Buy Either The Blu-ray Disc Or DVD Edition Of Casino Royale Now By Clicking On The Respective Icons Below!

Title: Casino Royale: 2-Disc Widescreen Edition & Blu-ray Disc Combined Media Review

DVD Region: One

Blu-ray Disc Region: A

Genre: Spy-Fi Action Thriller

Stars: Daniel Craig, Eve Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, Judi Dench, Tobias Menzies, and Caterina Murino

Writers: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis

Based On The Novel Casino Royale By Ian Fleming

Director: Martin Campbell

Feature length: 144 minutes

Extras: Becoming Bond, James Bond For Real, Bond Girls Are Forever (2006), Chris Cornell Music Video, Previews

Blu-ray Disc Languages: English PCM 5.1 Uncompressed Surround Sound and English, French, and Spanish Language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound

DVD Languages: English and Spanish Language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and French Language Dolby Surround Sound

Blu-ray Disc Subtitles: English Subtitles For The Deaf And Hearing Impaired and English, Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai Language Subtitles

DVD Subtitles: English Closed Captions and English, French and Spanish Language Subtitles

Blu-ray Disc Packaging: Blue BD Case

DVD Packaging: Single Size Two-Disc Keep Case Within A Cardboard Slip

Blu-ray Disc Chapter Stops: 16

DVD Chapter Stops: 28

Blu-ray Disc Sound: PCM 5.1 Uncompressed Surround Sound and Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound

DVD Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Surround Sound

Year of Theatrical Release: 2006/Blu-ray Disc Release: 2007/DVD Release: 2007

Theatrical Distributor: Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures

Home Video Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Reviewer: Mark A. Rivera

The twenty-first official entry in the James Bond 007 spy-fi action series finally brings Ian Fleming’s timeless hero into the post-9/11 twenty-first century with Daniel Craig portraying a newly promoted 007 on his first assignment to stop a notorious money launderer for terrorist organizations named Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), who made a fortune shorting select airline stocks the day after 9/11, suggesting that he may in fact cause disasters to profit by them. The mission is not to kill Le Chiffre because despite his nefarious nature, both MI-6 and the CIA are aware that Le Chiffre has a shadowy benefactor and therefore Bond first arranges for Le Chiffre’s next big market investment goes against him by preventing the destruction of prototype giant airliner leaving Miami. This forces Le Chiffre to hold a high stakes poker game in order to get back his funds before his terrorist investors kill him. Together with Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) at his side to watch over Bond’s financial dealings, 007 enters into a game that if he wins could put Le Chiffre at the mercy of the British government and force him to reveal his sources in return for sanctuary, but if Bond loses he would have directly been involved in a botched operation leading to the British government’s direct funding of terrorism, which of course is not an option anyone is willing to live with.

Judi Dench is the only actress to reprise her role as “M” from the previous four Bond entries, but otherwise this is a less polished Bond film in the sense that Daniel Craig is portraying Bond at the beginning of his career and thus we are watching his development into the character movie fans have come to love over the last 40 plus years. However like all of the 21 official Bond films to have been produced, Casino Royale has been updated to match with contemporary times and so it is and yet it isn’t a prequel to the previous films so much as it is finally a serious feature film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s book. The book had been previously dramatized in the 1950s as a TV program and then in 1967 it was used as the basis of a spoof of the entire spy-fi genre with David Niven portraying Sir James Bond. Craig is a departure from the previous actors to have portrayed Bond on the big screen. It is too soon to tell whether he will remind fans of one characterization over another, but personally I think he brings back some of the rogue masculinity and vitality that Sean Connery brought to role in the first film Dr. No. Director Martin Campbell proves to be a wise choice for the introduction of this new Bond for a new generation, just as he had for Pierce Brosnan’s post-cold war 1990s Bond in Golden Eye. Eva Green has fine chemistry with Craig on screen, but Italian bombshell Caterina Murino nearly steals Green’s status as a “Bond Girl” with only a few short, but sultry memorable scenes. To be a “Bond Girl” is arguably even more exclusive than being a Playboy Playmate of the Month. Tobias Menzies, who viewers may recognize from his role as Brutus on the HBO/BBC original series ROME makes for a good young assistant to “M” though I must confess I missed Colin Salmon as the Chief of Staff for M in the previous Bond entries that featured Pierce Brosnan. The action sequences and screen direction are excellent and this is the best Bond film I have seen in a long time.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is presenting Casino Royale on both DVD and Blu-ray Disc with a widescreen (2.40:1) aspect ratio presentation that preserves the manner in which the film was exhibited theatrically as close as possible for home video users. With the English PCM 5.1 Uncompressed Surround Soundtrack and a native resolution of 1080p, Casino Royale is a terrific demo disc for impressing perspective Blu-ray Disc consumers, but the extra value features are not up to par on either the DVD or Blu-ray Disc release to the excellent 007 DVDs release by MGM and MGM through Fox over the past years. I suppose the black and white top menu and the animated transitions to standard interactive still frames on the DVD are in keeping with the theme of this film sort of being both something old and something new, but the lack of any extra features associated with an A-list release such as Casino Royale beyond a handful of documentaries is truly a disappointment. Where is a cast commentary or Director’s commentary? How about a trivia track? The theatrical trailers are not even included here and on the DVD and the little insert booklets that have accompanied both the MGM and the recent Fox two-disc sets are also not included within the DVD. Instead there’s just an advertisement for the Atlantis at Paradise Island, Bahamas. The weak extra features on both releases leads me to believe that perhaps in a year or so there could be a more deluxe DVD and Blu-ray Disc release, but nothing has been officially announced.

The image quality on the Blu-ray Disc is stunning and vibrant to behold with MPEG4 AVC encoding used. The MPEG2 encoding on the DVD does look good and while I would not expect a DVD even upconverted to look as good as a Blu-ray Disc, I was kind of surprised by the fine grain and somewhat dull picture quality on the DVD. Considering the work Sony has done on DVDs over the years, I find this DVD transfer while not at all a bad picture, still definitely not up to the quality of other Sony DVD releases and it does not look as good as some of the original MGM Special Edition DVD releases of the Bond films either. The Blu-ray Disc also features English, French, and Spanish Language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound along with English Subtitles For The Deaf And Hearing Impaired and English, Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai Language Subtitles are encoded as options while the DVD features English and Spanish Language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and French Language Dolby Surround Sound and English Closed Captions for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired and English, French and Spanish Language Subtitles encoded as options on the first disc.

The main extra value features, which are identical on both the Blu-ray Disc and DVD, include (1.78:1) widescreen documentary shorts Becoming Bond (27:18) and James Bond For Real (24:31). The American Movie Classics 2006 edition of Bond Girls Are Forever (48:49), which is divided up into sections that can be viewed individually or collectively with a “Play All” feature is presented in a (1.33:1) letterboxed aspect ratio as is the Chris Cornell music video for the excellent theme song, You Know My Name (4:08). The Blu-ray Disc features trailers for The Pursuit Of Happiness (2:26), The Holiday (2:25), Stranger Than Fiction (2:36), and a Blu-ray Disc promo while the DVD also features previews for Premonition (2:31), Spider-man 3 (2:31), and Spider-man 2.1 (1:55). All of the previews on both the Blu-ray Disc and DVD editions are presented with Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound.

Already on the top ten best selling Blu-ray Discs and DVDs available at retailers on and offline, Casino Royale Blu-ray Disc and Casino Royale: 2-Disc Widescreen Edition are available now courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

© Copyright 2007 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.

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Buy Either The Blu-ray Disc Or DVD Edition Of Casino Royale Now By Clicking On The Respective Icons Below!