The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015) 4K HDR10 review, UK Lionsgate UHD disc. HDR metadata: Mastering display colour primaries: P3-D65. Mastering display luminance levels: 4000/0.005 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: 3940 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 371 nits. Disc type: UHD100.
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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015) 4K Dolby Vision review, Italian Universal UHD disc. HDR metadata: Mastering display colour primaries: P3-D65. Mastering display luminance levels: 1000/0.0001 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: N/A. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: N/A. Disc type: UHD100.
As Mockingjay Part 2 was shot back to back with Part 1 all the same techobollox regarding how it was shot is covered in the Part 1 review here:
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...9#post20802329, with the reiteration that Part 2 was similarly shot 2.8K anamorphic, finished to 4K but also had a Dolby HDR grading for the theatrical run. I mentioned how bright those final shots of Part 1 looked in HDR with Peeta thrashing about in the white-walled light room, and that carries on over into the scenes in the same room on Part 2. Even with all the HDR stuff I've seen over the years I wasn't quite prepared for this as those light panels are fookin blinding. For once I can believe the metadata figures as almost 4000 nits MaxCLL doesn't seem inappropriate!
From there it continues in a similar vein to Part 1, with lots of highlight range unveiled vs SDR although as Part 2 takes place in more brightly-lit locations you get a feeling of stronger brightness in general vs the intentionally dour underground-centric look of Part 1. Though one difference is less usage of that thinner, greyer black level seen in Part 1, some scenes like the sewer attack still have the blacks like that but mostly they're a lot darker and denser in Part 2 which gives you bolder contrast than its predecessor. They even seem a bit crushy in the way that shadow detail can fall off rather quickly but as the SDR Blu-ray is mostly the same it's not something that's been changed from one format to another like on the first and second movies, so that's fine.
Colour does the usual HDR thing...to a certain extent. The SDR Blu-ray has the standard light-green tint that nulls the colour and robs the skin tones of nuance, the HDR does away with this and gives a lovely boost and separation to the colour it without being excessive, but there's a catch. Andreas mentioned the purple snow and he's not wrong, there are a lot of scenes in the movie where the whites skew towards a purply tone and it looks a bit weird at times. It's not some purple drench affecting the whole image, it just affects the whites and even then it might not do it shot to shot during a scene. Take the briefing being given outside by Boggs where he shows the squad the Holo, in the side-on shots of him the sky is white, proper white, but when it cuts to Katniss the sky behind her now has that purple tone. Back and forth, purple/no purple. Sometimes the shots of skies when they're roaming the Capitol are fine, generally blue-green, but others have that lilac tinge. And those shots of Effie saying goodbye to Katniss at the end, wow, they're not trying any more, the snow is literally purple.
Given that I eulogised in Part 1's review about Part 2 having been graded in HDR from the start so there should be less weirdness going on, that looks a bit daft now! The odd part is how the purple comes and goes, it's as if the underlying source for whatever shots had a certain treatment or colour space which then veers into this purple haze with HDR applied to it (not unlike what House of the Dragon's colourist recently said to American Cinematographer about how when they were monitoring in SDR it looked fine but when they put it into HDR it had pinky colour tints). The SDR Blu-ray does *not* have any such discrepancy, the overweening green tint is ever-present but at least it's consistent with it from shot to shot. It's a shame no-one at the studio picked up on this, it's like they unclamped the 108-nit Dolby Cinema master and didn't bother to check it. I'm making it sound worse than it is though, it's not a deal-breaker for me as the colour still looks betterer overall than the jaundiced SDR disc.
Something else odd about the 4K transfer is the amount of aliasing, and not just aliasing but thin halos around very bright edges in some scenes. Right from the start I thought something was up when the white on black title text looked jagged and shimmery as it slowly enlarges. The caps don't show it up at all but in motion it's quite glaring, one example would be when Katniss visits Peeta near the start of the film. The edges of those white panels on the wall behind Peeta dance with aliased colour noise and look downright bizarre. And in the Holo briefing scene mentioned above look at the side-on shots of Boggs with Pollux in the background, around both of their heads there's a jagged white outline, perhaps it's some kind of compositing artefact as the background has been painted in but the effect is literally not there on the 1080p Blu-ray, ditto for the shimmering colour shite in the Peeta scene. Or maybe they cocked up the transfer of the 4K source master to the 4K video master, using wrong locations for the chroma pixels or something? As with the purple tint it doesn't fatally undermine the whole thing because the 4K detail smokes the 1080p Blu-ray (which is terrible in its own right, typical Lionsgate Blu-ray crap, it's got this blockiness going on that looks like grain but isn't and it wrecks the fine detail), but once you start noticing the aliasing you start seeing it everywhere in this transfer.
Regarding UHD vs UHD they're pretty much equal. Unlike Mockingjay Part 1 there's no major colour space shift between the two discs, although the Italian looks slightly cooler than the Lionsgate by like the merest fraction of a point. Oh, that squinky aliasing on the panels in the Peeta scene is definitely slightly less squinky on the Italian, it's still there but not as rampant and it's not DV related either as it looks betterer even on the HDR10 base layer of the Italian, though the main aliasing on the titles and other shots is still there on both. Regarding the Italian DV itself there's less banding to be cleaned up than in Part 1 (which itself wasn't a lot) but the light panels behind Prim when she's talking to Peeta look a touch posterised in HDR10 on both discs while the DV output with its 12-bit full enhancement layer (FEL) is cleaner. Tiny, tiny details though! For compression the Lionsgate is back to having a lower bitrate than the Italian owing to the length of the movie, I know it's not three hours but the more you go over two hours the more you've got to start dialing things back if you've got to make room for other stuff on the disc, even if it's a 100GB platter. I wouldn't say it makes a practical difference in motion though for the reasons explained in the Part 1 review, the image is so 'clean' and digital that it doesn't pose major compression problems.
That's the end of my belated series of Hunger Games reviews, but it's good to get some thoughts set in stone* for these at long last. I'm very pleased with the Italian steelbook set after having initially dismissed them as same old same old, and returning to the Lionsgate discs after almost 7 years (!) was an eye-opener. Those 2016 discs were/are not terrible but the first and second movies suffer a bit for compression when put against the 2022 Italian discs with their roomier and more modern encodes, while the third movie has what
now looks like an obvious colour space conversion error on the Lionsgate which gives it a two-tone teal/red look and that was corrected on the Italian UHD, though people may still prefer the Lionsgate. For this fourth and last movie the differences between the UHDs are the definition of minuscule, although the underlying 4K HDR presentation of Part 2 has some niggling issues regarding aliasing and colour that neither UHD is able to rectify fully. Overall though the Italian set was well worth it for me but it's a refinement more than a revolution, so if people are happy with the Lionsgates then there's no real reason to chase this upgrade.
* until I change my mind again
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