The night before I watched Saving Private Ryan on Blu-ray, Shakespeare in Love was on one of the various movie channels. The cable service we're cutting off in a few days has caused me to unintentionally be suckered into re-watching all kinds of things that I haven't seen in years. The last time I watched Ryan was 2002 or 2003, but all throughout college, I was subjected to the "Ryan v. Shakespeare" Best Picture argument over and over. I preferred Elizabeth and The Thin Red Line to both, personally.
Contrary to Jeff's accuracy arguments dashed off of the top of his head last week, the biggest "true to life" failings were the prominent officer marking on Hanks' helmet, all the talking they did in the Normandy bit while ostensibly sneaking around, and that our group of heroes are in Wave One, of which there were basically no survivors.
The video transfer on Ryan is stellar, as with other Sapphire Series titles (excepting Gladiator, which is being re-released later this year). It's a gigantic improvement over the muddy (by comparison) DVD transfer. The biggest improvement is in the contrast levels, where less is hidden in unintended murky shadows. The hint of color in skin that could be seen in theatrical prints has returned in the new HD transfer. The color palette was always desaturated, but the DVD turned everyone into a pale vampire.
As reported by The Digital Bits today, there is an audio sync issue that's now been acknowledged by the studio. It's not your player, it's the disc. My copy was affected by this and I held my review because I couldn't ascertain if it was my player, a concentrated issue, more widespread, or something else.
The issue affects any and all discs currently out there, and Amazon has temporarily pulled it from active sale. Retail stores are following suit. The good news is that there is going to be a disc replacement program put into place ASAP. This is a shame, since the video transfer is one of the top modern film Blu-ray transfers of the year thus far.
The Blu-ray extras are wholly repurposed from the D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition released in 2004. They still omit the 20-minute featurette from the original 1998 DVD release, but it was un-memorable enough that I've completely forgotten it by now. I'm very happy they cleaned up and re-transferred the theatrical and re-release trailers, but they're the only extras in HD. The fact the extras are on a Blu-ray disc would be great if they were in HD, but the ported featurettes are all SD.