Media Studies: On Control, Censorship, Self-determination and Whether The Mandalorian Will Ever Be Available on Blu-ray

Appointment television is no longer a thing. Most millennials would probably find the notion of having to sit down at a broadcaster-dictated time to watch a programme utterly preposterous, and they wouldn’t be far wrong. Even I, perched precariously on the cusp on middle age as I am, have only watched seven episodes of a show “live” in last couple of years (Line of Duty, obviously). Don’t get me wrong, if my phone pings to tell me that there’s a new episode of Better Call Saul on Netflix, I’m all over it that same day – but at a time when it’s convenient for me.

Above: The last stand of appointment television - BBC One’s Line of Duty.

Advances in streaming technology have kept pace with consumers’ demand for convenience, creating an extraordinarily low-cost yet extremely high-quality marketplace where viewers and listeners can access unprecedented amounts of content on demand. Assuming that you can afford to subscribe to most video-on-demand services and a single music one, you can feel just like a crewman on the Starship Enterprise, with almost the total sum of human culture only ever just a “Siri” or an “Alexa” away (or a “Computer”, if you don’t mind fiddling with your settings to get the full Enterprise effect, as I have).

 

Despite years of careful acquisition and curation, I haven’t listened to any music from my own iTunes library for a long time now. It’s all Apple Music these days, quick and seductive. Admittedly, this is largely due to me never getting the chance to listen to any proper music anymore (as my kids dictate the soundtrack to our lives), but, even so, pre-subscription (by which, of course, I mean pre-free six-month trial) I was throwing away endless £0.99s on some of the most vapid, jaunty tunes imaginable for the sprogs. I do miss the excitement of ripping the shrinkwrap off a new CD, though - almost as much as I miss choosing what I’ll listen to. Fortunately, with the marketplace as it is, I know that I could still buy an album if I wanted to (even one of The Mandalorian’s many, many soundtracks), and in the meantime I’m at least saving some wear and tear on my index finger and Apple Wallet.

Even books aren’t immune to the march of expediency, with the likes of Kindle Unlimited attempting to digitise the library experience, albeit with a tragically limited catalogue, and of course Audible serving as its audiobook sister service. There are also newer apps like Readly effectively compressing an entire newsagents (sans the top shelf) into a single app. It’s saved the missus a fortune on her disposable monthly magazines already - and the planet a fair few trees.

In the last forty years, rarely has a decade passed without one home media format superseding another, but never before has the media landscape changed so dramatically – and so fundamentally. In the past, music leapt from vinyl to CDs and back again as the coming of downloads transcended mainstream physical media altogether. There was some messing about with cassettes along the way – a form of piracy so feeble that it was tacitly accepted by just about everyone - and even some foolhardy business with MiniDiscs, but those of us who went down that dark path never talk about it. VHS was replaced by the much better and much cheaper DVDs and DVRs, which in turn found themselves quickly outmoded by HDD recorders and seemingly unbeatable 50GB Blu-ray discs. Yet the Blu-ray disc evolved to hold twice the amount of data so that it could carry 4K UHD video, and last year’s complete Game of Thrones box set pushed the bar even further still with the first triple-layer 150GB discs. In the background, satellite TV grew from a premium multi-channel service to a PVR that allowed its viewers to record, pause and instantly rewind live TV (which, I gather, impressed people who had yet to realise that it was live TV itself that was the problem – not one’s former inability to rewind it). Throughout all this, though, a single pattern held: people bought stuff. They owned it. Albums on CD. Movies on video. DVD box sets. iTunes downloads. Blu-ray steelbooks. 

Above: Watch in 4K HDR with Atmos sound on disc, or on NOW in “Full HD” (well, the frame at least might be 1080p...)

For years, we’d suffer through our favourite shows on the telly as they were carved up into four acts and interspersed with advertisements, only to later buy them on VHS or disc so that we could enjoy them unsullied by logos and ads, in far greater quality than when they were transmitted and alongside some exclusive bonus material. Now, though, once original content drops on a service, it’s available on demand indefinitely thereafter, and even if it’s not up to disc quality, the difference is imperceptible to many viewers. For the vast majority of people who’ve not invested in a 4K UHD Blu-ray disc player, 4K HDR streaming is sure to be a huge step up from what they’ve previously been used to. As such, to general consumers, the shift from broadcasting and home video to streaming is, obviously, an incredibly welcome one. But such convenience comes at a cost, even if it’s not necessarily financial.

Subscriptions to even just the most popular of on-demand services will make quite a dent in your monthly outgoings; however, when accounting for inflation it actually amounts to far less than many people will have paid for satellite TV packages and the odd DVD box set in the past, and in terms of quality there is no comparison at all. The best streaming services are now churning out critically acclaimed original movies and shows at a staggering rate, most of them presented in impressive 4K HDR and with decent (if lossy) multi-channel audio to boot, and of course each also boasts a varied – albeit apparently random, in most cases – back catalogue of historic content that can be viewed on demand.

Above: Netflix's Marvel Cinematic Universe shows have only a small presence on Blu-ray and digital in the UK.

No, the real cost of subscription services can’t be measured in pounds and pence, but rather in terms of their impact on collective fandom - and in particular the passionate nerd’s instinctive urge to further his/her/their own private media collection (they can never be complete). This issue has been quietly gathering steam for several years now, ever since Netflix stopped releasing their various “street level” Marvel series on home video (The Defenders has yet to see the light of day on disc, while later seasons of the peerless Jessica Jones and passable Iron Fist still aren’t commercially available at all in the UK), but the arrival of Disney+, with its new mainstream Star Wars and Marvel programming, has brought the matter to a T-visored head.

Streaming services not making their originals available to purchase is nothing new, of course, but as wonderful as, say, Ricky Gervais’ After Life, is, the prospect of not being able to own their own copy doesn’t send entire legions of people into the sort of rabid frenzy you might find a Star Wars devotee in when he/she/they realises that, having spent most of his/her/their life slavishly hoarding discs and tie-in merch, The Mandalorian won’t ever sit gleaming away on his/her/their shelf in a case hewn from molten beskar. 

But then I had a Mando taking his helmet off sort of moment. As I caught myself idly Googling “Mandalorian Season 1 Blu-ray release date” for about the eighth time this week, a few startlingly obvious truths hit me: 

(i) I could watch The Mandalorian again at any time on Disney+, which I’ve no plans to cancel as it continues to regularly bombard me with enticing new Star Wars and Marvel shows for a preposterously low annual fee; 

(ii) I don’t really want to watch The Mandalorian again at the minute; 

(iii) I don’t have time to watch The Mandalorian again at the minute; 

(v) I still haven’t got round to watching all of the Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian docuseries, which, from what I’ve seen, is of a much higher quality than most home video special features are these days.

(vi) I can no longer count using Roman numerals.

So why do I want to chuck fifty to sixty quid at an environmentally-unfriendly product that both technology and society at large have decreed is obsolete? Surely it’s not just for a shiny steel case? Wouldn’t that money be better spent on another year’s Disney+ subscription? Surely... this isn’t the way?

It’s a difficult question for even me to answer, and as such it’s easy to see why Disney executives have yet to commit to any sort of physical or digital release, particularly when they have to weigh the current exclusivity of their content (and the countless subscriptions that it yields) against any short-term financial gain to be made in making it commercially available in another form. Until this January, The Mandalorian was Disney+’s big poster show, and even with all the new Marvel series gradually assuming its thunder, I still believe that it’s their biggest draw. The two have become synonymous.

Whilst on our biggest TV and Atmos sound system, physical media does look and sound much better than purchased or streamed content (the bitrate of streamed 4K is often half of a 1080p Blu-ray’s and just a fraction of a 4K UHD disc’s, and much of Disney+’s content is limited to 5.1 surround - even the Star Wars movies which boasted Atmos soundtracks on last year’s 4K UHD physical release), the most honest answer that I could give is that I just like collecting media. I love holding it. Appreciating the artwork. Devouring the collector’s booklets. Knowing that I have the best possible version available to watch on demand without having to sign in and be force-fed cookies. Like the wealthy frittering away their millions on old paintings, it’s as much about ownership as it is appreciation. I like being a freeholder, not a tenant. This is the way.

Such abstruse motivations will be of little interest to Disney and Lucasfilm, though, and constructing a practical argument for home video releases in the 2020s becomes incredibly difficult indeed when you consider that, in no time at all, better technology will close the gap in quality between digital and physical content. I can’t even hide behind the old, “My Internet is rubbish” argument anymore because I’m on KC’s best Lightstream package. Though pricey, it is insanely fast and efficient - I’ve had more power cuts in the last year than I’ve had buffering issues. Likewise, whilst I’ve always been quick to lament the shoddy housekeeping of many streaming services – episodes presented in the wrong order (BritBox...), or with the wrong thumbnails (BritBox...), or with metadata so riddled with typos and inaccuracies that it would never have got passed the VPRC (Amazon, Netflix, NOW, BritBox, Apple TV+...) – I certainly can’t level the same complaint at Disney+, which not only boasts a beautiful interface with regularly refreshed, stunning 4K artwork (check out the new May the Fourth images, if you haven’t already), but also appears to take reasonable care when it comes to tagging. Even bonus material – yes, Disney+ movies boast “Extras” of the type once exclusive to home video releases, not to mention specially commissioned docuseries for all of its flagship shows – is neatly presented and nicely tagged under a separate tab. Hell, I can’t even whinge about The Simpsons being the wrong shape anymore as Disney+ lets you choose to watch the episodes in their original aspect ratio, if you prefer, remembering your preference so you don’t have to opt-out of the bastardised versions every time.

Above: Rest in peace, DVD extras?

In the early days of streaming, you’d hear horror stories about content suddenly vanishing – something that shouldn’t happen with media that you own (unless you lend it out to unreliable friends... or get burgled... or accidentally scrape scissors across the surface of a disc, as, unaccountably, a lot of people seem to do). Yet, even with licensed third-party content, most providers now give ample warning on when a movie or series will leave their service, and such things are, to date, unheard of with a service’s original programming – and it’s only such content that I’m concerned with here. A lot of older films and programming may be destined to forever float between services, but “originals” should have the same sort of permanence as if they were burned into a disc on a shelf.

Or so I keep telling myself.

Above: Remember when The Simpsons used to start their seasons with episode 2? No, I don’t either.

 
Yet one or two things give the cynic in me pause. The control freak in me that won’t concede a single decision to anyone else recoils in disgust when he remembers that someone, somewhere high in the echelons of Disney decided that The Simpsons’ third-season premiere, “Stark Raving Dad”, was too controversial to be hosted on Disney+ after two men accused guest star Michael Jackson of sexually abusing them when they were young boys. Now I loathe censorship in all its forms (and, needless to say, sexual abuse / harassment too), but I particularly take umbrage with people who are unable to separate an artist’s work from their personal life and, rather than simply boycott that artist themselves, they try to force everyone else to do so too. Yet watching “Stark Raving Dad” is no endorsement of Michael Jackson or his alleged wrongdoing; it’s enjoying The Simpsons. Watching The Mandalorian doesn’t mean that you agree with Gina Carano’s contentious social media posts, or the opposing philosophies of her woke co-stars for that matter. Entertainment is supposed to be an escape from all that shite - quite literally escapism.

Above: Carasynthia Dune - not Gina Carano, the actress who played her before she annoyed the Internet.

But herein lies the danger: when content lives exclusively on a streaming service, it’s vulnerable to the whims and caprices of corporations and their perceptions of viewers’ sensibilities, which - Mary Whitehouse excepted - have never been more sensitive. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see half the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who vanish from wherever it currently resides just because Noel Clarke is facing allegations of sexual harassment and John Barrowman is rumoured to have to got his cock out a lot on set. Fortunately for me, every potentially “offensive” episode of Who is steel-clad on a disc on my shelf, and so I couldn’t care less about its online fate, but were Disney+ ever to revise or remove The Mandlorian, there’d be no way for me to see it again, or at least see it again as it exists today. And let’s face it, the franchise has got form on this front: just look at the number George Lucas did on his original Star Wars cut, and that was years before both streaming and hypersensitive consumerism. The only copy of the original Star Wars movie that I own stands all of 326 pixels tall on a letterboxed and pillarboxed DVD, and even that took some hunting down.

Above: Poor Mickey the Idiot. Likely to be struck from the public record just for looking like a young Noel Clarke.

I also find streaming very limited in a practical sense when measured against both discs and purchased digital media. As if punishing subscribers for having spent the late nineties and much of the noughties stretching and compressing the people on their screens using every ill-conceived means that their hefty old widescreen CRT tellies provided them with, most subscription services now lock their content in a 16:9 frame irrespective of its live dimensions. Whether it’s a film in 2.35:1, an old show in 4:3 or a modern programme in any of the dozens of fashionable aspect ratios in between, streaming services’ apps lock out your options to zoom in on the image, which is a real pain if you’re trying to watch a 2.35:1 movie on a 4:3 tablet or small 16:9 TV or phone. With discs (and iTunes purchases, for that matter), you can zoom in as and when you please - on an iOS device or an Apple TV it’s a simple as a double-tap. Streaming services rob you of a useful choice with one hand, and with the other give you an option to watch things at the wrong speed. Infuriating madness.

Above: Well that’s gym night ruined. So much for the upcycled dumb TV / Apple TV 3.

Worse still is my inability to watch subscription content where I want to. I have a repurposed third-generation Apple TV (the version before they integrated the App Store) in my gym plugged into a 40” dumb TV which I use primarily to watch iTunes purchases, and in theory should also be able to mirror video content to from my iPhone or iPad. But - you guessed it - the Disney+ app blocks me from mirroring downloads to it. As does BritBox’s. And Amazon’s... With streaming services, it all has to be on their (often poorly thought-out) terms. And so the debate on physical media isn’t necessarily about tangible vs intangible, or even renting vs ownership, anymore - it’s all about self-determination. All about control.

And so will The Mandalorian ever get a home video release? Or WandaVision? Or The Falcon and the Winter Soldier? Or The Bad Batch? Or the final seasons of The Clone Wars and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD? I certainly hope so, for the reasons outlined above, but my feeling on the matter is that over the next few years the last vestiges of physical media will disappear like the Jedi after Order 66. Like Yoda on Dagobah, certain high-end, specialist releases may endure for a while as the video connoisseur’s equivalent to vinyl, but I’m not especially hopeful given the apparently poor sales performance of even recent 4K UHD steelbooks. A couple of years ago, pre-orders would sell out within hours of a release being announced, whereas today, Zavvi are still struggling to shift last year’s stunning “Skywalker Saga” 4K UHD steelbooks even having slashed their price (just £24.99 a chuck now, if you’re interested). The main reason we don’t have Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager on Blu-ray is because CBS spent a fortune painstakingly remastering Star Trek: The Next Generation from its original film elements, only to find me and fourteen other fans waiting to buy it. We must remember that markets are consumer-driven, and passionate fans only account for a small fraction of mainstream sales.

Above: Warner Bros and DC continue to support home video with the Snyder Cut on 4K UHD Blu-ray.

Some will take comfort in the fact that many similar franchises (DC, Star Trek) still make their original content available to purchase on home video (and, in DC’s case, surprisingly rapidly after the shows have dropped on HBO Max, The CW, EPIX or wherever), and, indeed, in most studios continuing to release their made-for-cinema movies on home video - Disney chief amongst them. This is still precarious, though, as the COVID-19 pandemic has driven a wedge between studios and cinemas that leaves a question mark over the future of the industry. More importantly, though, we must note the differing practices of Amazon and Netflix: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is still jailed behind Amazon’s subscription paywall, and while Netflix did, mercifully, eventually release El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie to buy, it was only on Blu-ray and digital HD – you still need your Netflix subscription for the definitive 4K HDR version. If we do ever get a Mando release, then, it will probably be a downscaled, vanilla edition and at a point in the future when it has either stopped working as an effective lure for new subscribers or Disney+ has enough exclusive content not to worry about such things (by which time, home video releases could effectively serve a taster for potential Disney+ subscribers... assuming that they are not as dead as a MiniDisc by then).

Above: Amazon, obviously, don’t.

If you are reading this article, then you’ve almost certainly asked Google whether The Mandalorian is available on Blu-ray and so probably have as keen an interest as I do in keeping home video alive. I therefore ask you this: if it ever does materialise on disc, please buy the damned thing; Hell, get your mum one for Christmas too. Because one thing is for certain – Disney certainly won’t be releasing any more of their streaming exclusives on home video if no sod buys it.

You can subscribe to Disney+ here for either £7.99 per month or £79.90 per year. 

BritBox is still offering a short free trial which you can sign up for by clicking here. Thereafter it’s £5.99 per month or £59.99 per annum (just as Disney+ was before it incorporated STAR as a mandatory part of the package for all its subscribers). 

Netflix aren't offering free trials any more (they finally learned...) and they charge double what Disney+ does for 4K HDR, but you can still sign up here if you fancy it. 

I’m five months into a twelve-month Apple TV+ trial and I would only recommend two shows - Ted Lasso and For All Mankind - but if you think it might be your bag then you can start your own free trial by clicking here. 

Amazon Prime is only worth bothering with for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Star Trek: Picard is available in much, much better quality on Blu-ray). Just watch Borat next time you order something and find that they’ve tricked you into your nineteenth free trial of Prime.

Apple Music are still offering three-month free trials. You can sign up here. The service costs £9.99 per month thereafter which is slightly more expensive than other similar services, but I haven't tried them yet so couldn't comment on / recommend them.

Readly comes highly recommended from both the missus and the kids. I'ts cheaper and greener than endlessly buying and recycling magazines, and you can get a staggering six-week trial by clicking here. The service costs £7.99 per month thereafter.

You can start a thirty-day free Audible trial (and get a free audiobook) by clicking here. The service costs £7.99 per month thereafter and entitles you to one audiobook per month. Your books are yours to download and keep, even after you cancel your membership, and, despite their DRM, are compatible with iTunes. It's much cheaper than buying audiobooks through Amazon (the prices of which appear to be deliberately inflated to drive you to Audible), but still more expensive than buying audiobooks through Apple Books if you use CheapCharts to keep track of price drops.

Crisis on Infinite Platforms (or, "A Plot to Watch Crisis on Infinite Earths") - UPDATED

It’s the end... of the worlds. Or it certainly feels like it if you’re living in the UK, four months on from the conclusion of Crisis on Infinite Earths on the CW, yet still at least five weeks away from being able to watch it yourself. However, now that Batwoman has finally premiered in the UK on E4, we can at least put together a multi-platform plan on how we’re going to watch it – a plan made needlessly complex by NOW TV’s terribly timed pulling of Arrow’s final season and the question mark hanging over its Blu-ray release.

At the time of writing, Supergirl’s opening hour of the crossover (originally broadcast on 8th December last year in the US!) is available to stream on NOW TV until 15th July 2020 along with the other episodes of the fifth season that have dropped in the UK so far (and, I suspect, those still to drop between now and then). A NOW TV Entertainment Pass costs £8.99 per month and you can sign up for a week’s free trial here. However, I would strongly recommend purchasing a two-month Entertainment Pass from Currys instead as, at just £10.00, it offers much better value than NOW TV does directly, and, locked down as we are, two months will probably give you enough time to catch up on all of this season’s Arrowverse episodes broadcast to date in addition to its centrepiece Crisis.

Above: Batwoman takes us back to Smallville

After the first part, though, things get much trickier. The second hour should air on E4 on Sunday 24th May 2020 as part of Batwoman’s first season. This hasn’t been confirmed by the channel yet, but the one positive in E4’s habitual holding back of DC content is that when they do eventually air their shows, it’s typically without any breaks in transmission. Batwoman episodes generally drop on the free All 4 catch-up service shortly after the live broadcast, albeit with several ad breaks. For those like me who simply can’t tolerate commercials, iTunes generally make Batwoman episodes available to download or stream in 1080p HD the day after their UK transmission for just £2.49 (or as part of a £19.99 season pass).

Above: Flash of Two Worlds... The DCEU's Flash meets his Earth-1 counterpart

As with Supergirl, The Flash’s third part of Crisis is already available to stream on NOW TV and is scheduled to remain there until 30th July 2020 alongside the season’s other UK-broadcast episodes (1-11 at the time of writing). However, by the time that Batwoman’s Crisis episode airs, Arrow’s will have been pulled from NOW TV. It might not, of course – last year I rushed through Supergirl’s last clutch of episodes as the NOW TV website announced that were only available until a certain date, only to find that they hung around for much longer. Nonetheless, we can’t rely on NOW TV to continue to make the fourth episode available if, as I suspect, other factors are forcing them to pull it. Once such factor is the season’s Region B Blu-ray release, which is slated for 25th May 2020 according to Amazon, who have it available to pre-order for £30.00. Unfortunately the Amazon listing is silent as to whether the Blu-ray will include all five episodes of Crisis on Infinite Earths, as the Region A release does, but if not we should at least be able to get our hands on the Arrow instalment on Blu-ray disc, which is certainly my plan as a collector of Arrow seasons. However, for those just in it for the Crisis, iTunes have already made the episode available to download or stream in 1080p HD for just £2.49. Unfortunately the full season pass includes only the Arrow instalment.

Above: Kevin Conroy's iconic take on the Caped Crusader takes a live-action turn

The fifth and final episode of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which nominally opens DC’s Legends of Tomorrow’s fifth season, is already available on NOW TV and should remain there until 1st August 2020. At the time of writing it is only accompanied by the season’s second episode.

Above: Black Lightning's back... and so is Earth-90's original Flash

The cheapest way to enjoy Crisis on Infinite Earths in the UK is therefore to wait until the Batwoman instalment drops (for free) on All4, get yourself an £8.99 one-month NOW TV Entertainment pass and purchase “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Pt. Four” from the iTunes Store – a grand total of just £11.48. Another £1.01 would get you a two-month NOW TV pass from Currys. Another £2.49 (£14.98 all told) would enable you to avoid ads, whereas another £35.00 on top of that (£49.98 in all) would get you digital season passes for Batwoman’s first season and Arrow’s final one. If the Arrow Season 8 Blu-ray matches its US counterpart for content, then £30.00 will get you all five episodes to keep forever in the best available quality, but this has not yet been confirmed.

It’s come to something when you need to be a superhero just to be able to work out how you’re going to watch your favourite superhero shows, but at last, the end (of the worlds!) is in sight.

Update - 10th May 2020

The NOW TV iOS apps allow you to download programmes to watch within thirty days - even those like Arrow that are leaving the service within those thirty days. If you’re content to watch on an iPad screen, you should download Arrow’s Crisis hour before it leaves NOW TV on 14th May 2020.

Update - 25th May 2020
The adventure continues.

For reasons known only to them, E4 have stated that they will air the Batwoman episode of Crisis on Infinite Earths at the end of the season later this summer. If you to try to stream what is erroneously labelled as “Season 1, Episode 9” on All4 you will in fact get Season 1, Episode 10 - “How Queer Everything is Today!” This comes as a particularly nasty shock if you try to stream it via the Apple TV app, which pulls some of its metadata from Apple rather than E4.

Above: E4 show that they can mishandle a crisis as well as the UK government

The silver living is that the iTunes Store have made the episode available to stream and download for just £2.49 as expected, meaning that us UK viewers won’t have to regress two formats to standard-definition DVD to be able to enjoy the complete, high-definition Crisis - provided that they get the Batwoman episode downloaded before Apple realise that they’ve made the “wrong” episode available (“How Queer Everything is Today!” has not dropped as it should have).

For those not troubled by picture and sound quality, a DVD containing all five episodes is being released today. You can order it from Amazon for £6.99. There’s no Blu-ray, frustratingly.

Finally, both Warner Brothers’ and Amazon’s updated product information for the Arrow Season 8 Blu-ray suggests that the box set (also released today) does not contain the Crisis on Infinite Earths bonus disc. Despite one hopeful reviewer’s comments (who posted his musings a month before the release date), the set is slated to contain just two discs (not three) and only ten episodes (not fourteen). I can confirm though that the NOW TV app is letting me watch the episodes of Arrow that I downloaded prior to them being removed from the service.

App / Streaming Service Review | Amazon’s Prime Video

“No, not really,” was the response that immediately leapt to mind when my mobile provider asked me if I’d like a six-month free trial of Prime Video. Having tried the service periodically before – whenever Amazon have pushed a free trial on me or the missus – I had always found it difficult to navigate; riddled with bugs; and, crucially, chock full of movies and shows that I either already owned or had no interesting in watching. This all changed when I heard that Prime had secured the rights to stream the then-upcoming Star Trek: Picard in the UK. “No, not really,” quickly became, “Yes please!”

Above: And here's me thinking that Star Trek: Picard is a CBS All Access original! Surely "Amazon Exclusive" would be a more honest slogan?

It’s telling, though, that in my five-month wait for Star Trek: Picard to drop, the only show that I watched on the platform was DC’s Swamp Thing (a bold and singularly scary series inexplicably cancelled by DC Universe as soon as its first episode aired), but even that could have been enjoyed elsewhere as it is now widely available for purchase digitally and on Blu-ray. One of my daughters has also watched a few Little Princesses, and together this accounts for the total sum of our household’s pre-Picard viewing. Admittedly, there is a plethora of content available on the platform that we love (the American version of The Office, Smallville, Arrow…) but why would we waste gigabytes of our monthly usage allowance streaming it over the Internet when we could just watch it on Apple TV using home sharing? Why to pay to rent what we’ve already purchased outright?

Above: Unless you're talking about Swamp Thing, which, even in this territory, is also available to purchase digitally. There's even a region-free Blu-ray knocking about for physical media enthusiasts. Hardly exclusive.

One such reason might be a better interface, which Prime Video does not have. In fact, Prime’s apps are even worse than NOW TV’s; ugly and laden with traps. Whilst the landing screen at least has the reserve to limit its offerings to those tagged with “Prime” in the top-left corner, if you search for a movie or programme you will often get a positive result even if the video in question isn’t available to stream as part of the subscription package. For adult subscribers watching alone, this is probably a bit annoying; for those of us with kids, it makes life impossible. “But it’s found it, Dad, look!” This mandatory store integration might be welcome for those heavily invested in the Amazon ecosystem, who also want to use the Prime Video app to stream the videos that they’ve bought from Amazon, but I’m sure that most subscribers to the streaming service would prefer a cleaner interface such as those offered by their main competitors. There’s nothing to prevent Amazon creating a separate app for consumers to make and stream their purchases or, better still, download them to PCs or home media servers to share within their homes along the lines of iTunes’ home sharing via the Apple TV’s Computers app.

Another reason would be simple convenience, but again Prime Video crashes and burns. The unpleasantness of the cheap-looking layout is indicative of the service’s rigid and clunky functionality – trying to skip backwards and forwards is a painful experience irrespective of which app or remote I’m using, while crucial functions like zoom are missing entirely. This was a particular problem for me as both shows that I watched during my free trial were letterboxed. For some elusive reason, the ability to blow up a picture is disabled entirely on my Samsung TV’s Prime app (the app actually goes to the trouble of overriding the TV’s built-in zoom feature, leaving it greyed out), while the tvOS app for Apple TV does not respond to the remote’s convenient double-tap zoom. Similarly, the iOS apps prevent you from blowing up an image, which is particularly preposterous on an iPad, where a 2.35:1 video fills only about half the available screen. The only way I could get Picard into 16:9 was by watching it on the Apple TV’s Prime app while using my Samsung TV to blow up the entire Apple TV input (controls and all) from 2.35:1 to 16:9. Losing a bit off the sides of an image may be heresy to some purists, but for me the opposite is true - at least when it comes to programmes supposedly made to be enjoyed on TVs. Whatever your view, though, if studios are going to deliberately make a TV programme the wrong shape, then viewers should at least retain the choice of how they want to view it. Amazon, in their dictatorial wisdom, take that decision away from you.

Above: Another red cross for Prime.

Above: Prime Video on an iPhone

Another key failing of Prime is the iOS apps’ download supposed download function. Even with the download quality set at “Best”, a forty-four-minute episode of Picard weighs in at a paltry 215.7MB. To put that in context, a 64-second Doctor Who trailer for that I recently downloaded from iTunes takes up 43.8MB disc space. On an iPhone 6s Plus’s 5.5” 1080p screen, trying to watch downloaded Prime content is scarcely any better than watching an old .avi file on a mid-’90s CD-ROM or dial-up Internet connection. I’d take a screengrab to illustrate my point but, true to form, none of the Prime Video apps support them – you can screengrab the menus all you like, but if media is playing, then you’ll either just get a blank screen or a blank screen with the interface on top. Another red cross for Prime.

A further irritation for me is my watchlist’s tendency to populate itself. It’s as if it’s incredulous that I’ve only got Picard on there; it can’t accept it, so it takes matters into its own hands and starts loading it up with whatever mass-market tripe Amazon Studios have recently farmed out. Having to suffer through unsolicited and irrelevant trailers half the time I try to watch anything is bad enough, but don’t go messing with my watchlist.

Above: Not X-Men, X-Ray...

Watching Picard, though, one unexpected feature has really impressed me – X-Ray. Exhaustive cast metadata is commonplace now; any half-decent media server (Plex, Emby, MediaPortal…) can readily extract information from IMDb or the TheTVDB and turn it into a prettier-than-Prime interface, but Prime Video is the first that I’ve come across to offer scene-specific cast information. I discovered the feature by accident when pausing the show, but have found it particularly enlightening ever since. I was convinced Marvel’s Clark Gregg was playing a Romulan in “Maps and Legends”, but thanks to X-ray, I could prove myself wrong without even having to reach for my phone. At last, Prime earns its first green tick.

Above: Prime Video on an iPad

Another welcome feature is how Prime deals with movies and programmes that will be leaving the service soon. These are all clearly identified and even promoted on the apps’ landing pages, encouraging viewers to get them watched while they can. Of course, the very need for this feature highlights Prime’s greatest failing: its continuing dependence on third-party content, the extent of which is diminishing as more and more studios claw back their own content to host on rival services. While Amazon offers a wide array of “Originals”, as they stand they are hardly comparable to Disney’s peerless archives, let alone the combined output of BBC and ITV. There’s not a single, Amazon-produced programme (i.e. a genuine “Original”, as opposed to licenced exclusives like Picard and Swamp Thing) currently on the service that appeals to me. That will change if the long-rumoured Lord of the Rings prequel series ever drops, of course, but that particular project is still without an expected date, two and a half years on from being announced.

Another coup for the service is its recently-acquired Premiership football, which for too long has been the exclusive preserve of BT and Sky. However, with only “up to” twenty games all season, it’s little more than a taster for viewers, as opposed to a viable means of following the competition. Again, Prime isn’t setting itself up as a workable alternative to the market leaders here – for now, it’s just a purveyor of a limited number of matches that other broadcasters can’t get or don’t want.

Above: The selling point.

For £7.99 per month or £79.00 per year, Prime Video offers its subscribers a random assortment of eclectic entertainment that’s quite capable of keeping any household entertained for a while, subject to personal tastes and the extent of people’s own media libraries. However, it lacks the easy-to-grasp focus of cheaper offerings such as Britbox and the upcoming Disney+, both of which offer near-exhaustive libraries of particular types of content for £2.00 per month less (£29.01 per year less, if you take Disney+ up on their pre-order offer). Prime can’t market itself as the home of Star Trek, for instance, or the exclusive home of Premiership football, because it’s not – it’s mostly just a rag-tag assemblage of smash-and-grabs, devoid of identity and permanence. Unless you simply can’t wait for Picard’s eventual home video release, Prime is a service best avoided – even when it’s offered for free.

You can start a 30-day free trial of Prime Video by signing up here. If you’re only planning to watch Star Trek: Picard, you might want to hold fire until at least 27th February 2020 to make sure you can watch the whole thing without having to become a paid subscriber.

4K Ultra-HD & Blu-ray Review | Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut directed by Zack Snyder

Who watches the Watchmen these days? Well, thanks to HBO’s new spin-off series, probably a few million more than were doing so a few years ago, by which time Zack Snyder's divisive masterwork had begun to fade from recent memory, overshadowed by the MCU juggernaut and DC’s ill-advised attempts to duplicate it. This revival of interest has led to the long-awaited UK release of the movie’s Ultimate Cut on the new 4K Ultra-HD format, with Zavvi even offering a luxuriant steelbook version for those prepared to invest a little more.

Above: The sold-out steelbook edition. Click to enlarge images.

Even in its theatrical form, Watchmen is one of my favourite comic-book movies – pretty unsurprisingly, really, given that the Watchmen graphic novel is generally regarded as one of the medium’s greatest masterworks and Zack Snyder is one of my favourite directors in the genre. Given his penchant for dark and moody interpretations of even the most colourful of comic-book characters, Watchmen was the ideal fit for Snyder’s subversive style as it came with its cerebral themes and sordid intricacies already in place. All Snyder had to do was stay true to the source material and his own instincts, and the “unfilmable” could finally be filmed. 

Above: The sold-out steelbook edition. Click to enlarge images.

The Zavvi-exclusive steelbook is extraordinarily striking – a yellow Rorschach ink blot on black steel is the canvas for a colour-drained montage featuring all the principal players. It may not be as iconic as the smiley-face Blu-ray steelbook, but it’s a considerable improvement on the movie poster version that was issued, and it comes jam-packed full of all manner of trivial treats ranging from a blood-spattered smiley sticker to collectible art cards. The steelbook slots safely inside a protective cardboard slipcase that shares the standard release’s artwork, which itself has been very nicely done, but as was the recent Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald steelbook, the bonus disc is separately housed in a cheap cardboard slipcase of the type you’d generally find bundled with a broadsheet newspaper. The discs themselves are unremarkable too – picture discs seem to be becoming more and more and thing of the past – but of course it's what on them that really counts.

 

Like many not-quite-recent films, Watchmen was finished at 2K, which means that its resolution here is only marginally greater than on its 1080p Blu-ray release - the picture has just been upscaled to 2160p. Already abounding with grain, the upscaled image does precious little to enhance what was already a near-perfect presentation. This release doesn’t benefit from a new Atmos or DTS:X soundtrack either - it simply ports over the Blu-ray release’s lossless 5.1 mix. This is not to say that the 4K release isn’t worthwhile, though - the HDR presentation is so drastic as to completely alter the movie’s tone, taking already dark scenes and making them even more atmospheric while allowing the comic book’s deliberately ugly accent colours pop as intended - purples, yellows, magentas and greens appear to be much more vibrant here than on the Blu-ray version from which this article’s screengrabs have been lifted (and which is also included here in the same curious way that DVDs were bundled with Blu-rays for years).

However, I was less concerned with any uptick in technical quality that this release might offer than with the expanded version of the movie itself. One of Watchmen’s great strengths on the page is the sense of total immersion that it offers - it’s not just a story, but a window into another world; a world with a rich, divergent history that twists everything from the that way war is waged right down to the contents of comic books. Zack Snyder's theatrical cut of Watchmen did a fantastic job of translating the comic book’s narrative into the movie medium, even improving upon its already jaw-dropping final act by making it much more personal, but where I found it wanting was in its absent asides. The flavour of the world conjured by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons was there, but it was missing its substance. This Ultimate Cut seeks to remedy that, finally putting one of the genre’s most divisive films on the same footing as the graphic novel on which was based.

Above: Tales of the Black Freighter, present and correct

What sets this Ultimate Cut apart from the Director’s Cut released on home video a decade ago is its seamless assimilation of the Tales of the Black Freighter animation starring Russell Crowe. A dark and impressive piece of work its own right, its inclusion within the main body of the film goes a long way to recapturing the expansive feel of the comic book. Its presence resonates outwards as it draws the audience into the street-level world of Bernard the news vendor and Bernard the comic-book fan while also serving as a grim parallel of Adrian Veidt’s own journey.

Above: Under the Hood - missing in action

At a mammoth two-hundred and fifteen minutes, this cut of Watchmen is amongst the longest movies that I’ve ever watched, yet I’m still left with the nagging sense that it should have been longer. When Tales of the Black Freighter was released on home video just prior Watchmen’s theatrical run, it was paired with Under the Hood – a forty-minute, faux-documentary that sought to capture the spirit, if not the letter, of the excerpts from the original Nite Owl’s memoir that peppered the pages of the original Watchmen issues. Snyder quite rightly took the view that dramatising Nite Owl’s accounts would have killed their world-building flavour, and so instead he crafted a spoof magazine show entitled The Culpepper Minute on which Nite Owl appears to promote the release of his book. The programme’s central chat sees Nite Owl recount several of the passages published in Watchmen almost verbatim, yet in a manner that doesn’t feel even the slightest bit artificial. Adding colour are brief snippets of interviews with Carla Gugino’s original Silk Spectre and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian that instantly bring to life the events that torn the Minutemen apart.

Above: Under the Hood - missing in action

Above: You'll need to hang onto this release for a while yet...

In my view Under the Hood is an even more crucial part of the fabric of the Watchmen than Tales of the Black Freighter as it deals directly with the rise and fall of the Minutemen and how this alternative world’s history diverged from our own, and it does so through the beautifully subjective accounts of some of those who lived through it. Admittedly, weaving Under the Hood into the narrative would have been a more challenging task than doing the same for Tales of the Black Freighter – whereas Tales’ colour-dense animation serves as a stark contrast to the murky live-action of the main narrative, Under the Hood is a live-action piece which utilises many of the same players. Yet its period 4:3 aspect ratio instantly distinguishes it from the 2.35:1 main feature, particularly as the footage has carefully been aged in the same way that later prints of the original book used dot patterns to segregate its Tales of the Black Freighter panels from the main Watchmen panels. Its exclusion from the Ultimate Cut really reeks of missed opportunity.

Leaving Under the Hood out of the Ultimate Cut might have been made a little more palatable had it at least been included in this three-disc set, but sadly the bonus material on offer here is limited to the film’s original complement of special features. This means that Under the Hood is nowhere to be found, nor is the stand-alone cut of Tales of the Black Freighter or even the enlightening twenty-five minute documentary, Story Within a Story, which served as a fascinating exploration of both. This release’s “Ultimate” billing also gave me false hope that I might finally be able to get my hands on a full-HD physical copy of the 2008 Watchmen motion comic, but, again, a corner is cut. In many respects, that motion comic is every bit as gripping as this set’s flagship live-action motion picture.

Above: The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics

What has been included, though, is still most impressive. DC and Warner Brothers rarely disappoint in their documentaries, with the depth and quality of their features seeming to increase the more that the focus is turned towards comic books, as opposed to their adaptations. The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics is a typically comprehensive half-hour retrospective devoted entirely to the creation and reception of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' acclaimed graphic novel. Obviously Moore himself doesn’t appear, but Gibbons shares a number of fascinating insights into their collaboration, and a number of DC executives and those involved with the production of the film are on hand to dissect and celebrate what many still hold up as the greatest comic book of all time.

Real Superheroes: Real Vigilantes is slightly shorter in length, but not substance. Whilst only tangentially linked to Watchmen, their themes marry quite nicely as this piece also challenges the glamorising of have-a-go heroes, taking a sober look at vigilantism with especial focus on New York's Guardian Angels organisation and a pair of real-life superheroes who are as hilarious as they are worrying. Similarly entertaining is the seventeen-minute Mechanics: Technologies of a Fantastic World feature in which Professor James Kakalios – an academic who uses nothing but comic books to teach science classes – discusses the believability of the film’s fantastic concepts, using the novel idea of a “miracle exemption” to look beyond a one-off “power” and study how that power might work in the real world. The making of the movie itself is well documented in more than half an hour’s worth of video journals, all eleven of which each take a brief look at a different scene or concept. Rounding out the extras package is the promo video for My Chemical Romance's cover of Bob Dylan’s "Desolation Row” – a track that’s clearly eclipsed by Bob’s own “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that memorably underlines the movie’s opening Minutemen montage.

This may be the Ultimate Cut, but it certainly ain’t the Ultimate Edition – we’d have needed at least two more Blu-ray discs for that. This release gets most things right that matter, but completists like me will inevitably lament what’s missing rather than celebrate what’s here.

The Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut 4K Ultra-HD and Blu-ray set is already becoming difficult to find - the steelbook edition sold out long before the first one was shipped, and even the standard edition is now selling out fast. HMV still have copies in stock priced at £19.99 with free delivery to your local store, while Zoom will charge you a penny more to deliver to your door. Amazon are charging £19.99 plus delivery. However, you can stream (at a lower bitrate) a 4K Ultra-HD version on Apple TV and download a 1080p HD copy to your iTunes library all for just £4.99.