The Stand (2020 limited series) Blu-ray review

Mar 19, 2022- Permalink

I may be a little late to the party here. Though the 2020 limited series of The Stand was released on Blu-ray in the US in October 2021, it didn’t get released in Canada by Paramount until March 2022. Based on Stephen King’s 1978 novel, and a remake of the 1994 series, The Stand is a post-apocalyptic story that occurs following a pandemic caused by a military biological research mishap. The remaining survivors are drawn to following two people, Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) or Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), in a struggle of good versus evil. The main cast of the series also includes James Marsden, Odessa Young, Jovan Adepo, Henry Zaga, Greg Kinnear, Irene Bedard, Nat Wolff, Owen Teague, Amber Heard and Brad William Henke.

The 1080p AVC encoded digital transfer is presented in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. It’s a really good looking video presentation with amazing detail from hairs and skin textures to environmental elements, textiles and the ravages of disease cooked up by the makeup department. The colour palette is natural, flesh tones look very good, and black levels are deep with good detail in darker scenes.

On the audio side, The Stand comes with an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack as well as German, Spanish, French, and Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks. Subtitles are available for English SDH, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The 5.1 soundtrack makes good use of the surrounds to place ambient sounds around the viewer, while action effects also move around the soundscape with a nice floor of low frequency tones for your subwoofer. The score is dynamic and mostly focused in the front. Dialogue is clear and well-prioritized.

The three-disc set comes with a couple of extras: a gag reel and an almost twenty minute featurette that looks at King’s work and some of the production aspects.

Given what we’ve been going through in the world these past few years, this update of The Stand seems quite timely and comes with a great cast and excellent video and audio presentations.