Pirates of the Carribean Dead Man's Chest
July 2007 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

The idea of this movie, the mental image it creates in your mind and the longing for a truly excellent flick of this type, exceeds what is delivered. It’s not a bad movie by any stretch. It’s certainly got the sweep, scope, look, and quirkiness to be a classic, but somehow things just don’t come together as well as you hope and imagine. I was hoping for an Indiana Jones pace and got something considerably more deliberate than that. But this Blu-ray release looks so fantastic, it doesn’t really bother you all that much. This movie’s "ending" is no ending at all, just a cut point leading to the concluding half of the story that comes in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, now showing in theaters.

Picture quality is outstanding. This is one of the best looking live-action movies available in either HD disc format. The only reason the picture quality rating I’ve given isn’t any higher is that the best CG animation still looks better, perhaps because it never existed on film before being transferred to high-def disc. The look of the movie, the color, the detail, the shadow information, the depth, and the ambience captured in the images are always great, and often spectacular.

The sound quality of the uncompressed LPCM 5.1 soundtrack is difficult to criticize in any way. It just "fits" every aspect of the movie. That said, it is not quite a sonic spectacular. I’ve heard other soundtracks that would make better ten-minute system demonstrations. But those soundtracks can wear you out if they go on like that for an entire movie. Ambient noises create a perfect atmosphere without being so obvious that you are drawn to specific speakers. The strong rating I’ve given for sound quality is for the natural presentation rather than the spectacular content. Note that Dolby Digital is the default soundtrack and it’s nowhere near as good as the uncompressed LPCM soundtrack. You can’t see the uncompressed option in the Sound menu until you scroll to the fourth choice. Only three choices appear in the selection menu at a time.

Extras on disc 1 are limited to a screenwriter commentary and the "Liar’s Dice" game. The commentary is better than many, but the delivery is sort of dry. The game would hang up in the game play screen on my Sony BDP-S1 with firmware 1.50, but firmware 2.0 eliminated the problem. Disc 2 is all standard-definition content, but the sheer volume of content pushes the rating to 3.5. You get these features: "Bloopers;" "Johnny Depp;" "Davy Jones;" "Sword Fighting;" "Bone Cage;" "Pre-production Diary;" "Cinematography;" "Creating the Kraken;" "Updating the Theme Park Ride;" "World Premiere;" "Producer’s Diary." The disc package claims seven hours of extras.

The Sony BDP-S1 player was frustratingly slow loading this disc and the menus with firmware 1.50, but 2.0 made the menus operate quickly and the disc loaded about 50% faster.

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