I recently was asked to review the newly released Blu-Ray disc for the first season of the HBO series Game of Thrones. A fan of the fantasy genre in general, I was skeptical the series creators would be successful at transferring the rich world of George R. R. Martin to the screen. Let alone the small screen… To my amazement with the help of George R. R. Martin who executive produced, the show’s creators have managed to maintain the originality of the book and have created the must watch television experience of 2011. The series is both visually stunning, and addictively captivating. You will have a hard time not sitting down for a marathon screening once you are hooked by the politics and machinations of Martin’s Machiavellian fantasy universe. If you missed the original broadcast and would like to catch up before viewing the much anticipated season two, which premiered on HBO April 1st, I highly recommend the Blu-Ray collection.
For those who care about presentation, the collection contains the full first season (running at 600 minutes) presented in MPEG-4 AVC with a resolution of 1080p and an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. With the show being shot originally in the aspect ratio 1.78:1 for TV presentation, no part of the frame was lost when the series was translated to this package. The Blu-ray maintains the same stunning theatrical presentation of the series, and is something you would expect from a special effects heavy feature film. The audio for the English track is a DTS-HD Master Audio in 5.1 and the collection also has DTS 5.1 encoding for the French and Spanish audio tracks. Subtitles are also available for languages in English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish and Swedish. All 10 episodes of Season 1 of Game of Thrones, are wrapped up in this five-disc collection of Each disc 50GB discs. A must own collection for any fantasy fan, this set is worth the price of admission. If you want read the full review you can check it out here at cinemaya.net.