DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 in Home Video, review

DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 in Home Video

DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 arrives on home video a few days after its landing on Netflix (from 1 July) and practically simultaneously with its arrival on free-to-air TV on Italia 1 (every Saturday with two episodes). The home video version obviously allows us to appreciate this season in the high definition of 3 blu-ray discs that collect the 15 episodes of which this Season 5 is composed which, we recall, at the time of its original broadcast in the United States was interrupted several times, with significant production problems, due to the health emergency caused by the then prevailing Coronavirus.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5, more science fiction than superheroism

With this Season 5 , DC's Legends of Tomorrow definitively frees itself from the shadow of the superhero series and, using the background of the characters as a starting point, becomes a fun science fiction series tout-court that has more than one point of contact with the mythical Doctor Who. Closing the crossover with the other Arrowverse series titled Crisis on Infinite Earths, the series immediately picks up on the events of the past season in which Neron's defeat led Astra to free 16 extremely dangerous souls from Hell.

The Legends thus find themselves running around in various eras to stop the temporal anomalies caused by characters such as Rasputin, Marie Antoinette and Genghis Khan. However, the real threat is represented by Astra with Constantine more than ever determined to make amends for his personal sins. The situation will be further complicated when the true identity of a Legend will be revealed that will also involve the Moira (the deities of classical mythology who wove the thread of fate of every living being) determined to rewrite reality.

Between references to pop culture, metatextuality and a decidedly light-hearted tone DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 is certainly the best season of the series starring the "secondary" characters of the Arrowverse.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 in Home Video, the audio / video quality

DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 in Home Video allows us to see or review the season (we remind you that in Italy it arrived exclusively on Premium Action of Mediaset in May 2020) in high definition. The encoding chosen for this blu-ray edition is in fact 1080p High Definition 16 × 9 FF with a decidedly constant video stream and optimal compression.

All this translates into a really good and dynamic video rendering, always related to television production of course, in which there are no particular notes to make. The focus and detail are balanced, there is no grain and the blacks and contrasts are balanced and optimal. The high definition, however, shows all the limits of the television production of DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 which, as can be easily understood, are concentrated in a CGI and special effects whose technical realization is not always flawless and sometimes it is coarse. That the series, in terms of structure and setting, is ideally able to narratively reabsorb even these "shortcomings" is certainly a point in its favor but technically it is impossible to override them except with a massive dose of "suspension of disbelief".

If the video has a more than good rendering, unfortunately the same cannot be said of the audio. The Italian audio track is in fact an ancient Dolby Digital 2.0 which, in addition to not being dynamic, has an unbalanced mix whose master is set several decibels below the ideal zero and above all which forces several times to manually modulate the volume with ours. remote control both upwards (in some sequences where dialogue dominates) and downwards (obviously in the action sequences).

It is much better selecting the audio track in English or a robust DTS -HD Master Audio 5.1. The dynamism of the audio obviously increases, now even more enveloping, although there are no particular effects, and the mixing is more balanced, but not free from those oscillations that force you to manually modulate the volume, albeit less frequently than the Italian track. Finally, it should be noted that the Italian subtitle track present is the one for the deaf.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 in Home Video, the extras

The extra section of DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 in the home video does not shine for variety or quantity. In fact, there is the inevitable gag reel with the bloopers of the various episodes and a short behind the scenes, always with a comic theme, all centered on the seventh episode entitled More Fun Moments Collection. Still as regards the behind the scenes, certainly the most interesting extra content is the Post-Production Theater in which we relive the phase of adding special effects in some scenes of different episodes and the "difficulties" of the protagonists of the series in acting right in these scenes which are then actually completed in post-production.

Finally, it should be noted that practically for each episode there are one or more deleted scenes. In general, the extras of this edition in home video are very small, especially when compared to the amount of citations and references (comics, related to pop culture and historical ones specifically for this Season 5) that DC's Legends of Tomorrow has always been full of. A few behind the scenes in this sense would certainly have enriched the edition and perhaps prompted some skeptics to buy.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 in Home Video, the packaging

Very good the packaging of the home video version received by Warner Bros. Home Entartainment Italia. This is the blu-ray standard home video version of DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 5, as already mentioned, entirely collected in 3 blu-rays allocated in a cardboard slipcase of discreet thickness inside which we find an amaray (standard case with a classic color transparent blue) alphacase with central strip to accommodate two of the three discs.

Amaray and slipcase take up the same artwork while it is interesting the choice, within the amaray, taking up the graphic theme of the artwork, to instead insert contents and index of the episodes with relative titles and short synopsis.