Blue Thunder [Blu-ray] [2009][Region Free]

At last the fantastic blue thunder arrives on blu ray. This is a great film with a superb cast headed up by the late Roy Scheider and Warren Oates. The Blu Ray transfer is perfect with great sound and picture quality. The Sunrise at Pinkville is great in surround sound. The extra is where BLue Thunder fans will be thrilled with some first class never before seen behind the scenes footage, and uptodate interviews with John Badham, Roy Scheider before his passing and the writer. This Blu Ray is region free so now worries there and for those that like it, the Blu Ray comes with BD Live. If you love blue thunder then get it on blu ray.

This film has always been a favourite of mine. The excellent cast, modified helicopter and the flying sequences at the end of the film have always made this one to watch.

Some people don't like the way Roy Scheider's character seems distant and disinterested with everything and everyone, but this is the whole point of the story.

He is haunted with bad memories from Vietnam and it has made him into a burned out cop with very little patience for red-tape, bureaucracy, and devious people who wear cheap suits.

The 80s was the golden age of action movies, and Blue Thunder still holds up as one of the most enjoyable. Part of a Summer double whammy from director John Badham that also saw him scoring a big hit with WarGames, it's another piece of paranoia turned into slick entertainment as Roy Scheider's Vietnam vet with a bad case of flashbackitis (otherwise known as Clint Eastwood Firefoxitis) gets reassigned from flying police choppers to testing out a new crowd control weapon - the heavily armed state of the art helicopter of the title. With 1984 literally just around the corner and fully equipped with computer-controlled gun systems, high-tech listening devices that can hear a mouse fart at 2000 feet and infrared cameras that see through walls, it's clearly intended for more than just crowd control at the Los Angeles Olympics, which isn't exactly a surprise since Malcolm McDowell's old wartime adversary is behind the program.

Naturally Scheider uncovers their real, albeit vaguely defined dastardly plot and uses the weapon against them, with some especially spectacular results as helicopters duel over the city in scenes that are all the more impressive for being done largely for real. No CGi here and surprisingly few model shots too, just terrific stunt work excitingly edited. The Blue Thunder itself is a striking creation, first seen blotting out the rising sun like a malignant insect, the film clearly enjoying showing off its tricks and firepower as much as it pays lip-service to abhorring its purpose. The plotting may be rudimentary and the characters one step up from cardboard, but the film manages to sell them effectively enough to never quite allow them to be completely overshadowed by the hardware thanks to solid performances, with particularly good supporting turns from Daniel Stern as Scheider's rookie observer and a wonderful swansong from Warren Oates as his eloquently sarcastic boss (the film, co-produced by The Wild Bunch's Phil Feldman, even has a rather sweet dedication to him `for all the joy you gave us').

It did inspire a dismal short-lived TV series that missed the point of the film and turned the Blue Thunder into a `good guy,' though the film itself was changed substantially from Dan Jakoby and Dan O'Bannon's original script. Closer to Taxi Driver with multi-million dollar firepower, that saw Scheider's psychotic character genuinely going crazy and shooting up the city, but the studio wanted the destruction without the high body count of innocent bystanders - it's one of the finished film's absurdities that for all the destruction only the villain gets hurt - turning him circuitously into the film's hero instead, borrowing more than a few plot points from the previous year's Firefox along the way while thankfully improving on Eastwood's film. The rather decent documentary on the special edition DVD AND bLU-RAY goes into that in surprisingly frank detail, with O'Bannon even talking about the commercial reasons for his taking first billing on a screenplay largely written by Jakoby - with Alien just released and O'Bannon too ill to work full time, they could get a better deal with his name first. It's certainly a lot more informative than the vintage 1983 puff piece for the film that's also included and which has unfortunately been letterboxed from its original fullframe.

Unfortunately the picture quality on Columbia's special edition DVD isn't any visible improvement over their earlier issue, with the same rather light blacks and limited depth: it's an acceptable widescreen transfer, but if it weren't for the new extras it wouldn't be worth the effort. However, the Blu-ray is a distinct step up in quality.