PREDATOR: ULTIMATE HUNTER EDITION (1987, Blu-ray released June 29, 2010 – MSRP $29.99)
I never tire of the original 1987 Governator extravaganza, Predator. And watching it again on Blu-ray in this new Ultimate Hunter Edition has got me all fired up to see the Robert Rodriguez produced sequel, Predators, in theaters this week. But this Blu-ray, while a welcome addition to my library, is not without its problems.
If you follow home video news at all, you’ve no doubt come across the controversy surrounding this disc. Fox, in an effort to appease the fans who cried foul at the bare-bones, grainy-looking initial release of Predator on Blu, decided to give them exactly what they wanted in this newest release – a feature packed, fully remastered and “restored” disc that would make their eyes well up with joy. Sadly, to most film and video afficianados, they missed the mark by a long shot.
The disc is, in fact feature packed. Fox has ported over all of the goodies from their previously available 2-disc Special Edition DVD. And they are fabulous! More on them later. The problem with the disc lies in the transfer. Fox clearly didn’t want to give the fans another noisy image, full of grain and poorly compressed with a legacy codec as on the previous Blu-ray. So, instead they have delivered what can only be described as an all new vision of the film – scrubbed clean and colour boosted to within an inch of its life and looking very little like the grainy, dark film director John McTiernan released into theaters in 1987. Now to be fair, the encode is brilliant here. Fox has done a great job moving the image from film to video. It’s just that the image doesn’t look much like the Predator I know and love.
Now here’s the other side of the coin – casual Predator fans, Arnold Schwarzenegger fans and a lot of fans of slick looking HD presentations are loving this version of the film. While that pains the film fan and preservationist in me, I can totally understand where they’re coming from. These folks aren’t concerned with how accurate and film-like a Blu-ray transfer is, they just want a fun movie that looks spectacular on their television sets. And if yours is 40″ or smaller, you might not notice how artificial Predator looks on this Blu-ray – complete lack of grain structure, waxy complexions, loss of detail – and, in fact may fall in love with its slick new clothes. I wouldn’t blame you. But if you’re the type of person who likes film to look like film, even when transferred to Blu-ray, you simply will not be satisfied with this re-envisioned look of Predator. It’s one CGI Jabba the Hutt away from a George Lucas Special Edition. That’s the level of difference I’m talking about here. I personally love the film so much that I can enjoy it anywhere, anytime in any condition. I just hope that sometime in the near future, Fox will see fit to give us a Blu-ray edition of the film, remastered with a lighter touch on the Digital Noise Reduction (DNR) knob and with a much more film-like look.
The great news here is that Fox saw fit to port over the wonderful, full DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track from the 2008 Blu-ray release. Alan Silvestri‘s score stands crisp and clear amongst the cacophony of jungle sounds and army guy ‘splosions. The audio can’t quite go toe-to-toe with the most modern soundtracks but on its own merit it really delivers the goods.
Speaking of delivering the goods, those special features I mentioned earlier are really pretty great. The director commentary and 30-minute long making-of doc, “If it Bleeds, We can Kill it” are most certainly the highlights here. But the newly produced featurette, “Evolution of the Species: Hunters of Extreme Perfection” which amounts to a nice look back at the film by the creators of the upcoming sequel as well as the producer of the original, is a very entertaining, if not brief love letter.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Feature-length audio commentary by John McTiernan
- Text commentary by Historian Eric Lichtensfeld
- Sneak Peek at Predators (new)
- Evolution of the Species: Hunters of Extreme Perfection: featurette including interviews with Predators producer Robert Rodriguez, director Nimród Antal and original Predator producer John Davis (new)
- If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It: Making-of documentary
- Inside The Predator: documentary
- Special effects featurettes
- Deleted scenes and outtakes
- Short takes
- Theatrical trailers
- Photo galleries
- Predator profile
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It is sad that FOX has scrubbed this version of Predator more or less totally clean of everything that made it look like a movie and not a video game. The old version was by no means perfect, but the new one looks horrible.
But as you say there are probably plenty of people who will find the look of this version stellar, which will probably not make it the last movie destroyed by extreme grain removal
[...] point in time, with all the extras carried over, much as Fox did with their second dip into the Predator [...]