The Tree of Life on DVD & Blu-ray today

Time to revisit one of the crowning glories of 2011.   Reviews of the disc find the video and audio quality are flawless. (From an Oscar angle, Fox Searchlight announced a couple of days ago that all the actors in The Tree of Life will be campaigned in supporting categories.)

(DVD Beaver)A while back I received an email requesting a ‘Top 10 Blu-ray list’ of my favorite of the new medium. Any mental list I could create is always in flux. But today and perhaps this year my number one spot would be an easy choice – The Tree of Life. The appreciation is always a balance between an adept 1080P transfer and the specific film’s visual attributes. In this latter regard The Tree of Life eclipses all in my recorded memory. With a high bitrate the dual-layered disc gave me a reference viewing – a large part due to the aural benefits (discussed below.) This may be the most beautifully shot film I can recall since the Blu-ray format evolved – and appropriately the image quality is… quite perfect. Grain is very fine, detail impressive and colors appear consistent and authentic supporting the exquisite art direction and interesting camera angles. There is nothing to do but allow the film’s rich presentation to wash over you – there is no point seeing this in the enclosed NTSC DVD. If ever there was a film to see, in your home theater, in Blu-ray – this is it.

The Tree of Life’s fetching images are like glowing shards of glass, and together they form a grandiose mirror that reflects Malick’s impassioned philosophical outlook. It’s unquestionably this great filmmaker’s most personal work, a revelation of how he came to be, why he creates, and where he feels he’s going. And though it’s also a highly self-absorbed vision, emotionally aloof by aesthetic design, in connecting his elliptical depiction of his own spiritual making with a customarily quizzical regard for the shape of all things, from the veins of a plant to the wrinkles of the human face, Malick is sincerely asking us to scrutinize the meaning of our own creation.

(Blu-ray.com) If Tree of Life‘s director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men) doesn’t win the Academy Award next year for best cinematography, then something is seriously awry in Hollywood. Whatever you think about the content of the film, you can’t say it isn’t staggeringly beautiful from start to finish. It usually doesn’t take me very long to take screenshots for these reviews, but with Tree of Life I was faced with a gorgeous, desktop wallpaper-worthy high definition image in nearly every frame. (As a testament, I’ve included 40 screengrabs, rather than our standard 20, in the screenshots section.) And other than the fact that I noticed two or three tiny white specks on the print over the course of nearly two and a half hours, I can’t find any real fault with the 1080p/AVC-encoded, 1.85:1-framed picture Fox has assembled for this Blu-ray release. Shot predominately on 35mm, with some of the “evolution” scenes filmed using IMAX-ready 65mm cameras, the film retains it’s natural grain structure and integrity here, with no visible evidence of DNR or edge enhancement.

You may notice that grain is a bit heavier than it would be in a more glossy film, but this is a product of the way Tree of Life was shot–on location and almost entirely with natural lighting, which necessitates “faster” film stock. With this in mind, clarity is excellent. Fine detail is easily visible in the actors’ faces, and the period clothing is wonderfully defined in closeups. Any softness seems due to the fact that the film was predominately shot using darting, sweeping Steadicam movements, which means focus isn’t always precise. What impresses most is the rich, painterly color palette; everything looks realistic but amplified, poeticized, with great use of light and shadow and the balanced contrast to back it all up on Blu-ray. Black levels are deep without putting stress on shadow detail, and there are no clipped highlights or general overexposure. The encode is solid too, with no overt compression artifacts or other troubles. This will definitely be one of, if not the, best-looking releases of the year.