Friday Night Lights Blu-ray Review

Friday Night Lights

Blu-ray Review
Universal Home Entertainment
Released: January 6, 2009

Friday Night Lights is based on the bestselling book by H.G. Bissinger and stars none other than Billy Bob Thornton.  This inspirational sports film has finally hit the Blu-ray format for the first time courtesy of Universal Home Entertainment.

Friday Night Lights focuses on the town of Odessa, Texas and follows the high school football team on their road to what they hope is a state championship title.

They have a head coach, Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) who has to take the reigns and is expected to do nothing but win from everyone in the town.

The team is made up of a variety of characters with the cast consisting of some great young actors such as Lucas Black, Garrett Hudlund, and others.  The movies follows the highest of highs for these high school kids, as well as the lowest of lows.

When I watched Friday Night Lights I immediately began to compare it to other inspirational sports films, such as Remember The Titans, Coach Carter, and others.  While I still give the nod to Remember The Titans, this film definitely holds its own and is worth watching for fans of inspirational sport stories.

The video quality for this Blu-ray release is extremely clear as the video is presented in 2.35:1 aspect ratio and is crystal clear throughout.  The colors are vibrant and the gritty scenes have some great little details you will be able to pick out, a big jump up from what we saw on DVD.

The audio is presented in a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix and does a fantastic job of really engrossing you in all of the action during the big football scenes.  Though it is not demo-quality, it definitely packs some great hits!

In terms of extras on this Blu-ray release, we get some good stuff here starting out with feature commentary with director Peter Berg and author Buzz Bissinger.

From here, we are presented with a few featurettes such as the Story of the 1988 Permian Panthers, which is a documentary on the real players the film is based on.

There is also a piece on Tim McGraw and how he had a role in this film, as well as some videos from the Permian Panthers called Player Cam Action Shots.

There are a couple of other little extra throw-ins here as well, such as deleted scenes, but nothing really special.

We do get a BD-Live feature in the form of My Scenes, as you can share your own scenes with buddies on the BD-Live interface.

Friday Night Lights is well-worth checking out on the Blu-ray format for fans of inspirational sports movies, as it packs quite a punch and tells a great story.

Film 8.2 A well-done sports film that tells a great story overall.

Video: 9.0 A great video transfer with nice clarity, flesh-tones.

Audio: 9.2 The audio mix packs one heck of a punch!

Extras: 7.9 Though more Blu-ray exclusive stuff would have been nice, this is a good set of extras overall.

Final Score: 8.4

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