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Sunday, July 18, 2010

BD impressions: Luftslottet som sprengtes

8:14 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

...a.k.a. LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRÄNGDES, a.k.a THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST. See here for my review of the film. To summarise:

I came away from THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST thinking it the weakest of the three novels. Conversely, I felt that THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE was the strongest on the page and the least impressive on the screen. Thanks to its slick production values and clarity of purpose, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO remains, by a considerable margin, the best of the three adaptations, but director Daniel Alfredson has done a decent job of translating books two and three to the screen in spite of the limited resources at his disposal. I have a feeling that David Fincher, if he chooses to adapt the entire trilogy for the US market, will wipe the floor with Alfredson's take on the second and third instalments - at least in terms of visual panache - but at the same time there's something quirky, honest and altogether European about all three films that I doubt even a filmmaker of Fincher's calibre will be able to match. And, at the risk of flogging a dead horse, let me state, for the record, that no-one can replace Noomi Rapace.

Image quality: I was distinctly disappointed by the image quality of the BD release of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE. To put it bluntly, the encoding sucked. Okay, so the grubby 16mm photography, a lot of it handheld, was always going to be a challenge to compress, but there was no excuse for some of the mush that made it into that encode. I had hoped that THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST, presented on a BD-50 instead of a BD-25, would fare better, and to be fair the encoding is an improvement on that of the previous disc, but there are some instances in which is screws up so badly that it obliterates any chance it might have had of scoring higher. There tends to be severe blocking in the shadows, and in a handful of scenes the heavy grain simply disintegrates into soup (see Example 17 and Example 18). On the whole it's a satisfactory transfer, but the weaker moments threaten to derail it completely. 7/10

Luftslottet som sprengtes
studio: Nordisk Film; country: Norway; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 31.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 30.81 Mbit/sec

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