Production designer Kirk M. Petruccelli and costume designer Deborah Lynn Scott deserve resounding praise for helping to bring the period to life in meticulous detail. Columbia TriStar has created a flawless transfer that meticulously reproduces Caleb Deschanel s beautiful cinematography in exacting detail. So are the colors that are produced in bright daylight and the cool blue lighting of darker sequences. Flesh tones maintain a consistently natural appearance in all lighting situations. There are absolutely no signs of chromatic distortion, nor do the intense hues ever bleed beyond their boundaries.
Blacks are dead on perfect and image displays amazing level of shadow detail.
The only minor flaw in the picture is a tiny bit of film grain that occasionally makes an appearance. However, considering the lighting set ups required to recreate the 18 th century, the mild grain is easily overlooked. There are almost no signs of digital compression artifacts on this dual layered DVD, which has been authored to maintain the beauty of every moment of this 165-minute film. This mix is enveloping and involving from the opening logos until the final credits roll. The soundtrack has a subtle and sometimes sublime sense of presence that nicely contrasts to precise and explosive direction effects that are aggressively deployed during the battle sequences.