X-Men 3 The Last Stand
April 2007 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

X-Men 3: The Last Stand took some heat from critics, but was a box-office smash hit. From my perspective, it is a nearly perfect comic-book-on-the-big-screen. Comic books don’t often aspire to literary or critical greatness. They and their characters have a specialized appeal, and X-3 captures it just fine for me. After listening to their commentary tracks though, I don’t understand how the directing, writing, and producing staff ever pulled off a movie like this. They seem to have so little knowledge of or appreciation for their subject.

Picture quality is quite excellent from a transfer point of view. I saw few problems with the transfer, and the ones that were visible were fleeting, just a few frames at most. On the other hand, Brett Ratner shot this movie in Super 35 format, which means there is less film-area per movie frame. Spherical lenses are used, so the film frame has the same aspect ratio as the presentation in movie theaters or home theaters. Most films are shot with anamorphic lenses that distort the image horizontally, squeezing it so everything looks tall and skinny. The anamorphic format uses a larger area of film per frame, so images tend to have less visible grain and each frame looks sharper. You can see the film grain quite easily in just about every scene of X-3. You can’t fault the Blu-ray transfer for this though. You are seeing exactly what was captured by the filmmakers. The transfer of X-3 is about as good as transfers get on 25GB Blu-ray discs, but overall picture quality is limited by the Super 35 shooting format.

The sound is very good, in spite of the fact that there are no Blu-ray players or surround processors yet that will decode DTS-HD. My sound came from the 5.1 analog outputs of a Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray player, limiting the quality to the highest bit rate supported by standard DTS 5.1 sound. Even with that limitation, the sound is pretty impressive: clear, clean, dynamic and very well detailed. It serves the movie quite well. It’s annoying that I can’t hear the best sound on this disc right now, but it is somewhat comforting that when surround decoding hardware, or perhaps firmware updates for some Blu-ray players, catches up, the disc does have waiting what will undoubtedly be better sound.

Special features included in this release are the same as the DVDs: director, writer and producer commentaries; deleted scenes; three alternate endings. The only HD extras are an added text-in-a-window "Trivia Track" that pops up trivia facts as the movie plays, and a movie trailer. The weak commentaries and lack of HD special features are responsible for my weak Packaged Extras rating.

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