8.3 | / 10 |
Users | 5.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.4 |
A teenage Norman Bates and his mother Norma move to an old house overlooking the adjoining motel which they are renovating. The house and motel both come with secrets of their own as does the new town which the Bates family now calls home. A modern re-imagining and prequel to the movie Psycho (1960).
Starring: Freddie Highmore, Vera Farmiga, Max Thieriot, Olivia Cooke, Nestor CarbonellHorror | 100% |
Psychological thriller | 27% |
Mystery | 14% |
Coming of age | 10% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: VC-1
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (2 BDs)
UV digital copy
Mobile features
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The A&E TV series Bates Motel is usually described as a "prequel" to Psycho, and the term is accurate to the extent that the show depicts a teenage version of Norman Bates, the adult character originally conceived by novelist Robert Bloch, whose book was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic. But Bates Motel is only a "prequel" to Psycho in the same sense that the BBC's hit series Sherlock is a "remake" of any previous movie or TV version of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Sherlock's success is largely due to its reinvention of an iconic character for the modern age. In the same vein, Bates Motel showrunners Carlton Cruse and Kerry Ehrin (veterans of Lost and Friday Night Lights, respectively) have reconceived Norman Bates as a 21st Century teen inhabiting an entirely different world than the one surrounding the character that Anthony Perkins played for Hitchcock. This Norman even lives in a different town, although the motel and the famous gothic house are identical to those in Hitchcock's film. Like Sherlock's Baker Street address, some things are timeless. Perhaps the most important element in Bates Motel's reinvention is that Norman's famous mother, Norma, now has a voice of her own. In Psycho, she became what a commentator called one of the most famous cinematic corpses in history, her voice supplied entirely by her son. In Bates Motel, she is a richly complex character with a mysterious past, operatic emotions and explosive mood swings. Cruse and Ehrin wrote the role thinking of actress Vera Farmiga, with little expectation that she'd be interested, but the part was too good to turn down. Farmiga was nominated for an Emmy for a performance that is mesmerizing, pitiful and scary, all at once. One of the less-noted aspects of Psycho is how much it diverges from Hitchcock's own formula for suspense, which is to give the audience plenty of information so that they can thoroughly dread what's coming. In Psycho, by contrast, Hitchcock mostly withholds information, while simultaneously dissembling about where the real danger lies—or even who the movie is about—so that the viewer is constantly shocked by unexpected developments. The last ten minutes of the film require lengthy exposition by a psychiatrist who explains how everything fits together. In Bates Motel, by contrast, we already know that Norman and his mother are deeply disturbed people and that Norman is destined to kill her some day, conceal the crime and suffer intolerable guilt that fractures his psyche. But our understanding of mental illness has advanced significantly in the fifty years since Psycho. The creators of Bates Motel want to explore in greater depth and detail the forces that turn a young man into a monster and a mother's love into a torment so great that killing her becomes the only solution. Updating the story to the present reveals possibilities that Hitchcock and his screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, never imagined. It turns out that the world against which Norma Bates constantly warns her son really is filled with dangers, some of them from genuine criminals and some from sexually aggressive women who thoughtlessly meddle with a sensitive boy's fragile sense of masculinity. Do they deserve to die for that? No, but they're playing with fire.
Two cinematographers are credited for five episodes each in Season One: John Bartley (Lost) and Thomas Yatsko (Fringe). Information about the shooting format was not available, but both appearance and standard modern practice indicate digital photography. The image on Universal's two 1080p, VC-1/encoded Blu-rays superbly reproduces the cinematic feel that showrunners Cuse and Ehrin say they wanted for the program, which takes full advantage of the constant rain in the Pacific Northwest to help create a contemporary film noir style. The image is so consistently sharp and detailed that the rain usually registers, even though falling rain is one of the most difficult elements to photograph. Noise and distortion are entirely absent, blacks and contrast levels are appropriately set, and the colors run the gamut from the noticeably dull and dated wardrobe favored by Norma Bates to the flashier colors of the high school girls and the bright neon of the Bates Motel sign. The greens of the surrounding forest, which turns out to be an important location, are impressively verdant.
The bass extension on Bates Motel's lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack reaches unusually far down for a TV show, starting with the throb of the motel's neon sign switching on during the brief title sequence. That same deep impact can be felt in numerous effects, including gunshots, heavy door slams and other kinds of impacts and subjective sounds associated with troubled psychological states. A number of specific environments have distinctive sonic signatures, including, for example, a nearly derelict ship that Norman and Dylan visit at one point, the high school halls, various forest locations and a kind of "factory" where Dylan works. Dialogue is beautifully rendered, and the classic thriller-style score by Chris Bacon (Source Code) is one of the best I have heard on TV in a long time.
Because they appeared at roughly the same time, Bates Motel is often compared to Hannibal, the NBC mid-season replacement series chronicling the early career of serial killer and cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the character memorably played by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Red Dragon. Hannibal, too, is something of a reinvention, and my colleague Ken Brown placed it on his Top TV Titles on Blu-ray of 2013, where he said that it "managed to pull off everything Bates Motel tried—and failed—to do". My evaluation is the exact opposite. Both series had top production values and great casts, but Hannibal failed to create an internally consistent world in which its far-fetched plots could be credible. Sheerly for the sake of indulging in Grand Guignol, the viewer was required to believe that a supposedly brilliant profiler failed to identify the serial killer in front of him, that the FBI was hopelessly incompetent and that a top agency officer would keep a man in the field who clearly belonged in a padded cell. Bates Motel, by contrast, relied primarily on emotional violence, with just an occasional gore effect to underscore that the danger was real. The criminality of the town requires a suspension of disbelief, but at least the series creators set the town in a remote area as an explanation. And the dangerous proclivities of the lead characters are already well-known; they just haven't fully matured. Let me sum it up this way: Hannibal has disappeared from my viewing lineup, but I'm eagerly awaiting Season 2 of Bates Motel. Highly recommended.
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