12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Restoration has its limits, 24 Jan 2009
After Lowry Digital set the bar sky-high with its fantastic restoration work on Dr. No and From Russia with Love, I was ever so slightly disappointed by this spruced up version of Thunderball.
Despite Lowry's best efforts, it seems there were some elements of the original negative that had deteriorated beyond repair. In particular, there are occasional gate-hairs that remain on screen for several seconds at a time, and some underwater shots contain a vertical line in the picture. Since these parts of the film involve movement and a quickly changing frame, the blemishes must have been too problematic to remove digitally.
However, these very minor defects are few and far between and do not detract from the overall presentation, which is easily on a par with other Bond releases on Blu-ray. I look forward to more of them.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Languages & Quality, 15 Nov 2010
Blu-ray all zone
Ratio of the feature film:
2.35:1
Languages of the feature film:
DTS Master Audio 5.1: English
DTS 5.1: French, German
Dolby 5.1: Latin Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese
Dolby 2.0: 2 commentaries
Subtitles for all the videos:
German, French, Latin Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and English for the hearing impaired
Subtitle available only for the feature film:
Swedish
Verdict:
An outstanding picture and sound quality, the Lowry Company in charge of this restoration did an excellent job for the fourth film of the collection, this film couldn't have been watched in better condition than it is today. If you watch carefully, you should notice that the car after the DB5 does not have a door on the driver side for the stuntman to be ready to jump out of the vehicle. The mockups of the plane landing on water and the boat exploding at the end looks more obvious.
Soundtracks:
The English soundtrack is by far the most surrounding and accurate obviously, the German and French made in the 60s are also of good quality.
The Latin Spanish, the original dubbing is quite by far the most amazing using the new remastered soundtrack: they have removed the front centre channel which contains most of the English dialogue and replaced it by the original Spanish dubbing which contains some background noise meaning the special sound effect and music sometimes differ compare to the English soundtrack. The dialogues also taking up all the channels make the depiction of the Spanish soundtrack sounds mono during some part of the film, not all fortunately!
Un-expecting dubbing:
As usual in the early Bond films, the Bond Girls were dubbed. Nikki Van der Zyl, the one who dubbed Ursula Andress in Dr. No dubs the French actress Claudine Auger (Miss France 1958). The reason seemed to be that she could not speak loud enough despite a good command of English.
And also, Adolfo Celi playing Emilio Largo is dubbed by Robert Rietty.
NB: quite surprisingly, Blofeld whose face cannot be seen is played by Anthony Dawson and voiced by Joseph Wiseman (both featuring in Dr. No).
In the French dubbing, it is the German actor Gert Fröbe (playing Goldfinger in the previous film as well as speaking fluently French) who dubs Blofeld but not in the German dubbing.
Overall, we are looking at an excellent film technically speaking as always from Lowry. You shall not be disappointed.
For all the Fan of James Bond:
On amazon.fr, you can find 2 other titles of the collection on Blu-ray which have the advantage to be all zone
* "The Man with the Golden Gun" (L'Homme au Pistolet d'Or)
* "License to Kill" (Permis de Tuer)
Both of them come in DTS Master Audio 5.1 English soundtrack with English subtitle of course.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent picture and sound, 10 Feb 2009
Although not quite as jaw dropping as the first two bond movies on Blu-Ray, Thunderball still looks terrific. The colours are vivid, depth perception into the image is strong, and there's plenty of fine detail. I know this film quite well, but still noticed many details I hadn't before, one striking example in particular being the legibility of the warning signs on the Vulcan bomber; the bombs have "handle like eggs" written on them which I'd never noticed. It may well be possible to make out these details on the DVD, but the fact is they jump out at you on Blu-Ray.
The sound is also superb, although limited to DTS only, it is very punchy compared to the DVD soundtrack with excellent clarity, I was immediately struck by subtle cues in Tom Jones' voice as he sang the (rather weak) title song, and again, its the details spring out at you. Effects steering is also a noticable improvement over the DVD release.
The extras appear to be the same as the Ultimate Edition, which is pretty exhaustive in any case, and much of it is now in HD which is great.
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