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Monday, March 14, 2011

BD impressions: Never Let Me Go

1:04 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

The film: I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's novel NEVER LET ME GO somewhere in the region of 48 hours before watching the movie adaptation. This is admittedly not always a good idea, as it means the source material is so fresh in your mind that there is a tendency to view even the slightest deviations from the book as flaws. Alex Garland's script, however, is fairly faithful to Ishiguro's novel. Sure, there are nips and tucks here and there, and certain key events are combined or even excised completely, but by and large the plot and, more significantly, the spirit of the novel is retained. (With one fairly crucial difference: the film is a lot more upfront about what precisely is "going on", so to speak, than the novel. I'm as yet undecided as to how I feel about this change.)

Like director Mark Romanek's other film, the Robin Williams vehicle ONE HOUR PHOTO, NEVER LET ME GO is, with the exception of a single scene involving Andrew Garfield's character (which I won't spoil), a cold and emotionally distant film. In some respects this is appropriate, given that much of the book's sense of tragedy stems from the fact that, despite the hopelessness of their situation, its protagonists quietly accept their fate and embrace it more or less willingly. At the same time, though, it makes for rather frustrating viewing, and while I didn't find myself asking the "Why don't they just run away?" question (for me at least, what made the book so chilling was that the characters were so indoctrinated as to their purpose that the thought of escaping never even occurred to them), I did find its po-faced solemnity rather wearying. The acting by the three young leads - Mulligan, Knightley and Garfield - is uniformly excellent, the greyish, understated photography is faultless... It's one of those "well-made films" that doesn't quite have the emotional resonance it should. 7/10

Image quality: A solid if slightly less than outstanding offering from Fox, whom I'm increasingly coming to consider to be the studio providing the most consistently high standard of BD releases, new or catalogue (major gaffes like PATTON and the re-release of PREDATOR notwithstanding). The encoding is solid, and while a handful of shots look to have been slightly grain reduced (going through it frame by frame, the first frame of the affected shots shows more defined grain and better detail than each subsequent frame - see here and here), it's not overly destructive and detail ranges from good to very good throughout. 9/10

Never Let Me Go
studio: 20th Century Fox; country: USA; region code: AB;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

2 Comments

 
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