Not sure how common this knowledge was. I only saw a few people mention the terrible quality on Amazon, and similarly folks on message boards weren't particularly vocal about it.
Anyway, the Blu Ray transfer is shit. After putting the movie in, I swapped several times between 720p and 1080i, wondering if something wonky was going on with the resolution. It basically looked like a low resolution video file blown up too much for its own good. Plenty of artifacing, particularly in the less dark scenes, and the black levels were flat broken. I could have gotten the blacks half-decent, but I would have had to change too many pic settings on my TV, and frankly the movie isn't worth that.
It basically looks like a not-great quality DVD upscaled. It's not like, eye raping bad. Just wallet raping bad.
Causes?
1) 28DL was one of the first movies shot basically all on digital video. This was a bragging point in its day, but, well, there's a price that comes with being an early adopter of a hot new thang.
2) Goes along with 1. Danny Boyle likes to use filters, and do trick shots through translucent textures, like colored glass and see through shower curtain material. This exasperates the compression and artifacing issues. This is particularly evident during the opening scenes where Rage is released, and in the final scenes of the mansion. Basically when the editing gets all music videoy TO THA EXTREME.
3) This movie is just from 2002, so it is entirely possible that the studio deemed that it was too new to get a new transfer, so they used the original DVD transfer. The more I think about it, the more this is likely, but due to the amount of artifacing, and black issues, 1 and 2 have to play parts as well.
In short, DO NOT BUY. This is either a difficult movie to transfer, or it was a quickie cash in.
