Silverado: Steelbook (4K UHD Review)

Reviewed by: Stephen Bjork
Review Date: Sep 30, 2025
Format: 4K Ultra HD

Director

Lawrence Kasdan

Release Date(s)

1985 (October 7, 2025)

Studio(s)

Delphi III Productions/Columbia Pictures (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)

Film/Program Grade: B+
Video Grade: A
Audio Grade: A-
Extras Grade: B+

Review

Lawrence and Mark Kasdan’s Silverado opens with a pre-credit sequence featuring an as yet unidentified Emmett (Scott Glenn) being ambushed by a few equally unidentified gunmen while he’s resting inside a small shack. After defeating them handily, he opens the front door and the camera follows him through it, revealing the vast New Mexico landscape outside and the Silverado opening titles. It’s the reverse of the legendary final shot of John Ford’s The Searchers, where the camera withdrew into a cabin through an open doorway before slamming the door firmly shut, leaving Ethan Edwards (and all that he represents) to remain alone in the wilderness. Ford intended the shot as a visual shorthand to show how uncivilized Western figures like Edwards would never be able to find a place in polite society, but in a way, Ford was also closing the door on the traditional Western genre that he had spent decades helping to shape. So, it’s appropriate that Silverado reverses that imagery, since it was an attempt to open the door for the return of traditional Westerns.

While the Western genre has been a staple of the cinema ever since its inception, going all the way back to The Great Train Robbery in 1903, it has occasionally suffered through its own boom and bust cycles. The greater psychological depth of Fifties Westerns like The Searchers and Shane gave way to the revisionist Westerns of the Sixties like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Wild Bunch, and ultimately to the anti-Westerns of the Seventies like Little Big Man and Soldier Blue. That left nowhere else for the genre to go, and thanks to dwindling box office receipts, studios became reluctant to back further Western projects. Yet in 1985, two different studios, Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures, financed two very different attempts to revive the Western genre for Reagan-era audiences: Pale Rider and Silverado.

In Pale Rider, Clint Eastwood embraced traditional Western iconography while elevating the basic narrative structure from Shane and sailing it into the mystic. For Silverado, Lawrence Kasdan opted to embrace tradition from stem to stern, utilizing every single Western trope that he could think of—and then some. Kasdan has referred to Silverado as being a postmodern Western, but that’s not really accurate. While postmodernism is a somewhat nebulous term, even in the arts, it generally involves questioning norms and interrogating traditional social narratives. While Silverado is a knowing wink and a nod to the Westerns that preceded it, it’s all done without a trace of ironic detachment. Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson was a postmodern Western from a postmodern filmmaker, but Silverado is nothing of the sort. Instead, it’s an open love letter to the Western genre that tries to cram as many familiar tropes as it can into a single film.

In that respect, Silverado is the Star Wars of Westerns, freely borrowing elements from everything that came before it and reassembling them into something that felt fresher in 1985 than it really was. The Kasdans crafted a script that includes everything but the kitchen sink: wagon trains, river crossings, homesteaders, wealthy cattle barons, gunslingers, corrupt law enforcement, shootouts, saloons, gamblers, prostitutes, more shootouts, cattle stampedes, bandit gangs, old scores, still more shootouts, horses, posses, Stetson hats, quick draws, and plenty more fancy shootin’ (with or without actual shootouts). The only thing that’s missing is anything involving Native Americans or Mexicans, which the Kasdans wisely avoided since there was no way to treat those subjects sensitively in this kind of popular entertainment. On the other hand, they did choose to address something that traditional Westerns often overlooked: the presence of black cowboys in the Old West.

That’s a lot to squeeze into a feature film, but the Kasdans handled it by turning Silverado into not just the Star Wars of Westerns, but also into The Big Chill of Westerns. Lawrence Kasdan was the writer/director of that film, so he was no stranger to ensemble dramas, and Silverado has a big enough ensemble to encompass all of the storytelling tropes that he and his brother wanted to use. The heroes include Emmett and his brother Jake (Kevin Costner), Paden (Kevin Kline), and Mal (Danny Glover). The villains include Ethan McKendrick (Ray Baker), Tyree (Jeff Fahey), Scruffy (Pepe Cerna), and Slick (Jeff Goldblum). The lawmen (corrupt and otherwise) include Cobb (Brian Dennehy), and incongruously, Sheriff Langston (John Cleese). The townspeople and homesteaders caught in the crossfire include Hannah (Rosanna Arquette), Stella (Linda Hunt), Ezra (Joe Secena), Rae (Lynne Whitfield), Phoebe (Amanda Wyss), Hobart (an uncredited Brion James), and the rest of Emmet and Jake’s family (Earl Hindman, Patricia Gaul, and Thomas Wilson Brown).

That’s also a lot of featured actors to squeeze into a single film, and some of them did end up falling by the wayside in the 133-minute final cut. Rosanna Arquette suffered the worst, and while elements of the planned love triangle between Hannah, Emmett, and Paden do remain in the film, it’s bafflingly elliptical without all of her original scenes. Still, she’s just one cog in the machine, and many of the other supporting actors fared much better than she did. Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt, and even John Cleese managed to bring some real depth into their otherwise thinly-drawn characters, making them feel like real individuals, not just archetypes. Still, Silverado belongs to the quartet of Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner, and Danny Glover. Kevin Costner in particular is a marvel, displaying more personality in this one film than he has in the rest of his career put together. It’s a shame that he found more success with his patented stone-faced persona, because Silverado proved that he was more than capable of playing energetic characters like Jake.

In fact, it’s Jake who offers the closing line of Silverado as he and Emmett ride off to California, telling (warning?) everyone else that “We’ll be back.” Sadly, that never happened. While Pale Rider had turned a tidy profit thanks to Eastwood’s legendary efficiency working with limited means, Silverado was an expensive film to produce, and Columbia didn’t get much of a return on their investment. It doesn’t help that Silverado ended up opening on the week after Back to the Future did, and while that may seem a mite foolish in hindsight, even Universal underestimated just how much that their troubled Robert Zemeckis film would dominate the box office. (To be fair to the execs at Columbia, they already had that opening date locked in, while the release date for Back to the Future had been a moving target thanks to production delays.) Silverado never stood a chance, a sequel never materialized, and Jake’s promise was left unfulfilled.

As a result, the Western genre fell back into dormancy for the rest of the Eighties (despite an occasional blip on the radar like Young Guns). It wasn’t until the next decade that the success of Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, and Tombstone made the Western genre viable again, enough so that Lawrence Kasdan decided to make his own return with the wildly ambitious (and tragically underappreciated) Wyatt Earp. But what happened with that film is a story for another day...

Cinematographer John Bailey shot Silverado on 35mm film (in Super Techniscope format, aka Super-35) using Panavision Panaflex cameras with spherical lenses. 35mm release prints were anamorphic blowups framed at 2.39:1, while 70mm prints were spherical blowups to full-frame 2.20:1. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in Dolby Vision and HDR10.

Super-35 has an unfair reputation as being excessively grainy, but part of that is actually due to the grain being magnified during the blowup process. With a 4K scan directly off the camera negative, that’s not necessarily a problem. Yet Silverado is indeed a grainy film, but that’s more likely due to the stocks and exposures that Bailey used than being the results of the Super-35 process itself. (While Bailey was interviewed by American Cinematographer back in 1985, he didn’t provide any information regarding film stocks.) The optically printed opening credits are particularly grainy, so the process of creating dupes didn’t do the film any favors, but everything else is sharp and clear—including the grain. That’s the interesting tradeoff from a negative scan: release prints would have softened the grain due to generational losses, but the anamorphic blowup process would have magnified that softened grain. In this version, it’s tighter but almost too sharp. (This is one case where some delicate grain reduction wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad idea.)

Bailey told American Cinematographer that he was influenced by Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of the same New Mexico landscapes that appear in the film, and he tried to be faithful to her multicolored panoramas with a strong emphasis on natural earth tones. The key to all of that was very dark blacks, which he felt were the necessary foundation for strong whites and all the other colors as well. That palette is reproduced perfectly here, with deep blacks that do provide contrast with the pure whites of the snowy landscapes. All of the colors in between those two extremes are well-saturated but always naturalistic. It’s worth pointing out that while the skies can appear deeply blue at times, Bailey intentionally toned them down whenever he didn’t want to distract viewer’s eyes from the characters, by overexposing, backlighting, and filtering them. So, if the skies don’t seem consistent from shot to shot, that’s exactly what he intended. If there’s one minor criticism here, it’s that some of the brightest of those overexposed skies feature grain that may have some noise mixed in with it, but that’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things. In all other respects, this is another reference-quality transfer from Sony.

Primary audio is offered in English Dolby Atmos, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio. Silverado was released theatrically in optical Dolby Stereo on 35mm prints and 6-track mag Dolby Stereo on 70mm prints (“baby boom” format, so the surrounds were also mono). The 2.0 track here does appear to be the original Dolby Stereo mix with encoded surrounds, while the 5.1 is the same remix that has appeared previously. The big news is the new Atmos mix, and it’s another fantastic example of Sony gently expanding the soundstage to take advantage of object-based audio and the additional channels, but without losing the character of the original mix. While the surrounds were already quite active in Dolby Stereo, they display much more precise placement of individual sound effects in Atmos. The overall soundstage is also more cohesive in Atmos, while it demonstrates the limitations of the basic four-channel array in Dolby Stereo. Fortunately, while the music in Sony’s recent Atmos remix for Krull ended up sounding a bit recessed and constricted compared to the original, that’s not an issue here. Bruce Broughton’s rousing score for Silverado has all the energy, liveliness, and presence in Atmos than it does in either 2.0 or 5.1. Feel free to audition all three tracks, but you might be surprised at how satisfying the new Atmos mix can be.

Additional audio options include French, German, Italian, and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital, plus Thai 2.0 mono Dolby Digital. Subtitle options include English, English SDH, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Spanish (Castilian), Spanish (Latin America), Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Sony’s 4K Ultra HD Steelbook release of Silverado is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with an unremastered 1080p copy of the film. It also includes a J-card slipcover and a Digital code on a paper insert tucked inside. (Sony is referring to this as a 40th Anniversary Edition on some of their press materials, but nothing on the packaging, the discs, or the J-card indicates that.) Aside from the new trailer on the UHD, the rest of the extras are identical to what was on Sony’s previous Blu-ray release of Silverado for the simple reason that it’s the exact same disc—and all of them actually date back to the 2005 Columbia Tri-Star Superbit Gift Set. While some new 40th anniversary retrospective love would have been appreciated, there’s nothing wrong with the existing extras:

DISC ONE: UHD

Theatrical Trailer (HD – 2:01)

DISC TWO: BD

Along the Trail: A Western Historian’s Commentary
A Return to Silverado (SD – 21:01)
The Making of Silverado (SD – 37:01)
Previews:
- The Da Vinci Code (HD – 1:06)
- Casino Royale (HD – 1:34)
- Ghostbusters (HD – 1:23)
- A River Runs Through It (HD – 2:36)
- Damages: Season 1 (HD – 1:37)

Along the Trail: A Western Historian’s Commentary features film historian Frank Thompson, University of New Mexico professor Paul Hutton, and UCLA history professor Steve Aaron. They analyze Silverado from a historical and thematic perspective, noting where it’s accurate to the period and where it’s not. (They’re a little harsh on the various hats, with only the one worn by John Cleese getting their unreserved stamp of approval). They make the valid point that Westerns were always as much about the time in which they were produced as they were about the eras in which they were set, and Silverado is very much an Eighties film. They also note how the excision of Rosanna Arquette’s character Hannah means that Emmett and Paden became the real romantic core of the film. As commentaries go, this one is a ton of fun and well worth your time.

A Return to Silverado is an interview with Kevin Costner, who talks about his own love of Westerns (How the West Was Won was a personal favorite) despite the fact that they didn’t necessarily speak to him personally. Silverado ended up connecting him to the genre in a way that previous Westerns hadn’t. Interestingly enough, he says that he was initially disappointed by the nature of Jake’s character and saw himself as more of the taciturn type, but Lawrence Kasdan convinced him to give it a go, and he’s now eternally grateful for the role. He also learned a lot from Kasdan that influenced his own work as a director.

The Making of Silverado was written, produced, and directed by the great Laurent Bouzereau, and needless to say it’s up to his usual high standards. It mixes archival footage and clips from the film with new and archival interviews with Lawrence Kasdan, Mark Kasdan, John Bailey, production designer Ida Random, editor Carol Littleton, Bruce Broughton, Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Scott Glen, and Linda Hunt. The Kasdan brothers are front and center, explaining all the challenges involved with making a Western during an era in which the genre had fallen out of style. They cover topics like finding the locations, building the sets, gun training, horse (and cattle!) stunts, the editorial process, sound mixing and the score. They also briefly address the idea of a sequel, but while they did develop a script, Lawrence says that his heart was never in it. Tantalizingly, The Making of Silverado does include outtakes of some of the footage that was deleted from the final cut, but unfortunately Columbia/Sony has never provided a full set of deleted scenes from the film.

Sony has also not included the featurette A History of Western Shootouts from their Superbit Gift Set DVD release, nor has the majority of the extras from Criterion’s 1991 Special Edition LaserDisc release, which includes scrapbooks, storyboard comparisons, and a teaser trailer, made it past that format.

The extras that Sony has included has always been fine, so the lack of new or previous ones isn’t really an issue here. On the other hand, Sony’s new 4K Ultra HD master is a revelation compared to any and all previous home video versions of the film. It’s a night-and-day improvement over the aging Blu-ray master, let alone the DVD, so it’s going to be a mandatory upgrade for Silverado fans. Highly recommended.

-Stephen Bjork

(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).