The Goonies 4K review

Sep 11, 2020- Permalink

Richard Donner’s 1985 adventure The Goonies was an entertainment staple for kids growing up in the 1980s. Written by Chris Columbus and based on a story by executive producer Steven Spielberg, the movie’s cast features Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Jeff Cohen, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton and Ke Huy Quan as a group of friends in search of a long-lost treasure. Warner Brothers Home Entertainment has now released a 4K version of this fun adventure. WBHE provided me with a review copy of this release, but the opinions below are my own.

The 2160p HEVC / H.265-encoded HDR10 transfer is in a 2.40:1 aspect ratio. This is a dark film, but I mean that literally not content-wise. Much of the adventure takes place in underground caves interspersed with shafts of light. The previous versions on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray looked a bit muddy, but this new 4K restoration gives us the best looking version of The Goonies. Facial textures, textiles, environmental elements and sets all impress with amazing detail. In a dark film, the contrast and black levels are important and they’re very good here with detail available in the shadows. Though the setting makes for a very muted colour palette, the HDR10 allows the golden treasure and other flashes of bright colours to pop. The transfer does have some film grain, but there’s nothing of much note here in terms of compression artifacts.

On the audio side, there’s a treasure trove of soundtracks available including an English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack as well as French, Italian, Dutch, Castilian Spanish, and Czech Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks and a Latin Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track. There are subtitles in English SDH, French, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Latin Spanish, Dutch, Traditional Mandarin, Korean, Czech, Romanian, and Thai. It’s a front heavy mix, with the surrounds giving some additional ambient placement and musical elements. The musical score sounds great and dialogue is centred and well-prioritized.

The Goonies 4K set comes with a copy of the 2010 Blu-ray release and a digital code. Extras are on the Blu-ray disc and include a “Hidden Treasures” viewing mode with pop-up clips, audio commentary by Richard Donner and the cast (Why is this not on the 4K), a “making of” featurette, deleted scenes, a trailer and the Cyndi Lauper music video for “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough”.

Whether you’re new to The Goonies or you watched it 100 times in the theatre and on VHS, you’ll want to add this 4K release to your collection.