Film After 11 Podcast | Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Vegas, baby! The Film After 11 podcast travels to the city of sin this week, in the company of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and a whole bunch of famous friends. Yes, Film After 11 takes on Ocean’s Eleven in an 11-minute review with a 12-year-old viewer. Maybe I should have done this last year for symmetry? In any case, will my son recognize any of the superstar faces in the cast? Will he be able to follow the overly-complicated plot? Will he have fun anyway? Those are questions we’ll answer in the episode.

On the parental side of things, rewatching Ocean’s Eleven now reminded me how quickly time flies by as an adult. I can hardly believe this movie was released 25 years ago. I feel like I just saw it in the theater last month. My kids wouldn’t even be born until more than a decade after this. Somehow, the movie doesn’t feel dated in the slightest (unlike the 1960 original, which hasn’t aged as well). It’s always been a lightweight, superficial concoction that no one could ever accuse of realism, but it’s incredibly entertaining all the same and remains so today.

Ocean's Eleven (2001) - Supporting cast lineup
Title:Ocean’s Eleven
Also Known As:Ocean’s 11
Year of Release: 2001
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Watched On: Fandango at Home (rental)
Also Available On: Blu-ray
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Peacock
Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Video Streaming

I could have sworn I owned Ocean’s Eleven on Blu-ray. When I went searching for it, I discovered that the disc was in fact a copy from the short-lived HD DVD format. Warner Bros. released the entire Ocean’s trilogy on both HD DVD and Blu-ray in late 2007, with comparable discs featuring only lossy Dolby Digital audio. As far as I can tell, subsequent reissues on Blu-ray were just repackagings of the same original discs. 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray remasters for all three movies followed in 2024 but I don’t have any of those.

I actually tested the HD DVD and got it to work, even skipping around between scenes, but decided not to take any chances for this viewing. (HD DVD was a notoriously glitchy and unstable format, with discs from Warner Bros. especially known to fail over time.) Instead, I rented it on streaming from Fandango at Home, which conveniently offers the newer 4K version.

Ocean’s Eleven was photographed on the Super 35 film format and was released before the Digital Intermediate process was widely in use. Nevertheless, judging by appearance alone, the 4K version looks like it was probably upscaled from an older video master. Perhaps I could be wrong about that, and perhaps some of the softness I encountered was just due to streaming compression, but that’s what it looks like to me. In this case, even if that’s true, the older master was still pretty good and I don’t have any serious complaints.

The 2.39:1 image is reasonably sharp, even if nothing about it says “4K” to me. The neon lights of Vegas seem like they’d really benefit from HDR, but I’m not convinced anything here exceeds SDR range. Any benefits of Wide Color Gamut are likewise limited by Steven Soderbergh’s fondness for heavy color washes that drown out other colors. Many of them look oversaturated and even bloom.

All that said, this was always a handsomely-photographed movie and continues to look sleek and stylish today.

Ocean's Eleven (2001) movie poster

Whereas the 4K physical media copy was upgraded to a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, the streaming version is still just Dolby Digital 5.1 The audio mix is primarily distinguished by the movie’s bouncy musical score, which sounds good and has a satisfying bass beat at times. Low-end effects rumble once or twice (a building being demolished, a bank vault being blown open). Surround activity is mild in general, mostly used to expand the music. A boxing match scene is noticeably much more enveloping for a couple minutes.

Related

Note: All screenshots on this page were grabbed off a web browser, and came out looking much softer than actually watching the movie from a proper streaming device. They are used for illustration purposes only.

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