THE FIFTH ELEMENT SPIDER-MAN
It’s back, and this time it’s in 4K. Luc Besson’s sci-fi masterpiece had a chequered history on Blu-ray, so Stephen Dawson discovers if the UHD release delivers the full bada-boom...
Here we go again! The Fifth Element is a movie I first caught — partially — on broadcast TV. Analogue TV, that is. And only partially because, being a science fiction nerd, I couldn’t cope on that particular evening with Chris Tucker’s OTT performance. But in 1999 it came out on DVD, with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and a video bit-rate of 4.6Mbps. Four years later it received the Sony premium treatment, coming out as a ‘Superbit’ version with a video bit-rate of 7.6Mbps and DTS 5.1 sound.
Then in 2006 I got my hands on the region-free Blu-ray release. That was produced by Sony in the US. It bumped the bit-rate up to 17.6Mbps, but used only MPEG2 format and LPCM 5.1 sound, as was common with the first few Blu-ray releases. And it was a horrible transfer. People complained. Sony listene,d and responded a year later with a remastered version with superb video and Dolby TrueHD sound. But then when Sony released the Australian version, it arrived with LPCM again, prompting dark speculations that
Sony had dumped the leftovers of
the substandard first version on our shores. But those speculations were wrong. The Australian version had the higher quality video. I reviewed that disc in Sound+Image back in 2008.
Then, for corporate reasons beyond my ken, distribution in Australia went from Sony to Madman Entertainment. The video stream on Madman’s version was identical (I checked 999 frames and they proved to be bit-perfect matches) to the Sony US version of the disc, but the audio was now Dolby TrueHD again.
Now Madman has this Ultra HD release to tease us back to a new purchase. And the second disc in this release by Madman Entertainment is identical to that earlier Madman release. And while the standard Blu-ray differs a little to the US Sony release (it’s locked to Region 4 and it lacks the usual Sony test patterns), the UltraHD version is Sony through and through, including having the 3.5-minute UltraHD test patterns which can be invoked by pressing ‘7669’ on the remote while at the main menu. And including Sony’s standard, weird, practice of having 16 chapters in the movie placed at more or less random scene breaks. By contrast, the Madman Blu-ray has 13 chapters, sensibly organised.
On the UHD disc, the movie is presented in HDR10 with the usual BT.2020 colour space, and 10-bit 4:2:0 colour resolution. (The standard Blu-ray scores BT.709 and 8-bit 4:2:0.) The video bit-rate, as far as I could tell by eyeballing the readout from time to time within the movie, tended towards around 60Mbps during action scenes, occasionally blipping up
to 80Mbps, and dropping to around 15Mbps in predictable areas like the rolling credits.
The first thing I noticed was the richness, the glorious, depth and boldness of the colour. Besson chose a future that was bright and colourful, rather than the dour look so often used. This UltraHD Blu-ray version conveys that better than anything so far, whether it be the first glimpse of the infinitely deep blue of the sky over the desert, or the costumes of the gliterati in the space cruise.
The movie was shot on film, of course, in Super35 format. That uses a standard 35mm film with a spherical lens, but with the optical audio track omitted to allow a wider frame (up from 21.95mm to 24.89mm). More width means more resolution, although not as much as with an anamorphic lens. And 1997 pre-dates digital intermediates, so there was no bottleneck there for resolution. This movie presents with a fine scattering of grain, noticeable only if you look for it. Otherwise, detail is glorious. It somehow seems sharper than the Blu-ray. It’s unclear if Sony telecined the print afresh, but it certainly looks like it might have.
Yes, some of the digital special effects don’t hold up perfectly, given the visual transparency of this disc. But neither did they pull me out of the movie.
The sound is high 1997 quality. Here it has received another upgrade into Dolby Atmos, based on Dolby TrueHD 7.1 for those without a full system. There’s plenty going on, for sure. The bit-rate indicator on the player was hovering around 5.5Mbps most of the time.
There are plenty of featurettes on the Blu-ray disc. But there’s a new 10-minute one on the UltraHD disc — ‘The Director’s Notes: Luc Besson Looks Back’. It’s basically Besson talking about the film. It’s UltraHD in resolution but SDR/Rec.709, but still with 10 bits of video resolution.
You will note that I’ve barely mentioned, you know, the movie! In case you don’t know, it’s a wild adventure in which retired special forces soldier Bruce Willis joins up with a shadowy cult and the alien Milla Jovovich to save the world. They’re opposed by, amongst others, Gary Oldman. It’s a fine cast and a lot of fun.
I should also mention the brief appearance of the recently deceased Luke Perry. At the time he was a star of the long-running teen-soap Beverly Hills, 90210. Why he was in this movie is a mystery. He’s on screen for five minutes, sitting around, doodling, then looking scared. Perhaps the important thing was having his name on the posters.