V For Vendetta - impressions

[BStecke]

I posted this in the one V thread, but I figured it'd be cool to have a review thread. If I'm mistaken and this is totally lame, then I guess it can be merged or deleted. Anyway . . .

Picked this up at Best Buy on my way home. Just popped it in to check out some scenes. The first thing I checked out was the final scene with the exploding Parliament/1812 Overture, etc. The TrueHD track takes some turns of the volume knob to really get going (-8db on my receiver), but it sounds a lot better than the DVD (obviously). It still sounds a bit compressed to me, like it's on the edge of sounding full and open, but it doesn't quite get there. Dialog seems kind of strained to me in a couple of scenes as well.

PQ wise, it looks good, but not great. There's grain in the picture, but it doesn't look like film grain, and it seems a bit soft at a lot of times. I'll be watching the whole film tonight, so if I have anything else to add, I'll post it up. For you bitrate people, the video seems to be hovering around 11-12mbps and I've seen it drop to 991 and go as high as 24.8. Again, I haven't watched the whole thing, so this may not be representative of the whole presentation, but I'm not really a meter-watcher either.

Don't get me wrong, it's a worthy upgrade to the DVD (even though I hate comparing everything to DVD), but I can't help feeling like it could be better. This was a very highly regarded title that people always talked about for HD DVD and, while it's a good upgrade, I'm just not that blow away with what I've seen.