Movie
From the continuous opening shot of five minutes, Spectre takes you on an adventure that is pure entertainment, worthy of the name Bond. Back from the old Bond stories, it re-introduces ultimate villain organization Spectre in the post-Casino Royale world.
The Writing’s On The Wall, the opening song where Sam Smith takes over Adele’s record-breaking Skyfall title song, seemed a bit weird when it was released, but in the movie it does work. You can read all about the opening sequence at The Art Of The Title.
The twenty-fourth movie in the series, not counting Never Say Never Again of course, is a solid 007 movie, showing us glorious locales from Mexico City, Rome, Austria, Tangier, and of course, London. Though the second act feels a bit adrift, it makes up for it in the end.
Inevitable there will be comparisons to Skyfall or even Casino Royale, but it still works as a standalone film.
Video & Audio
One of 2015’s biggest movies shot on film, well .. apart from the Star Wars thingie, it’s easy to see that Bond never looked better with Sam Mendes at the helm. A razor sharp image on a glorious 1080p transfer with no signs of compression at all. We hope to see a 4K release in the future, which should be even more glorious!
The audio track has an amazing soundscape, with subtle things like Bond’s leather holster creaking to impressive big explosions. There really is a different feeling in every room, with some truly amazing work by the audio department.
Extras
It really seems that the glory days of three disks filled to the brim with extras are over. With Skyfall we had quite a bit of extras and a great audio commentary. However all we get with the Spectre Blu-ray are a 20 minute promo-feature showing how they shot the awesome opening sequence, and six 90 second video blogs that are all too short, and have seen before on YouTube. Some trailers and a photo gallery that noone ever watches are also included. Especially with more and better video constantly being posted by the 007 Social Media team it just feels half-assed.
Conclusion
We gave Spectre 8/10 when it first came out, a rating we still agree with. The Blu-ray release we will rate a 7.5/10, with amazing image quality outweighing the disappointing extras. Then again, If you’re a Bond fan, you’re going to get this disk anyway. 😋
Spectre is out on Blu-ray in the UK today, with Belgium following on March 3th.
