Joker has recently arrived in the home video market, on a myriad of media. From the Apple TV version to the YouTube version, passing through Blu-Ray, there are many ways to see the story of Arthur Fleck on the small screen. If you don't want to compromise on quality though the Ultra HD Blu-Ray edition is the one to buy, offering exceptional visual quality, along with high-level audio, at least in the original language track.
The detachment with the simplest Blu-Ray version is palpable, for an edition that allows you to better appreciate the work done by the director Todd Phillips and the director of photography Lawrence Sher, as well as the interpretation of Joaquin Phoenix, recent winner of the Oscar for best leading actor.
An excellent master, but Italian audio is only Dolby Digital 5.1
To get the best view of Todd Phillips' masterpiece, we used a 65-inch Sony AG9 TV with a Dark Dolby Vision preset, along with a multi-channel sound system compatible with Dolby Atmos. In the case of Joker we are not dealing with a "fake" 4K, the master from which this Ultra HD Blu-Ray derives is in fact in Ultra HD. The film was shot with several Arri Alexa cameras, at 3.4K, 4.5K and 5.1K resolution, with an aspect ratio of 1: 85: 1. We have also observed the Blu-Ray version in 1080p, the gain in terms of detail and sharpness is palpable, it is not always so seen that simple upscaling is often used to make 4K versions of the films.
Dolby Vision then further increases the quality of this Home Video edition. Unlike It – Chapter 2, recently arrived in Ultra HD (our review here), the HDR10 + is not available, necessary to take advantage of the dynamic metadata on Samsung televisions for example. Our hope is to see more and more multi-format optical media, in order to broaden the use of dynamic metadata, since they are essential to fully exploit the capabilities of modern TVs.
As we will see, on the video front Joker offers exceptional visual quality, on the audio side we can only be disappointed by the presence of the only Dolby Digital 5.1 track in Italian. Dolby Atmos True-HD is only available in English and French, a choice that leaves a bad taste in the mouth given the specific weight of this film.
Dolby Atmos is a standard still not widespread in Italy, but the loseless encoding in Dolby True-HD could be used on a wide variety of audio systems and it is a pity that it is not present. Ultra HD Blu-Ray are optical media dedicated to enthusiasts who want to spend more to have a higher quality, if this is not there then the surcharge starts to become less justifiable. Fortunately, on the video front Joker manages to stand out in the panorama of Ultra HD Blu-Ray, partially compensating for the absence of a well-kept audio sector for the Italian.
Technology at the service of art
Director Todd Phillips and director of photography Lawrence Sher have created a real visual masterpiece with Joker, which is best expressed in 4K and with active Dolby Vision. Technology puts itself at the service of art to offer a clear glance from the eighties and a very particular color management, which can already be seen in the Blu-Ray edition, with shades that tend to orange. The rendering with active Dolby Vision makes the spectrum of colors represented on the screen slightly wider, obviously this is not a technological limit but a precise stylistic choice, which together with a marked contrast has made Joker a real pearl from the point of view visual. We are not faced with a tech demo like Aquaman's Ultra HD Blu Ray could have been, where the extended color palette and the high luminous peaks were highlighted: Joker is not a colorful film, it is a film that uses color as a means of communication to convey the director's message.
Light management also contributes significantly to creating a contrast-rich visual rendering, which makes the most of the features of an OLED TV such as the Sony AG9 used during the test.
4K, often less noticeable than HDR, is also well exploited thanks to the native master in Ultra HD, offering a more detailed scene than the 1080p version. The end result is a film with a devastating visual impact, which drags the viewer into the vortex of despair that will transform Arthur Fleck into Joker.
On the audio front, the English track in Dolby Atmos True-HD is on another level compared to the simple Dolby Digital 5.1 in Italian, not only in the positioning of the sounds, on which a very careful work has been done, but also in the high volume quality.
The extras instead are present for a total of about 30 minutes. The centerpiece is a twenty minute documentary in which director Todd Phillips talks about the genesis of the film and especially of Joaquin Phoenix's Joker. The other three specials present, lasting about one minute each, surround interesting extras but certainly not full-bodied in quantity.
