The Great Gatsby (UltraHD Blu-ray) 2013

Director: Baz Luhrmann Starring: Steve Bisley, Vince Colosimo, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Jack Thompson

I’m introducing two new things to this page with this review. First, Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ isn’t technically a musical but, damn, the music is so important that it might almost be. Secondly, UltraHD Blu-ray. Yes, it’s about time, and no doubt there will be some legitimate musicals and music titles appearing in this format at some point, for the moment the content is almost entirely modern. The oldest disc I’ve seen so far was the original 1984 ‘Ghostbusters’, and that was likely a tie-in to the cinematic release of the 2016 version. UltraHD Blu-ray offers significant technical improvements in picture quality over regular Blu-ray. Obviously there’s the matter of increased resolution: 3840 by 2160 pixels, rather than 1920 by 1080. But there’s also High Dynamic Range and Wide Colour Gamut. Most UHD discs to have appeared so far have defined their colours and brightness using ten bits per pixel per colour rather than eight. Instead of fewer than 250 grey levels, there are more than one thousand, and there’s a ‘colour space’ that encompasses three quarters of what the human eye can see instead of about only one third. This movie is an attempt at making F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic into a movie. The success with which this has been achieved is disputed. I wouldn’t know, being innocent of the novel. What I do know is that, not being locked into comparing it with the literary source, I found it quite gripping, bright and engaging, and very surprising. Leonardo DiCaprio is simply the most magnetic screen presence of the current era, while Carey Mulligan simply works as a woman over whom men would obsess. How good this will look will depend on how good your UHD display is. In particular, in handling the expanded colour and brightness ranges. And the same applies to the sound. Unfortunately, the analytical tools for UHD Blu-ray don’t yet exist, so I’m unsure of the technical details of the sound track. The Blu-ray version (you get both the UHD and Bluray version in the box, along with authorisation for a ‘Digital Copy’ for your portable device) scores DTS-HD Master Audio sound at 16-bits and 48kHz. The UHD Blu-ray also scores that format at 48kHz, but I cannot confirm bit depth. To me it sounded the same on both discs. And on both, it is exciting with a huge list of music contributors, not from the 1920s when it is set, but from the modern day where Jay-Z and so on are rapping and singing.