2+5 Mission Hydra – The 4K Blu-ray You Don't Expect

2+5 Mission Hydra, a 1966 film by Pietro Francisci, occupies an uncertain space where sci-fi ambition clashes with limited resources and a tone that oscillates between serious and facetious.

The plot begins with a classic 1960s science fiction trope: a UFO near a small Italian village, a curious professor, his daughter, and an assistant who stumble upon a crashed spaceship. Abducted by aliens, the protagonists are taken to another planet, but the cosmic journey takes improbable turns, closer to farce than intergalactic adventure.

Rare 1960s Italian Sci-Fi Foray

The director, who had brought dignity to the peplum genre with the successes of The Labors of Hercules and Hercules and the Queen of Lydia, experiments with a genre rarely explored by Italian cinema. This operation betrays a certain lack of conviction: homemade sets, rudimentary special effects, and often discontinuous pacing.

The choice to open the film with a kind of mise en abyme, showing Francisci himself on set and recalling images from his past works, is curious. This sign of self-irony seems to acknowledge the distance between the glories of peplum and this uncertain foray into science fiction. Unable to aim for space opera, too serious to be a true parody for a film that doesn't fail to entertain, provided you enjoy it with a good dose of indulgent retro spirit.

Shot on 35mm at an unspecified ASA sensitivity, the work was thought to be definitively lost until the original negatives were found and underwent 4K restoration. Original image format 1.33:1 (3840 x 2160/24p), HEVC encoding on a BD-66 dual-layer disc. Technically superior and an unexpected result for colors, detail even in the background, black depth, and light dynamics thanks to Dolby Vision dynamic metadata management. It's truly a joy to behold such a spectacle for a film with 59 years on its shoulders. A BD-25 disc with the 2K version of the film is included.

The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 dual mono track is more than decent, considering the conditions in which the rediscovered material likely was, revealing more or less direct dialogue and clear spoken Italian.

Cardboard slipcover. Extras include a booklet of textual insights by Nocturno Editore and a commemorative postcard with original artwork by Daniele Serra, who also designed the cover for the Gold Edition by Plaion Pictures.