The Film: 8
Given the cast and director, my expectations ran high for this movie. Four luminaries from Wilson Yip’s SPL: Sha Po Lang reunited for this biopic of one China's most famous martial artists: Director Yip, actors Donnie Yen (in the title role) and Simon Yam (in a supporting role), and the always impressive Sammo Hung – here working behind the camera as fight choreographer. Ip Man is, in a number of ways, a throwback to martial arts movies from the time of Bruce Lee – not coincidentally, since Ip Man was Bruce Lee's wing chun teacher. There is the familiar town with competing martial arts schools, each headed by its own master; the bully (Fan Sui Wong) who comes to town to set up his own school, but not before he humiliates the various school masters by giving each a brutal thrashing; and there is the quiet master whom everyone in town knows is the best but who heads no school of his own.

This would be Ip Man, a gentleman among men. Self-effacing, but confident. He is also quite well off and lives with his lovely wife (Lynn Xiong) and young son. Mrs Ip is given to looks of disapproval every time her husband finds an excuse to fight, even though he never gets hurt. He even tries to make sure that the house furniture is not damaged when he fights in his house. This is movie not without a sense of humor – for the first half-hour or so anyhow.

But lightness turns bitter and grey when the Japanese come to Foshan at the leading edge of what would become the Second World War. As the population shrinks from 300,000 to 70,000 we assume that not all of the difference are made up of refugees. Ip's residence has been consigned as the Japanese headquarters and Ip and his family are now among the homeless. It's very hard for him to swallow his pride and try to find work, which he finally does after pawning all the remaining family trinkets.

The Japanese general assigned to this town (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) is another sort of gentleman altogether. It is his fancy to round up those men desperate enough to fight his men in an arena. If one of these miserable people should live through it he gets a bag of rice. If he fails to demonstrate the proper humility, he may have to fight the general, who is an amazing piece of work in his own right. One thing though: the general doesn't appreciate it when his officers take matters into their own hands and kill off his subjects in the arena. Killing is for the streets.

Well, we can see where this is all going. Donnie Yen seems tailor made for the role of Ip Man – proud, assured, and confidently kick-ass in his newly learned wing chun kung fu skills. But even more than another excuse for Donnie Yen to show off his stuff is the unabashed pride that the Chinese take in the way this story unfolds, even though it may be liberally fictionalized. I don't expect that Western audiences would find the story quite as engrossing for this reason, even though its themes are not unfamiliar. It is not so much of a stretch to see in Ip Man echoes of High Noon or Destry Rides Again – the idea of a lone man who only fights when provoked beyond endurance, and then he takes his six-shooters out of mothballs and courageously stands to face his fate.

Image (WellGo): 5/8
The first number indicates a relative level of excellence compared to other Blu-ray video discs on a ten-point scale. The second number places this image along the full range of DVD and Blu-ray discs.

When I first watched the Universe Blu-ray edition at home I confess I had inadvertently set my projector’s color and contrast higher than they should have been, and drew negative conclusions about the differences between the first and second parts of the movie, feeling them to be arbitrary and tiresome. But on second viewing, with correct projection settings and a more forgiving attitude about the vagaries of the medium (viz., the entire signal path + the viewing environment), I am more accepting of the choices made in this regard, though there still remain some puzzling filtration choices here and there.

The Well Go is a different story. It is as if Well Go applied a consistent desaturating filter to the Universe Blu-ray. Now there is less apparent difference between the pre- and post-Japanese invasion scenes, made even less different on large screen front projection (as compared to smaller displays.) This observation, the fact that it makes the same edge enhancement mistakes, and the fact that Well Go, for a change, has given us a true 1080p image, tells most of the story and should satisfy. But I can’t resist a few subjective remarks:

In part it may be that I’m just tired of desaturating filtration as a style. I ask myself, why not just go the extra yard, make it black and white, and get it over with! Then there would only be contrast, grain and exposure to play with. Works for me. However, desaturating a color movie is not the same thing as having filmed it black and white to start with. Among other reasons, lighting is differently considered in order to manipulate contrast for the desired effect.

Since the Well Go and Universe Blu-rays are, aside from saturation, more similar than not, we wonder about original intent, in the absence of which the choice becomes one of taste – and that rankles the critic in me. My caps of the Universe reveal a couple of scenes that are excruciatingly oversaturated, and this “mistake” is “corrected” in the Well Go. But since the Well Go applies the same correction uniformly throughout, the rest of the movie suffers arbitrarily. I want there to be some absolute answers to these questions. We might ask: what about comparing these Blu-rays with the theatrical experience? Unhappily, such comparisons vary with the size and nature of the display even when optimally calibrated - not that the film is handy to begin with.

So, you would think, this leaves transfer issues – however, in this case they are much the same for both editions. And when I look at the comparative screen caps for differences in sharpness, resolution or DNR, I don’t believe I see any. The pre-Japanese caps have more life in the Universe because there is more color and for the most part that sits better with me. But what I cannot confidently account for on technical grounds is why the Universe should always feel more visually involving, even in the relatively desaturated occupation scenes. It would appear that desaturating the image, at least the way Well Go goes about it, flattens dimensionality which, in turn, makes for a less involving experience.

But there is another matter that relates to mass, substance, weight. The Universe has it, the Well Go doesn’t, especially in the earlier part of the movie. In a side by side comparison of the moving picture (less so, frame captures) we readily feel the difference in everything from clothing, to furniture to flooring. Well Go’s desaturation has also resulted in a thinning of the the image - this despite its stronger bit rate (28.00 Mbps vs the Universe’s 25.15). This is too bad, really, since I appreciated what I felt was too much color in some scenes on the original Universe edition.

I suspect that the Well Go is, for the most part, a desaturated version of the Universe rather than vice-versa, since those scenes that have color are rendered naturally and beautifully, and I don’t think you can get the same result by “colorizing” an image that was processed with less color for theatrical purposes.

As with the Universe edition, I found no distressing concerns with the transfer: most artifacts and noise reduction are kept at bay. Edge enhancement shows up in noticeable doses, and in the same way as the Universe, where edges are in strong contrast, such as in the arena where the Japanese stage their fights with unsuspecting Chinese.