The Film
Avengers: Infinity War is so balls out (and no, I’m not talking about Thanos’s chin) with its franchise-combining ambition that you’d have to be almost clinically dead not to be entertained by it. Fitting so much into a coherent and engaging 160-minute film rather than a 10-episode TV show really is a colossal accomplishment. And yet…
For me (and I realize this isn’t a popular opinion), it tries so very, very hard to throw the universe and everything in it onto the screen that in the end its relentless mix of character horseplay, galactic-level villainy and huge, usually CGI-dominated spectacles actually becomes a bit exhausting. And ever so slightly hollow.
Maybe when there are so many things to care about, it’s hard work to really care about any of them.
It also seems that the Russo brothers’ usual flare for staging and action (as demonstrated brilliantly in their two Captain America films) fails them somewhat with Infinity War – maybe lost to the sheer enormity of simply getting a film as monumental as this one ‘in the can’ without it sucking.
That said, I definitely get why Infinity Wars has proved such a critical and commercial hit. It does, after all, deliver more laugh out loud zingers than many flat-out comedies; its scope truly is mind-boggling; and bad guy Thanos is a cut above the norm with both his charisma and his troublingly credible motivations. Plus, I guess, there are certainly worse criticisms that could be aimed at a film than ‘it’s exhaustingly entertaining’…
Release Details
Studio: Disney/Marvel Studios
What you get: All-region 4K Blu-ray, Region A/B/C HD Blu-ray, Digital download code
Features: Commentary with the writers and directors; four featurettes; four deleted scenes; gag reel
Best soundtrack option: Dolby Atmos
Video options: HDR10
Key kit used for this test: Oppo UDP-203 4K Blu-ray player, Samsung QN65Q9FN TV, Panasonic UB900 4K Blu-ray player
Picture Quality
As I wrote in an earlier story, Avengers: Infinity War’s journey to 4K Blu-ray hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing.
For starters, despite The Black Panther appearing on 4K Blu-ray boasting the premium Dolby Vision HDR format (with extra scene by scene image data to boost picture quality with compatible TVs), Disney has for some reason opted not to offer Dolby Vision on Infinity War. Despite Dolby Vision being available for the film’s digital streaming release.
The other issue for some AV/movie fans is that (despite the existence of a well-supported petition about it) Disney hasn’t offered the option to watch Infinity War in its IMAX aspect ratio (and large format picture quality). The 4K Blu-ray only carries the 2.39:1 ratio version used in non-IMAX movie theaters.
Regarding this latter point, the petition I mentioned has kicked off an interesting debate over whether the IMAX or 2.39:1 ratio is the ‘correct’ or best approach for home video. While both sides have compelling arguments, however, the Infinity Wars 2.39:1 version does seem to include a few more slightly awkward crops than other films with IMAX sections. A result, perhaps, of the way that for the first time with a Hollywood movie, almost the whole of Infinity War was shot for IMAX.
If you’re able to put what the Infinity War 4K Blu-ray does not offer behind you and focus on what it does, it’s actually still a pretty good looking effort overall.
For instance, many close up shots of the human characters and their real rather than digitally enhanced outfits look strikingly detailed and crisp – clearly beyond HD’s capabilities. Especially in bright scenes and during the film’s rare relatively static shots.
The final showdown in Wakanda with Thanos provides a particularly consistent run of shots that illustrate this sharpness, with, strangely, Vision’s skin proving especially good at highlighting the 4K advantage.
Some of the shots in this sequence reveal some outstanding detailing in the trees and grass around the action, too. In fact, by the time you’ve added in the joint effects of the 4K release’s reasonably aggressive HDR and use of expanded color, some of these relatively bright shots and locations really do approach reference levels. Look, for instance, at the shot where T’Challa ‘departs’ while trying to help one of his warriors to her feet. Genuinely stunning stuff.
The HDR’s impact is strong when it comes to ramping up peak light highlights (the scene where we are introduced to the Guardians of the Galaxy is particularly impactful in this respect), and counterpointing those ultra bright peaks against some profoundly inky blacks. The 4K Blu-ray’s light range clearly extends substantially beyond the top and bottom ends of the HD Blu-ray’s image.
It’s good to see, too, that the strong, rich black levels haven’t been used as any sort of dumping ground for video compression artefacts.
Grain haters, meanwhile, will love the polished, clean look of Infinity War’s digital images. And for the avoidance of doubt, this polished look is appropriate to the way the movie was shot, not the result of any sort of noise reduction processing.
The Infinity War 4K Blu-ray outperforms the HD, standard dynamic range HD Blu-ray with its colors too. Tones often look spectacularly rich and bold, and the expansion of the color palette gives the picture a more solid, three dimensional look.
The main issue I have with the Infinity War 4K Blu-ray’s picture (aside from its lack of Dolby Vision and IMAX options) is its consistency. For starters, while some shots look spectacularly detailed and sharp, others can look pretty soft by 4K standards. Only slightly sharper than the HD Blu-ray. This issue is particularly noticeable during extremely special effects-heavy sequences – of which there are, of course, rather a lot.
I don’t have any information on whether the film’s effects were rendered in 2K or 4K, and even the situation regarding the film’s Digital Intermediate seems confusing; until earlier this week IMDB was showing the DI as 2K, but recently changed this to say 4K DI. In the end, though, the slightly soft appearance of some parts of the film (such as, particularly, all the sequences on Titan) on 4K Blu-ray is all that matters, not the reasons behind it.
If I was being picky I might also say that the film’s many dark interior scenes are a little conservative in their use of HDR – especially considering how aggressive the disc can go with HDR elsewhere. But this is presumably a deliberate mastering choice.
Sound quality
Disney has been dropping the ball pretty spectacularly with the audio tracks of many of its recent 4K Blu-ray releases. They’ve sounded weirdly compressed and short of dynamic range.
The Dolby Atmos track exclusively found on the Infinity War 4K Blu-ray sounds better to some extent than previous horror shows such as Black Panther and, especially, Thor: Ragnarok.
For starters, unlike Disney’s poorest soundtracks, I didn’t need to turn the volume of my Atmos system significantly higher than my usual reference level to get it sounding equivalently loud to other Atmos tracks. There’s also considerably more bass extension in the mix than you get with Disney’s worst efforts, meaning that now when one of the film’s endless ‘big impact sounds’ hits, it actually hits, working your subwoofer and expanding the sound stage.
Action scenes also reveal more dynamic range in the rear channels than we’ve become accustomed to hearing with Disney 4K Blu-ray audio mixes, and the rears also seem somewhat more active. There’s some clearly defined stereo rear mixing, and aggressive transitions from front to back and vice versa sound almost as full blooded in the rear as they do in the front.
However. The rears still aren’t as consistently present as they might be in a film containing so much action and scale. Vocals sound slightly small and restrained – one impact of which is that I sometimes felt aware that dialogue was coming from my speaker just below the screen rather than from the actors’ mouths – an issue that seldom happens with Atmos mixes.
Use of the height channels is rather limited too for a film with more going on in the vertical as well as horizontal domain than most. And finally, while it’s a blessed relief to find bass levels more pronounced this time round, there’s still a rather compressed feel to the low extreme of the mix that stops it achieving the sort of ultra clean, layered, three-dimensional sense of audio space that really great Dolby Atmos True HD mixes manage. The bass sometimes sounds more like a continual grumble than a perfectly rendered rumble.
So to sum up: Infinity Wars marks a step in the right audio direction, but there’s still work to be done.
Extra features
Aside from frustratingly only putting the provided director/writer commentary track on the HD Blu-ray (it’s absent from the 4K one), Disney has done a solid job with the Infinity War extras.
The commentary is just about worth your time. There are some useful insights into creating such a mammoth story, as well as some interesting character background. It’s a bit lacking in fun, though, and tends to focus on the narrative rather than film-making anecdotes or challenges. It feels at times, too, that having the writers and directors together actually stymies the flow of banter, rather than leading to a free-flowing creative ‘group hug’.
Four short featurettes are up next. The first of these about bringing the multiple threads of the Marvel Cinematic Universe together is easily skipped. More worthwhile – though hardly classics – are The Mad Titan and two Beyond The Battle featurettes (which include some fun stuff on the video effects and locations)
The four deleted/extended scenes are all well worth a look for different reasons – especially the last three, which add respectively an interesting extra beat to the attack on Vision in Edinburgh; welcome extra Guardians humor; and extra backstory to Thanos and Gamora’s relationship that might well have given a bit more impact to their story arc if it had been allowed to stay in the film.
The inevitable gag reel, meanwhile, is worth a couple of minutes of your time.
Verdict
While it’s frustrating that Disney has inexplicably stepped back from a couple of film- and AV-fan features with arguably its biggest 4K Blu-ray release to date, the Avengers: Infinity War 4K Blu-ray is just good enough on the picture front to be worth buying instead of the HD Blu-ray. Especially as its audio offers at least a small improvement over the messes Disney has been providing on some of its 4K releases.
All of which makes me wonder as I wrap this up if maybe I’ve been too harsh on Disney’s latest 4K disc release. Here’s the thing, though. In Disney we have a company that surely has access to the very best technical assets as well as the very biggest movie franchises. So it kind of feels like we should be getting true reference standard, demo-grade blockbuster 4K Blu-ray releases from them every time. Yet for whatever reason, right now that just isn’t happening.
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