Blu-ray Review: Unbreakable

Unbreakable

Blu-ray Review
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
Release: April 1, 2008
MSRP: $29.99

Unbreakable comes from the brilliant mind of M. Knight Shyamalan. He was the writer, producer, and director of this film. This was his second major hit following the success of The Sixth Sense. Unbreakable stars Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, woven in a story which will have you engrossed from start to finish.

The story of Unbreakable is based around a man named David Dunn, played by Bruce Willis. David is the lone survivor of a major train accident at the start of the film, and somehow managed to walk away without any injuries at all.

David, rejoined with his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) and wife Audrey (Robin Wright Penn), finds himself wondering how in the heck he was the only person to survive, and survive without any harm.

Following a memorial service for those who died, he has a letter on his car windshield from Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson). David finds things out about himself that he never even knew, such as the fact that he is virtually indestructible, can’t be hurt, get sick. Etc. The story is extremely imaginative and the combination of Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson is phenomenal. Fans of M. Knight Shyamalan will not be disappointed.

The video quality of this Blu-ray release is presented in 1080p in AVC MPEG-4 codec. Compared to the past DVD release of the film, the video quality here is very well done. The video is not perfect, as there are some areas with grain and such in the video. For the most part though it is a fairly clean Blu-ray transfer. The flesh tones and black levels easily take the cake as the most impressive aspect of the video presentation, with the vibrant colors in a close second.

The audio is presented in an Uncompressed PCM 5.1 track, as well as a Dolby Digital 5.1 track. The Uncompressed PCM 5.1 track is superb with an amazing amount of detail and use of spatial sound to entrench you in everything going on.

The film comes to life through this audio mix with a great musical score and tremendous sound effect detail. Dialogue is also top-notch in the center channel.

There is a nice array of special features included here in this Blu-ray release. The first up is a set of deleted scenes which have introductions from M. Night Shyamalan. These run in total for just under 30 minutes and actually look quite good on Blu-ray. Shyamalan explains where the deleted scenes would have gone in the film, why they were cut out, etc. This goes above and beyond your typical set of deleted scenes thanks to the involvement of the director here.

There is also a 15-minute behind the scenes feature with Bruce Willis. This is your making-of feature for the release with a heavy emphasis on Bruce Willis talking about stuff from the film. Pretty typical stuff here, but entertaining to watch once.

My personal favorite is the Comic Books And Superheroes – Exclusive Feature With Samuel L. Jackson. This looks at, exactly what you would expect, comic books and superheroes. It runs for about 20 minutes and has Samuel L. Jackson going into great detail about the topics at hand, how they relate to the film, etc. A great feature to say the least.

On top of that, there is also a multi-angle feature for the train station sequence. This runs for under 5-minutes and allows you to watch the train sequence and switch back and forth to the original storyboards to see how closely things match up.

Rounding out the features is a short featurette called Night’s First Fight Sequence. This is early footage showing one of Shymalan’s first early homemade films.

Film: 8.5 A great film from M. Night Shymalan, with tremendous acting from Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. Terrific story, premise, and directing.

Video: 8.0 There is a bit of grain in the Blu-ray video transfer, but overall the flesh tones are great and the black levels are very solid.

Audio: 8.8 An enjoyable audio mix with terrific sound effects and musical score.

Special Features: 8.5 Some top quality stuff here, the lack of audio commentary with Shymalan is a bit disappointing though.

Final Score: 8.6

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Interested in picking up this release? Head over to Amazon at the link here - Unbreakable [Blu-ray]