Marlowe Takes a Look Back at...CASINO ROYALE COLLECTOR'S EDITION (MGM/Columbia)

Peter Marlowe

Studio Name: MGM/Columbia (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Disc/Transfer Information: 1080p High Definition; 2.40:1 Widescreen; Region 1 (U.S.) Release
Tested Audio Track: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1
Director: Martin Campbell
Starring Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Jeffrey Wright


"...the best Bond in the franchise's history..."


MARLOWE'S PLOT ANALYSIS:

In going back to review 2006's Casino Royale on Blu-ray, there are some monumental "lines" I am crossing personally -- the main one being the fact that I am going back on a static, concrete rule that I swore to never break again. After being burned with many "double" and sometimes "triple" dips of titles I already owned on DVD but re-bought on Blu, I swore to never do it again and to continue just buying brand-new material on the high definition format. By "burned" I mean that for the most part, these re-bought titles simply didn't hold up in the audio and video departments; the experlatives I could lather on here are daunting, but most weren't worth the "upgrade" at all. After hearing similar reports from fellow reviewer friends in the industry and reading reviews in home theater hobbyist publications of "catalog" titles (reissued older films and such), my tendency to lean towards not replacing anything I already have on DVD was pushed a bit further.

That was, until one of those DVDs simply couldn't be watched any longer -- hence, enter my issue with Casino Royale. Perhaps it was from the countless repeat viewings of this title, but my standard definition 2-Disc Widescreen Edition DVD version of the film has been scratched so badly, my Panasonic player won't read it after the opening chase sequence in Madagascar. This DVD was purchased before Blu-ray was popular or even "debugged" and the format wars were still on with HD DVD, but you know something? It was one of the absolute best looking and sounding DVDs I had in my collection, with bright, vibrant colors on the 2.40:1 transfer that exhibited little to no noise or compression artifacts, and an absolutely kick-ass Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix that shook the foundations of my room. I am going to get to an entire comparison between the DVD and Blu-ray later in the review, under the audio and video performance sections...unfortunately, I had to recently put my DVD copy of this awesome actioneer out to pasture because of the freezing and skipping issues the scratches caused. In going against one of my cardinal rules of this profession and hobby, I replaced it with the second release of the title on Blu-ray, the so-called "Collector's Edition." In addition to a swap from Uncompressed PCM audio to Dolby TrueHD, the Collector's Edition includes a plethora of extras on a second disc and many more interactive goodies, if that's your thing. The 2-disc DVD version had all the Bond you can ask for in terms of extras, so this seemed a bit redundant to me.

As for the second thing I am "going back on," well, after serious consideration, I feel I should reel in my statements regarding these remakes and such for a "new generation" a bit -- it's been my personal opinion up until now that the (mostly) horror remakes of late have been catering to a mindless, self-absorbed, drug-induced young audience to introduce them to a "new take" on a given franchise...but after viewing and loving both Royale and its followup, Quantum of Solace, I have come to realize that perhaps I fall into the camp of "new audience" for James Bond. I wasn't really raised on classic Bond, and although I have seen them all and I totally appreciate the fans who say there is no Bond but Connery or perhaps Moore, I really dig Daniel Craig in the role. So, in essence, I am saying that perhaps I am guilty of being a "new generation fan" of this Bond portrayed by Craig -- and this can easily be seen by classic diehard fans as inappropriate or perhaps "misleading."

But let's get to Martin Campbell's re-injection of testosterone into the Double O Seven franchise -- while sharing the title with an earlier Bond "installment" (if you even want to call it that), Casino Royale took the franchise in a new direction and was instantly called one of the best films of '06 while finding unparalleled following when it came out on home video. Home Theater cited it as the best-selling Blu-ray of the time and video editor Geoffrey Morrison made comments to the fact that it was one of the best Bond films of all time, let down on Blu-ray only by the fact that Sony put too much blatant product placement in the film. And that's true. Everywhere you look, there's a Sony Blu-ray player being shown, or one of their phones being used...it's a bit excessive. The decision to go with a fair-haired, blue-eyed Agent 007 raised a lot of eyebrows with diehard fans -- but it ended up working in many people's opinions.

The first thing director Martin Campbell did with re-inventing the franchise (so to speak) was to eliminate (thankfully) some of the heavy-handed and campy silliness that transpired in some of the older films -- gone were the ridiculous holographic video game matches with the villain and the hammy, almost-comical sequences during the Pierce Brosnan run. Craig, being seen in under-the-radar titles like Layer Cake, plays the role as cold and steely as ice in the veins -- here, for the first time, was a Bond that could be emotionally hurt even through the shield of brawn and machine-like skills. Not only could he be hurt emotionally, but the stunts this time around were much more realistic than in the past -- "physically possible," as they have been described. Bond now shows up with scars, scrapes and body damage evidence like any other human would if they went through what he did -- and this was a refreshing change in the series. "Hurt emotionally" refers to a Bond that actually fell for and trusted a woman, letting his guard down and learning a valuable lesson for it. In my opinion, Craig plays it perfectly.

Campbell needed to bring things "up to speed" in creating this new entry in the long-running franchise, so he turned to producers and screenwriters that came up with a plot involving Agent 007 being "reinstated" by M (Judi Dench) back to "Double O" status after he makes the two necessary kills. In an eerily effective black and white opening sequence, we witness one of those kills when Bond waits for one of his agents to return home after selling secrets behind MI6's back. The sequence explains how Bond did away with the backstabbing agent's contact in flashback scenes, while completing his second kill by rubbing out the traitor of their organization.

From there, a very effective title sequence rips across the screen, going along to "You Know My Name" by Chris Cornell; as any Bond fan knows, the opening sequence of these films are crucial in conveying the tone and feel to follow -- the best example of this was Madonna's opening track for Die Another Day even though the film was horrible. Casino Royale's followup, Quantum, didn't have nearly the same kind of effective opening sequence track, relying on a rather anemic "Another Way to Die" by Alicia Keys.

Some have called the plot that follows in Casino Royale a bit daunting to follow with tremendous holes in coherency if you pay attention, but I feel it's actually easier to follow than Quantum was. We are introduced to the new villain this time around, played by Mads Mikkelsen, a ruthless, facially-scarred banker to the world's terrorists. Known as "Le Chiffre," he is seen, in the first scene, traveling to Mbale, Uganda, where he and a cohort known as "Mr. White" are promising to take care of a certain warlord/terrorist's money for him. With the millions in his care, Le Chiffre instead decides to take his obsession with poker and use his client's money to play cards, setting up a high-stakes game at Casino Royale in Montenegro.

Meanwhile, Bond (Craig) is in Madagascar hunting and chasing down a known bomb maker in an exciting sequence that leaves you almost breathless after all the running these guys do -- in events that begin to connect with one another, in classic Bond style, Craig finds this bomb maker's cell phone history which leads him to Nassau in the Bahamas, where he begins hunting down another Le Chiffre associate. This is all being done without the authorization of MI6 or M, who feels Bond has become an unstable element with no regard for orders after he killed the bomb maker instead of bringing him in for questioning. The first "Bond Girl" is introduced, the gorgeous wife of this Le Chiffre associate in the Bahamas, and after sleeping with her and chasing her husband to Miami and killing him off, Craig uncovers a plot to blow up a prototype aircraft at Miami International Airport. This is all connected to Le Chiffre, who put a ton of his client's money into betting against the stock market for this new aircraft launch, being that he's the one that set up the bombing.

Once the plot to destroy the new plane is foiled by Bond, and with Le Chiffre out the money, he reteams with M in the Bahamas to learn that the woman he slept with has been killed by whatever organization is behind all this. M gives him inside information about Le Chiffre and sends him on his next official assignment: Go to Montenegro to infiltrate Le Chiffre's high stakes poker game, with the hope of getting him to talk and rat all the world's terrorists out which he works with. On the way, he meets Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), working for the treasury that's funding Bond's stakes in the game. As the two of them spend more time with each other at Casino Royale, pretending to be a wealthy married couple, a love interest develops, which becomes a pivotal point in this film and the next, Quantum of Solace.

M puts Bond in the game because apparently he is the best poker player in MI6's service roster; but as it goes in the spy world, Le Chiffre and his people discover who Bond really is after hours and hours of grueling poker playing. The poker sequences slow the film down a bit, but to watch Le Chiffre and Bond play a cat-and-mouse mind game with each other as they try to figure out each other's next move, is almost nail-biting. Jeffrey Wright plays an American CIA involvement, also in the game to get to Le Chiffre, and his character carries over to the next film as well.

If anything, Casino Royale is a bit too long and Quantum of Solace almost feels relieving at a much-less-daunting hour and forty minutes; the plot splinters into Bond's "trusted contact" at Casino Royale, Mathis, apparently ratting him out to Le Chiffre, then a torture sequence when Le Chiffre wants his money back after Bond defeats him in poker, which leads to Bond and Vesper taking their love affair to the next level in romantic sequences and eventually the final plot twist involving Vesper not really being who she says she is. Apparently, the whole time, she has been "working" for the organization behind Le Chiffre -- the big enchilada known as "Quantum" which is of course explored in the followup. But there's even more to this story, and the final sequence in an imploding building in Italy lays it all out, with Bond finally getting to the link behind all this...Mr. White. This is, of course, where Quantum picks up, with White in the trunk of Bond's Aston Martin as he races through the streets of Siena, Italy.

Craig's Bond let himself be open to emotional vulnerability, putting his guard down for falling in love and then getting betrayed -- even on the verge of resigning from active duty with MI6. But there are just so many other underlying themes here that it all gets a bit blurry -- when we meet Craig as Bond in the next film, his rage and anger at who is behind all this and the fact that Vesper "betrayed" him makes him a completely different character than at the end of Royale. As it is with this genre of cinema, it can all get so confusing and hazy...White was behind the introduction between Le Chiffre and the terrorists in Uganda in the beginning...but while we're lead to believe Le Chiffre is the big cheese in all this, there's a strange man with glasses who meets Green (Vesper) in order to steal the money taken from Bond's winnings at Casino Royale who appears to be the real boss behind it all -- and of course, it's still Le Chiffre's millions that were taken, yet taken from his clients who want to kill him. But then, we're lead to believe White is the person behind it all, as Bond's final confrontation and subsequent beginning of Quantum suggests -- of course, we learn that there's yet another mastermind in this organization in the form of Dominic Greene in Quantum.

A problem I had with Royale was actually the choice of a new Bond Girl in the form of Eva Green -- this chick is neither sexy nor attractive in any sense of the word, but if modern cinema is taking a page from The Dark Knight's replacement for Katie Holmes, I'm out of the loop. There's also an issue with the redundant "getting nowhere" theme regarding Bond and his search for the truth behind this organization -- in my view, the ending of Quantum didn't seal this up at all even though it was supposed to, and the character's constant hunt for more and bigger members of this group across all corners of the world gets daunting over two motion pictures. I could go on and on about seemingly obvious plot holes in these two films, but let me just say that I thoroughly enjoyed Casino Royale and have learned to really like Quantum of Solace, and both have received countless hours of repeat play time in my system. I am looking forward to Craig's next entry in the franchise, which has been greenlighted for pre-production.

Now, let's take a look at the Blu-ray as compared to the DVD version in the following categories, because there's a great deal to say on that matter:

VIDEO QUALITY:

Okay. First, let me point out that the DVD transfer of Casino Royale never left me wanting, and depending on the sequence or shot, the quality bordered on almost HD-like. Greens were saturated and rich, and the outdoor sequences in the Bahamas were stunning with detail galore for standard definition. Some artifact elements, noise and poor shadow detail crept in, but it was suitable and acceptable for DVD. I never had an issue with the DVD release, and if it weren't for the damaged disc, I wouldn't have bothered switching to the Blu-ray.

From the very opening black and white sequence with Bond and the double-crossing fellow agent, there is more detail on the 1080p Blu-ray, but from start to finish, this disc doesn't really look tremendously better than the DVD, and I said that when I first rented the Blu-ray version years back. The same issues that plague the DVD in the exact same spots appear on the Blu-ray but in different ways; the opening sequence, while intentional, is grainy and it's heightened by the 1080p encode. The sequences in Casino Royale looked pretty crummy on the DVD with macroblocking in the blacks and noise in the closeups of the poker table -- on the Blu-ray, these sequences appeared soft and unremarkable.

The sequences that looked great on DVD look the same or better -- these include most of the outdoor shots such as when Bond arrives in the Bahamas. The DVD looked stellar in these scenes, and the Blu-ray takes this up a notch with tremendous detail in the faces and an even more electric glow to the greens of the palm trees. A closeup of the dead wife Bond sleeps with in the Bahamas as she rocks in a hammock looks almost dimensional to the point that the sand on her face can almost land in your living room. Other video demo moments from the DVD include Bond coming out of the ocean, Bond lying with Vesper in the sand at the end and White being shot in the leg in the final sequence -- these were all enhanced with unreal detail and clarity. Still, I cannot help but feel that the DVD, too, was great-looking and satisfying enough on so many levels. The Venice shootout at the end exhibited some eye-popping detail when the shots of the outside of the collapsing building were onscreen...you could almost make out every piece of rock and concrete in the structure.

But those aforementioned interior sequences within Casino Royale were as disappointing as on the DVD; the image at certain points collapsed into an almost DVD-like level of softness that really took me out of the experience. At the end of the day, I have to say that of you already own Casino Royale on DVD, this is not worth the upgrade if you're playing it on a good upconverting deck. It looks good, sure -- but it just doesn't best the DVD all that much.

AUDIO QUALITY:

The audio was a disappointment -- but let me explain what we're dealing with here, first. The Dolby Digital 5.1 track on the DVD version was absolutely wall-rattling with wallops of LFE in the action sequences and nonstop surround activity during shootouts and chase scenes -- I never usually gush over a lossy Dolby Digital mix, but this one was absolutely fabulous. The original release of Royale on Blu-ray carried the Dolby mix (at a higher bitrate) and an Uncompressed PCM track that I recall didn't impress me all that much as compared to the Dolby mix.

This "Collector's Edition" Blu-ray swaps the PCM audio for an English Dolby TrueHD track, which, theoretically, should yield identical results, just about. I don't know if it was an issue with my player doing the decoding of TrueHD to multichannel PCM, but I was simply not moved by the TrueHD audio as compared to the Dolby Digital track from the DVD believe that or not. From the opening "You Know My Name" title sequence, the TrueHD track lacked visceral punch and was missing loads of LFE information that was on the Dolby mix. Now, this could be because of that infamous "LFE bug" problem that plagued this generation of Panasonic players (which I own), but whatever the cause, with the exact same calibration levels and settings, the TrueHD mix didn't move me the way the walloping Dolby Digital track did.

I knew all the standout moments in this film as far as sound goes -- there are so many of them; when Bond chases the bomb maker in Madagascar, there was an overwhelming amount of bass when Bond breaks through the fence with the construction machine on the DVD. On the Blu-ray, there was little to no effect here. The same thing happened with the end sequence when the building is coming apart in Venice -- this sequence exhibits heavy, aggressive wallops of LFE that simply weren't there on the TrueHD track as decoded by my player. I always found myself needing to turn the volume down on the DVD whenever I watched it because it was so hot and aggressive in terms of levels -- this simply wasn't the case with the BD.

I would be curious to hear from others regarding their experiences with Casino Royale and the TrueHD track on the Blu-ray; I'm curious if the issue lies with the decoding of my player (which I must use because it doesn't bitstream TrueHD) or if the disc itself just doesn't sound as good as it could have. If you have any information about the audio on Royale and care to share it, please do.

Still, all the wild, aggressive directional surround cues from the DVD's soundtrack were here -- police cars flying into the surround channels, the pouring rain of a Ugandan forest, the bullets firing around the soundstage in the final Italy sequence. There was just a lack of "heft" and presence on this TrueHD track, as exhibited by my system, that the DVD didn't exhibit at all. It's really a head-scratcher.

SUMMARY:

Indeed, the best Bond film to come along in awhile, with enough energy and charisma to reinject this series with a fresh boost of octane -- and the followup carries in those footsteps if not as good a film as Royale. Classic, diehard fans are understandably standoff-ish regarding Daniel Craig in the lead, but "new generation fans" have been enjoying him.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

As I mentioned, the video and audio in my opinion do not warrant a repurchase of this if you own it on DVD -- unless you have viewed the BD and feel it indeed does look and sound better. I didn't think so -- especially in the audio department, but that may be due to equipment issues. As I wait to decide on a player that bitstreams TrueHD (of course, all do now), all I can say about the "Collector's Edition" Blu-ray is that there is a second disc of extras and some interactive material, yet nothing really, save for the Dolby TrueHD track, stands out beyond the original Blu-ray release or even the extras-loaded DVD versions for that matter. The 1080p video, while stunning in some places in terms of detail and clarity, just isn't truly night and day over the DVD's transfer, in my opinion.

If anyone has any other findings regarding the TrueHD audio as compared to the DVD's Dolby Digital mix, I'd be interesting in hearing about it.

dsskid

Peter, I found the audio portion to be excellent (as well as the video transfer).

I'm not sure if the problem resides in your BD player, receiver, audio calibration, or a combination of any of the three, but you may want to have it looked at.

I know that you have been talking about getting a new BD player for the past few years, but please don't review the audio portion of the disc if you do not have a system capable of processing TrueHD, or DTS MA for that matter. Your comments may cause others to pass up on a high quality movie, such as this one.

To everyone else, I would definitely rate this as a "Buy".

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