UHD BLU-RAY

All three ‘Divergent’ movies get the full 4K movie treatment.

Only a few years ago there was that rash of movies based on dystopian young adult sci-fi novels: Hunger Games, Maze Runner and the Divergent series. The last of these was based on three novels by the surprisingly young Veronica Roth. She was rich soon after the publication of the first novel, when she was just 21 or 22.

The story concerns a future community in a post-apocalyptic Chicago. It has been isolated from the presumed desolation outside, and organised in a weirdly ant-like manner. Young people must join a caste, usually that of their parents. Young Tris (Shailene Woodley) has been brought up in Abnegation, which is about as dour as it sounds. But she chooses Dauntless, who are the adventurous protectors of society.

Unfortunately, Janine (Kate Winslet), the leader of the Erudites, thinks that her caste, and her specifically, would do a better job of running the place that the current leadership, which is under Abnegation. It seems that humans can’t help but be troublesome.

The first movie, Divergent, takes us through Tris’ training to a point where the coup is kind of foiled. Insurgent shows us that it wasn’t foiled well enough, and it turns out that Tris must be used by Janine to decode a message left by the founders. Tris is a ‘divergent’, which means that she has the characteristics that suit her to more than one of the castes.

Allegiant reveals the world outside the wall. It turns out that Chicago was a grand experiment by the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, which lives in a futuristic community nearby. But all is not quite as it seems there either.

As is the way of these things, the novel Allegiant was going to be filmed as two instalments. The movie Allegiant is the first half. But it didn’t do well at the box office, so the second half — ‘Ascendant’ — was shelved. It may yet appear as a TV movie, with most of the main stars begging off participation — but I wouldn’t be too confident about that.

Dark matters

Sometimes I feel a little guilty writing reviews of Ultra-HD Blu-ray discs. You see, so far they’ve almost all been pretty amazing. Particularly with recent movies, talking about the video quality has had something of the feel of trying to describe, or even perceive, the differences between 98.8% and 98.9%. (There are exceptions, like the extreme grain of the original Ghostbusters movie on UHD Blu-ray.)

But these three discs really give me something to talk about. You see, I think there’s

an encoding error in the video of Divergent and Insurgent, but not in Allegiant.

Before getting to details, I should first note that due to my suspicion about this error, I spent a lot of time disc swapping. I have Divergent and Insurgent on regular Blu-ray, so I did some comparing. And the increased resolution of the Ultra-HD BD seemed to deliver a smoother, sharper image. Even though these movies passed through the bottleneck of a 2K digital intermediate, that version of 2K (2048 pixels across) scales better to Ultra HD (3840 pixels across) than it does to mere full-HD (1920 pixels across). Particularly on the bright, daylight scenes there was a greater sense of transparency with the UHD discs compared to the Blu-ray discs.

The opening scenes of Divergent are dazzling. Brightly lit, colourful and true eye-candy. This is what Ultra HD is all about.

But later we get into some darker scenes, and it was these which got me wondering. In Chapter 9, for example, there’s a mock battle between groups of Dauntless in some abandoned buildings at night. And the blacks simply didn’t seem convincing. They seemed muddy, and not as deeply black as I’d have thought they should be. That’s not to say there was any problem with banding, nor any problem with distinguishing between different levels of black. It’s just that their floor level of darkness was rather higher than I would have expected. It was as though the ‘brightness’ control of a TV had been advanced (in the perverse world of TV settings, ‘brightness’ controls black levels).

But then I noticed something really weird. This movie has an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and that means that there are black bars at the top and bottom of the picture when it’s viewed on a 16:9 TV.

I was using a 2017 65-inch LG OLED television. And that means that the black bands actually go full black. When I’m watching a 2.35:1 movie on Blu-ray or Ultra-HD Blu-ray, at night with the room lights off, I simply cannot see the black bands at all. Yay for OLED!

But with this movie, I could. Not that I noticed straight away. In the bright scenes it was hard to tell. But in that Chapter 9 section, the bars were clearly visible as dark grey rather than black. So I went back and checked the bright scenes. Yes, they were also not fully black — though it’s harder to tell when your eyes adjust for overall brightness levels.

At this point I started to get worried, as reviewers do, about whether I’d somehow

messed up calibration. So I grabbed a different Ultra-HD disc (Chappie, FWIW) and checked out some dark scenes. The black bars were utterly black. So then I popped in the standard Blu-ray of Divergent. And, yes, with that too, the black bars were utterly black!

And I should say it here: Insurgent was identical in this regard to Divergent, but Allegiant wasn’t at all. It has completely black bars top and bottom. Also, the various company logos shown when the Divergent and Insurgent discs loaded looked to have properly deep blacks.

So what’s going on? Was this perhaps intentional? I’d be surprised. It’s not just the dark scenes that suffer. There are indoors scenes of intermediate brightness that lack the pop that you’d normally expect from UHD, primarily because of muddy blacks.

Presumably when a movie is being encoded there are settings for the extreme white and extreme black. With HDR10 there are 1024 levels available. It looks to me almost like the maximum black setting was not set to 0, but something like 64. It’s like when SDR material — which runs brightness levels from 16 to 235 — is played back on ‘PC’ settings, which expect encoding from 0 to 255.

To be clear, the TV does report HDR encoding. I just think that they may have mapped the levels incorrectly.

Sound bite

Well, that’s a lot on picture. How about sound? There are no such problems here. Divergent comes in DTS:X, an Atmos-like object-oriented lossless encoding system that can make use of height channels. The other two come in Dolby Atmos. Allegiant also has a two-channel dynamically compressed audio track for TV use.

The movies really do make use of their surround sound capabilities. During the aforementioned mock battle, the sounds of weapons are well-located in space — a 360 degree space. But the highlights are the induced dream sequences in the first and second movies. There the sound is steered to encompass the scenes of challenge in a particularly impressive way.

Extras? No, these are the Ultra-HD versions only. The only extra is the provision of persistent bookmarks. You’ll need the Blu-rays if you want featurettes.