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Monday, January 11, 2010

BD impressions: Defiance

4:44 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

In some respects I'm almost tempted to look on Defiance as a more po-faced Inglourious Basterds, as least in so far as it belongs to the underpopulated "Jews who fight back" sub-genre of World War 2 films. I'm led to believe that this "true story" plays hard and fast with the facts about a group of Jewish partisans who survived in the woods in Belarus for the bulk of the war's duration, effectively building a community for themselves to replace the one that had been taken from them. It does at times stumble into mawkishness (Daniel Craig on horseback giving rousing Braveheart-esque pep talks to his followers, not to mention a rather saccharine subplot involving a romance between two young partisans), and I get the impression that things weren't as cut and dried as the film would have us believe (the Bielski brothers are said to have been considerably less egalitarian than they are portrayed as being here), but as a straightforward dramatisation and a piece about refusing to surrender your humanity despite your enemies' attempts to dehumanise you, I found this to be a riveting and for the most part well-told movie. It's also stylishly shot by Edward Zwick and cinematographer Eduardo Serra (with Lithuania standing in for Belarus) and features compelling performances by Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber.

Image quality: Excellent work from Momentum, who provide a solid high bit rate VC-1 presentation with plenty of fine detail and some pronounced yet well encoded grain. It falls shy of perfection thanks to some noticeable but not overly distracting compression artefacts in some of the wider shots (see Example 10 and Example 16 - curse that snow and these dense woodlands!), but on the whole this is an extremely pleasing presentation. 9.5/10

Defiance
studio: Momentum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: VC-1;
file size: 36.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 38.51 Mbit/sec

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