Blu Ray Screencaps of Predator.
This is the original blu ray edition of Predator and takes up around 21GB of disc space, there are no extra features other than a trailer, it is enabled for D-Box motion control should you own it. The plotline for Predator should be well known by now, an elite commando team mount a rescue mission in the central American jungle.
The team led by Dutch ( Arnold Schwarzenneger ) are highly skilled and soon find the guerrilla base, when one of the hostages is shot they storm the camp and make short work of the guerrilla forces.
Dutch finds his old friend Dillon lied about the mission and they pick up a prisoner, a young woman named Anna, the team make their way to the extraction point but find something is hunting them, they are being killed one by one, their foe is no ordinary human being but an extra terrestrial alien that loves to hunt it's prey, they must make a stand or die.
Predator is an exciting film, well paced with a fantastic music score that is memorable, the cast assembled for the film are just perfect and everyone gets a few lines that enhances their individual characters, the scene where they storm the guerrilla camp is well put together and is a textbook example of how to stage a large scale action sequence, it's a scene which had to be trimmed in order to get an R rating on it's original release but despite this it still works very well.
John McTiernan went on to direct Die Hard straight after this film and he deserves a lot of credit for how well this film turned out, i felt it brought something fresh to the genre by mixing horror, sci fi and action. Its a very enjoyable film which i never tire of watching.
This release originally had poor reviews with some complaining about the film grain being too heavy, the problem is that the people complaining had their television or projectors sharpness control set wrongly and too high, this would have made the grain look more prominent and unnatural, those who bothered to lower their sharpness would have seen a pretty decent image.
Note that film grain in blu ray screencaps as featured below will show grain that when viewed as a screencap looks different to when viewed in motion, you will find it more pleasing to the eye when in motion, high definition detail needs this grain, if you remove it you will remove the fine detail, grain in screencaps is captured in a frozen form, in motion it moves with the image and is very natural, high definition detail relies on it and film grain should never be removed.
Image quality could be considered inconsistent at times, this is due to how the film was shot, some scenes have been zoomed in due to lack of coverage shots, these scenes have more grain and are slightly softer in detail, they make up a small percentage of the films running time, there are some compression artifacts due to the use of low bitrate MPEG2 on a 25GB disc but generally speaking you get what was filmed and the disc presents it warts and all.
This is a considerable step up from any DVD edition of the film, it could have been better if they had used the AVC codec and a 50GB disc but it's not nearly as bad as some of the reviews would have you believe. Indeed more reviewers need to understand how film is captured, maybe then the reviewers will understand what film grain is and why it should be preserved.
The sound mix is better than expected, it could be they have used the 70mm six track mix for this release, i don't know if thats the case but the music score benefits from the lossless dts master audio 5.1 track provided for the disc, i felt speech was clear and when the action starts and the bullets fly you get some directionality and the subwoofer kicks in appropriately and goes reasonably deep, it isn't anywhere near as dynamic as movies today but it gets the job done.
People should buy this disc and avoid the Predator Ultimate Hunter Edition which is a trainwreck of a transfer and has removed the film texture, see screencaps and read more about that here.
This is a classic film, it's one of Schwarzennegers best and features a cast of well known faces, you will recognize Carl Weathers who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky films.
View blu ray screencaps of Predator below. Click twice for the full HD image.
