Product Details

• Actors: Sendhil Ramamurthy, Jack Coleman, Masi Oka, James Kyson Lee
• Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, French, Spanish
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 5
• Rating: Unrated
• Studio: Universal Studios
• DVD Release Date: September 1, 2009
• Run Time: 1020 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B002BFBB0A
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,684 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Experience all the explosive action and shocking twists as Heroes: Season 3 comes to Blu-ray™ Hi-Def! Rediscover the phenomenon in this five-disc set that includes all 25 suspenseful episodes from the third season’s volumes, Villains and Fugitives. Plus, go behind the scenes with the show’s writers, stars and artists as you explore hours of exclusive and revealing bonus features.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best HEROES season so far, special features could have been better, September 13, 2009

By	A. Dent "Aragorn" (Minas Anor, GD) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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HEROES and LOST are the 2 more ambitious grand scale Sci-Fi series on today's TV. They both have in common stunning visuals spiked by well executed special effects, relentless action, a lot of it brutal and violent, intriguing story lines occasionally hinting critically at today's social and political realities (government-sponsored torture, the erosion of liberties, the roles played by large and secretive transnational corporations), large casts of great actors and the promise of getting at some core secret that would explain 'everything' but which is always elusive.

Of the two, HEROES seemed to be on the verge of self-dissolution last year, following a promising Season One. I am happy to see the series back on track with a vengeance on Season Three.

- CONTENT

HEROES Third season easily tops the first two seasons as the core that survived the frantic struggles of Seasons One and Two understand that 'normal life' is not possible for those blessed or cursed with super powers, not when a government that's jealously trying to maintain its own monopoly on violence is after them and not when there are so many opportunities to 'save the world'. The plot slowly shifts focus from the first 2 seasons' "HEROES vs. the Company" to their constant running and hiding from a secret branch of 'Homeland Security' determined to wipe them out but not before doing a little torture and experimentation on them. Not that what we would politically correctly call 'people with abilities' are all angels. Most of them are not and the struggle continues between the good and the evil ones where the good ones sometimes turn evil and some of the evil ones turn 'good', permanently or only for an episode or two but, interestingly, the old 'company' staff seems to be taking sides between the government and the HEROES and a lot of the plot is driven by their shifting loyalties and what appear to be their own personal agendas.

I hope I will be forgiven but I really don't wish to give away any of the plot's twists and turns because... this season's HEROES is THAT good. It's also possible that most have already watched many or all the episodes on TV and already have an opinion on what HEROES 3 was about. It's probably a lot more productive to discuss the Blu-ray edition which I shall.

My conclusion on 'content' - following the somewhat disappointed 'amputated' Season Two, this Season is a true treat.


- PACKAGING

To my surprise, after being spoiled by some other very tightly packed seasons, this Blu-ray box is quite large. While the 25 episodes where squeezed on only 5 disks, the box is thicker than I expected. On the positive side, the disks seem to be held securely in place by a new and innovative locking mechanism.

There isn't anything other than the disks in the box but brief summaries for each of the 25 episodes can be found on both the back side and on the interior wall that does not hold disks. The folding carton that holds the disks slides inside a cardboard sleeve.


- PICTURE AND SOUND

As expected, it's 1080p video, 16:9 or 1.78:1 - meaning 'full screen' on an HD TV set, no top and bottom bands. Some of the extra features may be in lower resolutions.

The Sound is DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 with English Dolby Digital 2.0 on the features.


- PRESENTATION AND PLAY

The episodes, about 42 minutes each, run for close to 18 hours.

The menu is relatively well designed but it's not perfect. The 'Play' option will play all episodes on a specific disk but, at least on my PS3, it could not resume play once interrupted. It was not possible to do a 'play all but start from the second episode'. To do so, one would start with 'Play', then fast forward or press the chapter skip button to reach the desired start point. Or episodes could be played individually. Individual episodes are not broken into 'scenes' in the menu.

During play, one can take advance of U-Control which can be turned on or off by pressing one of the colored buttons. During playback, Picture in Picture provides cast and crew commentaries. I found this distracting and I was glad to see that it's possible to play the same commentaries separately from the menu. The other U-Control enhancement is the availability of Hero Connections 'post it' like notes that pop on the screen and provide some information about a specific character that's meaningful within the context of the scene that's playing at the time. Each disk allows for the viewing of the updated Connections network separately from playback.

BD-Live allows for the downloading of a Season 4 preview and, being 'live', it's possible that more features may become available in time.

One annoying defect, at least on a PS3 is the playback becoming unresponsive once the Universal screen saver kicks in. After that, it's impossible to resume watching - pressing play/pause/fast-forward would return 'this feature is not available at this time' and pressing STOP would get me out of the movie and force me to reload the disk.


- SPECIAL FEATURES

They are quite few and thin for this season and many are bad enough to almost cross into the 'unwatchable' territory. After being spoiled with treats such as the story/legend of Takezo Kensei on Season 2, this season's disappoint. There are the obligatory 'behind the scenes' interviews but there is very little as far as 'creative content' is concerned. The short Pinehearst Commercial reminded me of the similar feature we watched while waiting to enter the Terminator 3-D show at the Universal Studios park in Florida and the Alternate Stories features are so bad, one wonders how they made it even as 'extra' features. Same for the Deleted Scenes - clearly, they were deleted for a good reason and watching them proves the director's wisdom not to include them.


- RATING

CONTENT - 5 Stars
PACKAGING - 4 Stars (could have been thinner)
PICTURE - 5 Stars
SOUND - 5 Stars
PRESENTATION AND PLAYBACK - 3.5 Stars
SPECIAL FEATURES - 2 Stars (big disappointment)

OVERALL (subjectively weighted average) - 4 Stars

4.0 out of 5 stars It's not as bad as people say, November 4, 2009

By	D. W. Knott (Red Wing, Minnesota) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Heroes season three is not terrible like many people say it is. It's definitely not the best television out there, but it's at least better than the poor second season the show suffered from. This review is very spoiler heavy, so only look at the star ratings I give each volume if you haven't seen them. Instead of writing huge paragraphs for each volume, I'll just give a list of what I liked and didn't like about this season and the individual volumes:

VOLUME THREE: VILLAINS - 3 stars

VOLUME FOUR: FUGITIVES - 4 stars



SEASON THREE

The good:

- This season expanded the the role and depth of secondary characters like Ando, Angela Patrelli, and Sandra Bennet. These characters are well acted and usually counter-act dumb decisions made by the main characters. Example: Hiro creates a stupid plan to get one half of The Formula from The Haitian. Hiro gets the attention of the Haitian to start his plan, but Ando just sneaks up behind The Haitian and knocks him out.

- Claire matures and becomes stronger as the season goes on, and it's a good change from the ditsy cheerleader she's been for the past two volumes. She is less reliant on HRG to protect her, and can take care of herself pretty well by the end.

- The heroes use their powers more often than they did in the previous volume, Generations, and this makes season three a lot more exciting. It gives you a better feel that they actually do have powers.

- Sylar was humanized in this season. In volume three, Sylar was shown glimpses of a normal life with a loving family. In volume four, Sylar goes on a personal quest to find his father and discover why he's so messed up. Sylar was no longer a bad guy just for the sake of needing a bad guy, and it showed that he just wanted to be loved by someone this whole time.

- This season was more action packed than Generations, and has a couple fights that kept me on the edge of my seat. I was a disappointed that there were no epic battles, but the fights they did have made good use of the abilities everyone had.

- The characters began to question if the means to justify the ends. Many times the characters do gray things to accomplish their goals, and it's interesting to see how they react.

The bad:

- Nathan's family is completely forgotten. This could have added a great conflict within his character like it did in season one, but the writers don't seem to like them at all. Claire's boyfriend West was completely forgotten about too. No one ever mentions them, and they never show up. They're not even back in the current fifth volume.

- This season reused old plot devices from the previous seasons way too much. How many comics did Isaac Mendez paint and write before he was killed? Does everyone and their mom have the ability to paint the future? How many flashback episodes are we going to have? Oh, and Heroes tricks you into thinking Nathan died... AGAIN. That's three times by now. These are particularly annoying in volume three, but Heroes start moving away from them in volume four. There were also way too many opening narrations in volume three.


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VOLUME THREE: VILLAINS - 3 stars

The good:

- Villains gives us the luxury of actually knowing the heroes' mission from the first episode. In Generations, the heroes' mission wasn't clearly presented to us until the seventh episode. This volume is about trying to stop The Formula from falling into the wrong hands. The Formula gives anyone abilities when it is injected, and it will eventually destroy the world if it is allowed to be mass produced.

- Mohinder gives himself abilities, and then starts to mutate as a result. I thought this was a good way to give Mohinder motivation, as he needs to perfect The Formula in order to reverse his mutation. It was also a very human thing to do. If I had been studying people with super powers, but didn't have any myself, I would jump at any chance to get one. Wouldn't you?

- Once the volume found its footing, it was very streamlined and better paced than Generations. One complaint I keep hearing about Villains is that every episode had a different direction, and that Heroes kept creating and dropping storylines each episode. This is true early on, but stops at about episode six. Starting with this episode, the writers quit screwing around with the storylines and got their act together.

- Angela manipulating Sylar into thinking she is his mother. This was pretty cleaver on Angela's part, and showed that Sylar just needed a parental figure to guide him. Sylar too showed that he is capable of compassion, but he still has very low self-esteem even when he's happy.

- Arthur Patrelli is the best villain yet. He put his wife into a coma, wants to kill his son Peter, wants to manipulate his other son Nathan into becoming a puppet president, steals any power he gets his hands on, killed Adam (he was really getting on my nerves by the time Generations ended), and the actor playing him is wonderful.

- Daphene is a great addition to the Heroes gang, and her character becomes very well developed in Villains. Matt's storyline was pretty blah before he met Daphene, but after that the two worked very well together. I liked her relationship with Matt, and she gives you the most realistic sense of having a power out of all the heroes and villains this volume.

- Hiro being suspicious of Ando because of what Hiro saw in the future. Their arguments were a great vehicle for giving Ando a voice, and it showed that he wasn't just a nameless tag-along like in seasons one & two. Hiro loosing his memory was a good twist, and worked to show us a lot of his past. This storyline had lots of fun writing to complement it, so these guys on screen was usually a high point for Villains.

- This volume fixed Peter's and Hiro's powers to be more balanced with everyone else on the show. I know this divided fans, but they were just getting too powerful for them to be in any real danger. Now Peter can only have one power at a time, and Hiro is powerless for a lot of volume four.

The bad:

- The creating and dropping of various storylines. I'll go into more detail below.

- Tracy Strauss. She was a terrible, terrible way to replace Nikki. She's a triplet sister of Nikki? Are you really going to insult with that kind of excuse? Her character overall is pretty good, but wow that was stupid. There was nothing to hint at this before, and they never even think about trying to find the third sister. So it's a stupid character replacement AND a dropped storyline. Come on writers, we're not goldfish.

- Sylar's Hunger. Why was this needed? Sylar's reasons for taking peoples' abilities was already well established. There's no need to add another thing which was never mentioned or hinted to at all. It was an interesting twist when Peter gained Sylar's ability of understanding (and subsequently the Hunger) to save the world, but all it did was make Peter do stupid things. The Hunger thing was dropped when the volume ended, and to add insult to injury, Peter didn't even need Sylar's power to save the world anyways. Nice going guys.

- Mohinder traps people in these cocoons for no reason what-so-ever. They never even give a throw away line to explain it. He just does it for to look creepy, and nothing else. This is also dropped half way through the volume.

- Heroes tries to link solar eclipses to people's powers. This is wrong. Heroes already showed that the main characters gained their abilities months before the first solar eclipse (season one episode "Six Months Ago"). They use another solar eclipse to temporarily shut off everyone's powers (which is actually interesting), but those episodes are poorly written and are pretty lame overall.

- The Level 5 Prisoners. I was excited about these guys when they broke out, but then they become a total non-issue the very next episode. Oh, and one of them is killed for no other reason than Sylar can't control his Hunger. Please don't make me laugh Heroes.

- Peter's story was changed way too many times early on. First he was trapped in a Level 5 escapee's body, then he was brought to the future and absorbed Sylar's ability. He absorbed Sylar's ability of understanding to know how to change the timeline, but all it did was make him evil for no reason. He's then put in a chemically induced coma for a couple episodes, beats the crap out of Sylar, looses his all of his powers, and THEN the writers stop messing with him. I swear I almost got whiplash from his story changing so much. Peter got better after they stopped messing with him, but he was pretty painful to watch for a while.

- Some characters acted dumb way too many times. I already explain Peter's dilemma, but Claire and Nathan also do lots of stupid things in the first half of Villains. Claire becomes smarter as the Volume goes on, but Nathan is pretty dumb throughout.

- Maya. She was already useless and annoying enough in Generations, but she's even more useless and more annoying in Villains. Every second she was on screen I felt like offing myself.

- The writing and acting is very uneven in some parts of this volume. This happens mainly in early episodes, but also ruins the two part episode "The Eclipse".

- What happened to Matt's family? I already explained about Nathan's family, Matt's disappeared for this volume too. Peter also forgot about his girlfriend trapped in the future.

- They retconned Sylar and Elle into a relationship. Turns out that Elle, to spy on Sylar before he was evil, was in a... Read more ›

4.0 out of 5 stars i love heroes!, November 4, 2009

By	Ash Knight "Ash Knight" (Bloomfield, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

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this season was great, alot of charecter development, but im gla nathan finally died, his charecter sucks.