Hero

[kobeson]

Anybody bought the local release? Keen to hear the specs - hoping the audio is Mandarin HD, not like the USA disc which had only English in HD.

[TelkEvolon]

Doesn't come out until the 24th. At least that is what is listed.

I will wait and get all these Asian movies in a one big buy. This is probably the best out of all of them.

[kobeson]

Oh ok, my mistake.

Keen to hear if somebody buys it this week

[Ghostdivision]

Did anyone happen to get confirmation if this title has loseless mandarin?

[gettodamoofies]

I saw it in JB and it doesn't indicate that anything other than English is lossless. Looks to me like it's the same deal that the US and UK got and considering it's Disney/Buena Vista in all the territories that wouldn't come as a surprise.

[troyus]

Ive got this around somewhere. Got it for xmas. I shall have a look.

[troyus]

says english HD
spanish, mandarin and french dolby digital 5.1

[MovieBuff647]

June 26th from Imprint. Likely as good of a release as we are going to get unless Miramax loses the rights. https://viavision.com.au/shop/hero-2002-imprint-asia-5/

[bigkid43]

Got confirmation from ViaVision that this is Region A compatible along with The Prisoner set and The Blind Swordsman.

I own the South Korea Nova Media Director's Cut and just posted a review. I decided to wait for a 4K update of both cuts rather than ordering this set. My luck would have been to order the set and then a month later a 4K version would be announced.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Hero-...6/#UserReviews

[app13533d]

Originally Posted by bigkid43

I decided to wait for a 4K update of both cuts rather than ordering this set. My luck would have been to order the set and then a month later a 4K version would be announced.

It's at the top of my UHD wishlist too, but apparently no negative is available of sufficient quality to do the transfer. https://www.reddit.com/r/4kbluray/co..._disc/j09x7su/

[yetanotherone]

I saw this in 35mm not that long ago. The print was in excellent condition. But the film itself is kind of on the blurry side of things, noticeably less sharp than a great deal of 35mms I have seen. So it is what it is.

[bongozoid]

Originally Posted by bigkid43

Got confirmation from ViaVision that this is Region A compatible along with The Prisoner set and The Blind Swordsman.

I own the South Korea Nova Media Director's Cut and just posted a review. I decided to wait for a 4K update of both cuts rather than ordering this set. My luck would have been to order the set and then a month later a 4K version would be announced.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Hero-...6/#UserReviews

Yeah I have that as well, and I 100% believe the new release from Imprint will be no better. Had they included Cause, then I would have considered, but as it stands, this is well over-priced for an old master.

[The Mole]

Originally Posted by app13533d

It's at the top of my UHD wishlist too, but apparently no negative is available of sufficient quality to do the transfer. https://www.reddit.com/r/4kbluray/co..._disc/j09x7su/

This Reddit post makes it sound like the original materials for HERO were lost. But I am pretty shure that they are safely locked away in the vaults of the original production company/rights holder in China. I mean: We're talking 2002 here. Not the 1960s-1990s when filmmaking in China and Hong Kong was still the wild east with little to no care taken for long term storage of film negatives and stuff.

What Miramax/Disney received for the Blu-ray might have been a sub-optimal scan from an interpositive or something with scanner noise etc. But that does not mean that the original materials don't exist anymore. Maybe the rights situation for these original materials is a little difficult nowadays because so many companies were involved it the films production and China/Hong Kong changes so fast that sometimes proper documentation gets messed up, and that maybe the reason why we don't see any 4k remaster. But it's not due to the lack of materials.

All this is speculation by me, but I would say the chances I am right are 95%.

[darry]

Originally Posted by The Mole

This Reddit post makes it sound like the original materials for HERO were lost. But I am pretty shure that they are safely locked away in the vaults of the original production company/rights holder in China. I mean: We're talking 2002 here. Not the 1960s-1990s when filmmaking in China and Hong Kong was still the wild east with little to no care taken for long term storage of film negatives and stuff.

What Miramax/Disney received for the Blu-ray might have been a sub-optimal scan from an interpositive or something with scanner noise etc. But that does not mean that the original materials don't exist anymore. Maybe the rights situation for these original materials is a little difficult nowadays because so many companies were involved it the films production and China/Hong Kong changes so fast that sometimes proper documentation gets messed up, and that maybe the reason why we don't see any 4k remaster. But it's not due to the lack of materials.

All this is speculation by me, but I would say the chances I am right are 95%.

Do you have any more info on this? China has maintained a film archive from as early as the 30’s.

[The Mole]

Originally Posted by darry

Do you have any more info on this? China has maintained a film archive from as early as the 30’s.

I don't have any detailed info. But proper long-term storage of films, especially of those cheaply produced by independent ventures to make a quick buck in the cinemas, has always been reported to be rather poor in territories like Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and China.

And having a national film archive does not prevent films going m.i.a. completely because a national archive does not provide storage for every film ever produced in a country. They often only take in those films that are regarded as being worthy of preservation. In Germany we have the Bundesfilmarchiv since 1952. Nevertheless hundreds of small, not widely known films from the last seventy years are forever lost (at least on film, if you're lucky there are still broadcasting tape masters for TV) because of missing documentation, materials being accidentally discarded as trash, companies being liquidated and their film stocks being misplaced, negatives being stored in wet cellars and what not.

[darry]

Originally Posted by The Mole

I don't have any detailed info. But proper long-term storage of films, especially of those cheaply produced by independent ventures to make a quick buck in the cinemas, has always been reported to be rather poor in territories like Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and China

And having a national film archive does not prevent films going m.i.a. completely because a national archive does not provide storage for every film ever produced in a country. They often only take in those films that are regarded as being worthy of preservation. In Germany we have the Bundesfilmarchiv since 1952. Nevertheless hundreds of small, not widely known films from the last seventy years are forever lost (at least on film, if you're lucky there are still broadcasting tape masters for TV) because of missing documentation, materials being accidentally discarded as trash, companies being liquidated and their film stocks being misplaced, negatives being stored in wet cellars and what not.

Then what are you basing all your opinions on?

[The Mole]

Originally Posted by darry

Then what are you basing all your opinions on?

E. g. that I once had a talk with Andrew Leavold, who is an expert for Philippines cinema. He told me that about 85% of the movies produced in the Philippines are forever lost because all the original materials were stored in the only film laboratory of the country in Manila, and when that laboratory went broke after the decline of the local film industry in the 1980s those materials fell victim to moist and vinegar syndrome. Not even theatrical copies survived.

Also how many 70s and 80s Hong Kong and Taiwanese Martial Arts movies do you know that are only, if ever, transfered from foreign theatrical prints because the original rights holders have closed down decades ago and the original materials have vanished from the face of the earth? Nobody knows where they are or if they still exist. I don't talk about the likes of Golden Harvest or Shaw Brothers but all those little independent companies or e. g. dummy companies of the Triads that used producing films to lauder dirty money.

Also various Hong Kong filmmakers have said in interviews that producing movies was often just a way to make money. Do the movie quick and cheap, release it in cinemas to make a quick buck, maybe do a 4:3 telecine for VHS/TV and then get rid of it. Nobody thought about storing film prints for decades because someone would come years later and want to do new 4k transfers from them. Storage space costs money. Lots of money.

[micpp]

Just received my copy today, and interestingly it seems to have three cuts: the first disc contains what it calls the "original theatrical cut" and the "US theatrical cut", and then the director's cut is on disc 2.
The two cuts on disc 1 seem to be completely separate transfers, with the US cut being hard-subbed

Edit: I've taken some screenshots to compare - they're just taken with VLC and I wasn't able to exactly match the frames so take them with a grain of salt but hopefully it gives some idea

Original theatrical:


US theatrical:


Director's cut:


Edit again: another set of screenshots showing the subtitles. The US cut subtitles are hardsubbed (i.e. encoded onto the video) but the other two are standard bluray soft subtitles.

Original theatrical:


US theatrical:


Director's cut:

[Chareth]

Wow, interesting! I was wondering what subtitle track Imprint would use: the initial one or the US one that tried to sidestep the political implications.

By doing this, Imprint may be enabling both.

Does the original theatrical cut use the phrase ‘all under heaven’ or ‘our land’ through the film?

I ordered the Japanese DVD years ago to have the more evocative subtitle track from my first viewing: this may make the Imprint set a must-have for upgrading to HD.

Could swear this wasn’t on Imprint’s page originally, but I see it there now in one of the bullets. Maybe a late addition?

A separate transfer for each cut bodes ill for quality though.

[micpp]

Originally Posted by Chareth

Does the original theatrical cut use the phrase ‘all under heaven’ or ‘our land’ through the film?

Haven't watched through the film yet, but at least in the opening prologue text both the original theatrical cut and director's cut use the "all under heaven" phrasing. It seems to be just the US cut that uses the "our land" translation.

Originally Posted by Chareth

A separate transfer for each cut bodes ill for quality though.

The director's cut is on a separate disc (along with the extras) so it's not TOO bad. For what it's worth, the director's cut takes up about 30GB of the disc it's on (not including the extras, which add about another 6GB or so), but the theatrical cuts are about 20GB each on their disc, so maybe a bit bitrate-starved by comparison?

Mostly I kinda find it unusual the differences between the transfers on the three cuts, like comparing the screenshots they're all at slightly different aspect ratios, and even with the two that have soft subtitles, the subtitles are in a different font. It sort of makes me wonder if Imprint had to get their masters from several different sources?