Smallville The Complete Seventh Season Blu-ray Review

Smallville The Complete Seventh Season

Blu-ray Review
Warner Home Video
Released: September 9, 2008

Smallville has made the move to the high-def Blu-ray format as Warner Home Video has released Smallville The Complete Seventh Season on Blu-ray.

Smallville has been around for quite some time now, and made its debut long before shows such as Heroes, and big motion pictures focusing on superheroes conquered the ratings, and the box office.

The series, from Warner Bros., focused on the future Superman, Clark Kent, growing up as a teenager.  The show was kept as an over-the-top teen drama basically, which put Superman into a whole new category of characters in regards to TV drama figureheads.

The seventh season of Smallville is a lot of fun, as you get some great new characters, as well as the recurrence of old familiar faces.

Familiar villains such as Brainiac (James Marsters) continue to cause headaches for Clark Kent (Tom Welling).  He continues the plot of Clark’s demise.  Season seven begins the process of going through a variety of mysteries, such as the Veritas Group, and much more.

All in all season seven does a great job of advancing things, and setting the stage so that you can’t wait to check out season 8.  The seventh season was not my favorite aspect of the show, as too many of the episodes in season seven seemed wasted compared to seasons in the past.  A good continuance of the bigger story though.

Smallville The Complete Seventh Season on Blu-ray looks great in regards to video quality.  The film is presented in 1080p VC-1, and is nearly flawless.  Fans of the series are going to be very happy with the strong image transfer, with some terrific colors, impressive contrast, and deep black levels.

The only minor hiccups with the video quality some with the fact that some of the scenes from the show are just hot up to HD-quality.

The audio mix is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, and does a good job of allowing the sound of the episodes to be showcased well.  The highlight of the audio mix is clearly the dialogue, which is allowed to take priority over everything else.  This, unfortunately, leaves the sound effects and such to come off a bit flat in spots.

The Blu-ray release of Smallville: The Complete Seventh Season packs some decent extras, starting off with two audio commentaries with creators Miles Millar and Al Gough, producer Ken Horton, Todd Slavkin, and writers Kelly Souders, and Brian Petersonas.

On top of those figures, you also get the cast such as John Glover and John Hartley chiming him.

Beyond the audio commentaries, there are some nice featured added in as well.  My favorite has to be Jimmy on Jimmy, which is a roundtable chat which features young and old actors.  All of the actors have played Jimmy Olsen, making it a fun view.

There is also a feature known as Supergirl: The Last Daughter of Krypton, which looks at the origins of Supergirl, explaining more for fans.

The extras are rounded out with a few animated shorts, as well as deleted scenes, and a digital comic.

Overall, Smallville The Complete Seventh Season has received a nice release on the Blu-ray format.  The only downside is that the show leaves a bit to be desired leading up to the big final season.  Fans should pick this one up though to continue the collection, a nice buy on Blu-ray.

Episodes: 7.0 Not the best season of Smallville, but sets things up for the big finale.

Video: 7.8 A nice video transfer on the Blu-ray format, great colors.

Audio: 7.0 The audio mix is well-done for a TV show on Blu-ray, nice use of dialogue in a clear and crisp manner.

Extras: 6.0 The extras really disappointed me, not a whole lot here for fans.

Final Score: 7.5

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