched it, I really want to rewatch it... again. I'm always this way with this film. Watching this film on my screen in 1080p... it brought me back to having seen the film in theaters. Like that scene in that restaurant between Robin and Bruce... with the Maxfield Parrish mural behind them... it is so beautiful, so gorgeous... it glows, and having seen that original Parrish, GARDEN OF ALLAH - at Skywalker Ranch - it transported me back to the ranch for a second.
Now I have to admit - UNBREAKABLE was a bitch to get working properly on my player. I'm bad at keeping up with Firmware upgrades - and in my opinion - they should come self-loading on the discs that require them. But that isn't how it works. Turns out something on the disc was causing my audio settings to send sound out of my R&L sound plugs and not the HDMI - which is how my sound had been configured. This would only occur when the movie started, btw. Till then - sound was dazzling. Then... nothing. No sound on any option on the disc. After two firmware upgrades - I still hadn't discovered what the problem was... Finally - as I was about to give up and put in the British OFFICE discs that my wife is making me discover (Brilliant btw) - I decided to check out my sound features on the Blu Ray player and discovered what the evil disc was doing. And it played fine. THANK GOD! Cuz I really wanted to watch the film - and so did Yoko.
I don't know if this problem exists on any other player, I've got a SHARP BD-HP20 - so if you have that player - you might have a weird Audio hitch - but all you'll need to do is to access your sound menu in SETUP prior to loading the disc and selecting HDMI.
That said - the disc seems to play through perfect now! Woo Hoo! The disc has all the same extras as the Two-Disc Vista Series edition - and those special features are not at 1080p. Sad face. But the disc is completely worth it for the sound and image which are spectacular. The Blu Ray is due out April 1st!