******
- Verified Buyer
I usually never provide my opinions about a film's acting or summary of plots as they have been done to death elsewhere, but I must say that I really enjoyed this action film. That said, this review is given its 5 stars based solely upon the actual quality of both the transfer to Blu Ray, its audio and video qualities.Keep in mind that the quality of what you see and hear also depends upon the quality of TV monitor you are using and its accompanying home theater processor and speakers. I have a pretty high end,7.1 esoteric system and am judging the Blu Ray off of that. One last thing, I do wish Amazon would separate the film reviews into Blu Ray, Standard Def and Streamed categories. It is a pain to have to scroll through a ton of streaming reviews just to find a review of the Blu Rays.VIDEO QUALITY....It is unfortunate that instead of paying for just the film and extras you wanted you are also paying for a long advertisement regaling the greatness of 4K's format as well as several (5) long previews of other films. These just take up room on the disc which demands a further compressing of the footage of the movie you are paying for. The more compression any movie has, the lesser the quality of the what you are seeing and hearing.Never the less, the footage in White House Down is really very clean and without artifacts or aliasing anywhere that I could see. The color grading is warm and slightly saturated, however, for this Blu Ray it appears that the blacks have been somewhat crushed too much. Despite much of the film taking place in shadowy & dark areas, the crushing of the blacks removes some of the small details. In light areas, details in hair and skin textures do come back. The average Mbps rate generally stayed at around 27Mbps and this is surely due to the pointless advertising and previews in the beginning of the disc. These ads all take up room on the disc causing for more compression as I stated before.There is a good deal of CGI effects throughout the film and the CGI was done very well. In many cases in other films CGI and Blue Screen fx are quite obvious but not for this film. The only area where I thought the CGI was less than stellar was in a long shot showing smoke and fire in the dome of the White House. This short shot just didn't appear very real to me. However, for the rest of the film, it was beautiful created and done.AUDIO QUALITYThe lossless 5.1 DTS HD MA audio codec is a major star and player in this film. Regarding this codec, I have come to believe that any lossless DTS HD MA codec is superior to any Blu Ray with a lossless Dolby Digital True HD codec. The dialogue is clear and transparent in this film and does not get stepped on by the massive number of loud and expansive sound fx of gunshots, explosions, car chases and helicopters/jets. The editors did a wonderful job of editing the audio so that there is a goodly amount of immersive sound ambience. Your LFE sub channel gets and aggressive workout throughout the film. Discreet steering of foley fx between the front and rear sound stages as well as the left and right surrounds made White House Down on Blu Ray a real theatrical pleasure. A+ for the audio here.EXTRAS....I certainly do not count the ad for 4K and 5 previews of other films as extras. That said the extras are plentiful and very enjoyable. The gag reel has several instances of goof ups and other extras regarding The Beast(the presidents car), Recreating the White House, a doc on the weapons used, VFX boundaries, creating the action scenes, and much more were all very well done and interesting. They were far more than the usual talking heads type of extra we see in directors commentaries. I watched them all in one sitting. Unfortunately, there were no deleted or extended scenes.Then there is the Ultra Violet copy of the film which, when I went there, as usual was a pain in the butt. They direct you to both UltraViolet as well as Flixter and I have always had difficulties with both. I would like to be able to just download it to my iTunes app where I can access it at any time.I do hope that this review has been of some help to you in deciding your purchase. All my blu ray reviews focus only on the actual quality of the transfer to blu ray so I hope some of them may be of help to you as well.Thanks for reading.
