A few weeks ago the folks at Fox Home Video finally put out the complete X-Men Trilogy on the good old Blu-ray. I checked out the X2: X-Men United Blu-ray and came away feeling mixed. If you have Blu-ray and don’t own the DVDs then this is a must buy set as X-Men and X2: X-Men united are two of the best comic book films of all time. X2 is epic, while watching it this weekend I was forced me to think of last week’s X-Men: Wolverine and how much better it should have and could have been. Wolverine actually affected my enjoyment of X2 because I kept going, wait a second Wolverine totally screwed up a lot of stuff and didn’t even bother to try and remain consistent with the current trilogy. Technically Fox considers Wolverine a reboot of the franchise but if that’s the case then they shouldn’t have had Patrick Stuart do his cameo at the end which, um,,, Hello? Linked the Wolverine film to this trilogy! Anyway, X2 is an almost perfect movie. Watching it on Blu-ray, I didn’t notice much of an improvement in picture or audio quality over the already pristine DVD version. But it is a nice 1080p, 2.40:1-framed transfer.
The Disk has subtitles in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin and Portuguese. The audio is English 5.1 DTS-HD, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese 5.1 Dolby Digital, with a full commentary track from Director Bryan Singer and Cinematographer Tom Sigel. With a separate commentary with the Production Team: Producer Lauren Shuler Donner, Ralph Winter, Co-Writers Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris and Screenwriter David Hayter. The menu navigation isn’t as bad as on most Fox Disks. I can actually easily get around and it’s not overly busy.
In addition to the commentary tracks it includes Marvel Universe Trailers for Wolverine, the other X-Men Movies, Daredevil and Fantastic Four and it includes BD-Live Functionality. The 2nd disk is where the package really shines it’s filled to the brim with hours of extra featurettes – all in 480p standard def. There are features on everything from scoring the film to the make-up effects to fight choreography, Bryan Singer always puts a lot of love into the extra features on his films and it’s on display here. The only problem is, I think I’ve seen all of these on the regular X-Men United DVD.
I like this package a lot and at $19.95 on Amazon and $55 for the full Blu-ray Trilogy set, it’s a must own for any Blu-ray fan.
Movie – A+
Video – A
Extra Features – A
Audio – A
Menu Navigation – B
Final Overall Grade – A
EM Review
by Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 5.09.09