I’m cheating here, because I just watched the beginning and the end of this right now. I’d watched it a month or so ago, though, and just got the Blu-ray today. This has been one of my favorite movies since I was a kid, and for a long time, it’s been saddled with a terrible DVD – lousy picture quality (non-anamorphic, which means it completely sucks) and a stupid Director’s Cut that served to make the movie worse than the original version.

So now it’s out on Blu-ray with a “Director’s Definitive Cut” that is a lot closer to the theatrical cut than to the stupid Director’s Cut (for instance, it lacks the Director’s-Cut-added anvilicious ending monologue about how the white man is pushing into the Native Americans’ land and soon they will have no place to live), and also with image quality that is about one zillion times better than the horrid DVD, on a movie that’s extremely visual. Verdict: YAY.

I’m really loving the Blu-ray era for how it’s providing excellent HD transfers of films that previously had lousy DVD releases – both 2001 and this movie have benefited way more than average from the HD generation, really.