Land of Whimsy

HD DVD Archives

Thursday, January 7, 2010

HD DVD impressions: Stardust

HD DVD! Anyone remember that? Well, some of us amassed fairly substantial collections of Toshiba's now defunct format, especially in the aftermath of its death, where retailers desperately flogged all their old stock at bargain bin prices. At that point, I picked up quite a few titles super-cheap, some of which I haven't even watched yet. One of these was Stardust, based on the novel written by Neil Gaiman (Coraline) and illustrated by Charles Vess (Sandman), which I watched this evening, having (literally) dusted off the old Xbox 360 plus HD DVD add-on drive. In addition to being reminded of the fearsome din Microsoft's console makes when running, I was also reminded of all the little gems that were released on HD DVD, some of which are yet to see the light of day on BD. (Stardust is finally being released next month, over two years behind its HD DVD predecessor.)

Anyway, this is a delightful little story that seems to revel in its own unabashed silliness. Some might find it just a tad too sentimental, but personally I was very taken by it. At over two hours, it's a little too long for something so slight, and on a handful of occasions it gets a bit too silly for its own good (to say nothing of a most unwelcome but thankfully brief cameo by - ugh! - Ricky Gervais), but it looks wonderful (some iffy CGI effects aside), has a great score by Ilan Eshkeri (even if elements of it do feel as if they've been bowdlerised from Howard Shore's music for The Lord of the Rings), and Claire Danes truly does look like a being who has descended from the sky.

Plus it has Robert De Niro in a frock.

Image quality: "But HD DVD, man, it was sooooo much worse than Blu-ray. I mean, I heard it only looked slightly better than standard definition. Someone said so on the Blu-ray.com forum." Ahem. That was sarcasm, in case you didn't pick up on it. This is a really, really nice-looking disc. Director Matthew Vaughn and cinematographer Ben Davis opted to shoot in anamorphic Panavision, giving the film a smooth appearance and resulting in some noticeable but entirely natural problems with focus. Blacks look ever so slightly murky, and I spotted a handful of instances of semi-distracting artefacting (see Example 9), but on the whole I was very happy with this presentation. You can probably expect the same encode to be used when it shows up on BD next month. 9/10

Stardust
studio: Paramount; country: UK; region code: N/A; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.4 GB; average bit rate (including audio): ???