DVD Talk review of 'Starship Troopers 3: Marauder' (Blu-ray)
 

I read Don Houston's DVD review of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=34095 and...

Don, I'm with you that this is a terrible, terrible movie, and it looks incredibly cheap. But your 1 1/2 stars for video is way off the mark. There's nothing technically wrong with the transfer. In fact, it's incredibly sharp, detailed, and colorful without any negative side effects like edge enhancement or compression artifacts. The image is grainy because the movie's photography is grainy, and the grain is well handled.

You seem to have let your dislike for the movie's cheap-o production design and visual effects (which admittedly look awful) affect your rating of the disc's picture quality. They are not the same thing.

Hi Josh!
It's good to see you lurking about (and helping keep us honest). My take on the score is that it is for "Video" as labeled, not for the transfer as suggested, so my rating would include the really bad visual effects. I think those wanting to know more about the picture quality as a whole will get that from the body of the review but you raise a valid point worth pondering. Thanks!

I hate to disagree with somebody as freakin' awesome as Don, but I have to on this. If the movie has distracted you by how cheap it looks, that's something to note with the review, yes. But I'd agree with Josh, that I would think most people aren't really looking to find out how much of a budget the film had when they read 'Video'. I know the only piece of information I ever wanted as a reader was, 'how good is the transfer'.

It's your review and your prerogative to rate the disc however you feel appropriate, Don. I certainly understand that there are many cases where the quality of a movie's photography will interact with other aspects of picture quality and should be reflected in the "Video" score (like 28 Days Later, for example). However, I don't think Marauder had bad photography, per se. It's just a cheap movie with bad sets, bad props, and bad VFX. The photography of those bad sets and props was perfectly adequate, and the disc transfer of that photography technically faithful.

I think most readers would expect complaints about bad CGI and production values to be reflected in the "Movie" score, not the "Video" score.

But, as I said, it's your review and your call.

No matter what, the most important thing for readers to take away from this is that the movie sucks. :D

You're on pretty safe ground agreeing with Josh over me on this one, it's just a matter of style. In this case though, I'd make the argument that people having watched the first, far superior volume would want to know how the reduced budget compared since it seems to have amounted to Verhoeven's catering budget from the first (but I'm not a fan of the "star rating system" either).