Holmes and Warner Brothers Blu-Ray

Watched Sherlock Holmes for the first time last night. The film was awesome. How could it not be with Guy Ritchie at the helm and Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law getting most of the screen time?

I also love that there is an opportunity for more Holmes films. Even if they don't make more, at least it's true to the original Holmes stories, of which there are several.

Sherlock Holmes is a Warner Brothers film and the Blu-Ray version utilizes a very cool feature. It's called Maximum Movie Mode. Holmes is the second movie I've seen with the feature, Watchmen being the first, and it has been a very cool experience both times.

Now, Maximum Movie Mode isn't something you use when watching the film for the first time. It is an enhanced director/actor/anybody commentary track. You will be watching the film when the camera will rotate to the director of the film while he discusses some aspect of the scene you are seeing. In addition to that, video will pop up and overlay the film at times with actors, set designers, etc. talking about various set and costume aspects.

Basically, instead of watching 14 bonus features, it presents it all to you at once and each one talks about specific parts of the film. The only two versions I've seen of Maximum Movie Mode also incorporate a timeline of the characters. In Holmes it laid out pieces of the detectives fictional past while in Watchmen the timeline depicted the differences between the actual events of 1985 and the fictional events created by Alan Moore in his skewed version of 1985.

Maximum Movie Mode is the coolest feature I've seen used with Blu-Ray discs. In addition to enhanced picture and sound quality the big excitement about Blu-Ray was the ability to put more data on the disc, allowing for things like Maximum Movie Mode.

I hope this kind of feature expands within the Warner Brothers family and beyond. I'd love to see a maximum movie mode with directors like Christopher Nolan (part of the Warner Bros. family, so fingers crossed for the Blu-Ray version of Inception), Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Sam Mendes, Robert Zemeckis, and many, many, many more.

If you're a big movie fan, invest in a Blu-Ray player and check out a film with Maximum Movie Mode. It won't disappoint you.




Zack Snyder in a still from Watchmen's Maximum Movie Mode.