Children of Men Review (Nordisk Release)

[Innerloop]

Here's my quick review of the Scandinavian release of Children of Men.

I was happy to hear that Universal's Children of Men was to be released on Blu-ray in Scandinavia, as this was one of a short list of films I was really envious of on the HD-DVD side. So I jumped on the chance to import it from axelmusic.dk.

The movie is packaged in the same size package used in the US (thinner than the UK packages) and is very nicely presented, definitely up to US standards in terms of packaging and artwork.

The disc itself is presented in AVC with an average bit-rate of ~32-38 according to the PS3 display. The disc boots initially to a menu to select one of several Scandinavian subtitles, then proceeds straight to the movie. The HD "Nordisk" logo is very nicely done in HD, sometimes import logos can be a bit cheesy, but this was slick.

There is no "None" subtitle option, but after starting the movie its a quick fix to turn off subtitles entirely. There is only one audio track, Dolby Digital 48K sampling rate at 640kbps. Nothing astounding there.

The picture quality is very good and sharp. There is no evidence of any filtering of the film image, there's an appropriate amount of grain and the contrast and colors seem accurately rendered, perhaps erring a bit on the darker side, but I recall the film was the same way (a bit bleak, by design).

There is no pop-up menu or special features. There are just 8 chapter stops in the film, so its not terribly easy to navigate, this part of the authoring definitely seems a bit sub-standard.

The disc appears to be a single-layer BD-25 disc. Since the Universal US release was VC-1 encoded, this would appear to be a new encode of the film, so it would be interesting to do side-by-side comparisons of the 25GB AVC version and the ~30GB VC-1 version. There are a lot of challenging scenes with lots of rolling smoke or fog, but I didn't see much banding evident, which I feared.

Overall this probably isn't going to set any Tier-0 records, but it looks like a skillful encode of a well-transferred master.