Mars: The Quest for Life on Blu-ray Disc Review by Brandon A. DuHamel on BigPictureBigSound

Blu-ray Disc and DVD : Blu-ray Disc Reviews

Published: 2009-04-01 - 15:09:24

Mars: The Quest for Life on Blu-ray Disc Review

By Brandon A. DuHamel

The Show

Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, named after the Roman god of war; this desolate red planet has fascinated humans for centuries, from the writings of Jonathan Swift and H.G. Wells to the short stories of Philip K. Dick or a television series like Babylon 5.

And as long as humans have dreamed of Mars, they have dreamed of life on the red planet. So ingrained is the idea of Martians on the human psyche that when Orson Welles now infamously broadcast his radio interpretation of H.G. Well's sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds as a fictional news broadcast, the hysteria it caused amongst the population was so great that he had to humbly apologize to his audience. One would hope that such a thing could not occur today, but the idea of life on Mars still fascinates us. In 2004 the Bush administration announced a space exploration initiative that would see a manned expedition to the planet by 2037.

Most of the missions to Mars to date have focused on searching for life, or, more precisely, the building blocks of life, like water, oxygen, carbon and methane. It all sounds grandly optimistic, but to date over half of the missions to the planet have been failures, such as the Mars Polar lander, which crash-landed into the planet or the European Space Agency's Beagle 2 lander with which all communication was lost.

This Discovery Channel show focuses on a group of NASA scientists working in conjunction with Lockheed Martin to build and place another lander on the harsh planet to once again search for signs of life. This time, the team responsible for the failed Polar-landing attempt works diligently on the Phoenix lander, designed to land on Mars then seek out water.

The show is successful at capturing the tension felt by each of the scientists involved in the project, but is missing in a lot of scientific detail on the planet itself. Still, for amateur astronomers and folks fascinated by space exploration, Mars: The Quest for Life offers an interesting look behind-the-scenes at the world of astrophysicists and engineers.

The Picture

The 1080i AVC/MPEG-4 encoding for Mars: The Quest for Life gives a mixed result. On the one hand, much of the high definition footage looks sharp, clear and detailed, as one would expect, but on the other hand the production itself is culled from a variety of sources that do not lend themselves to the best picture quality, no matter how much they try to label it "HD." For instance, much of the footage from inside mission control at Cape Canaveral is obviously upscaled (and often stretched) standard definition. Many of the CG segments of the Phoenix Lander are also low-res, so much of the time spent watching Quest for Life is spent watching less than reference imagery.

None of this is the fault of the actual transfer, which does not appear to get in the way of the source. In the end, however, it's "garbage in garbage out." That is not to say that Quest for Life is totally irredeemable. The new high definition footage and high-resolution CG effects all look as good as can be, but the overall impact of the show is far too inconsistent to score highly.

The Sound

This is another Discovery Channel production that has been brought to Blu-ray with no more than Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 audio options and an English SDH subtitle track. The soundmix is not very immersive, although there is some discrete use of the surround channels and a little ambient information in the rears as well. Dialogue, however, suffers from some obvious clipping, giving it a harsh and squeezed tonality. The 2.0 mix doesn't offer much better, but given the 5.1 mix's lack of entertainment value, it won't make much of a difference which one you choose in this case.

The Extras

There are no extras available on this release.

Final Thoughts

This brief Discovery Channel documentary on the effort that goes into putting a probe onto an extraterrestrial body will surely be intriguing to those who have even a passing interest in this subject, but this bare-bones, less-than-reference release, like most of the other recently released Discovery shows feels like it should have been bundled together with the other releases rather than being a stand-alone product. I'd say rent this if you really want to see it.

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