Cosmoball Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Cosmoball Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 9, 2021

Cosmoball is a nonstop visual and aural onslaught, and if it were possible to be able to figure out what the film is actually about, it might have been a major international blockbuster. Unfortunately, both a global pandemic and inherent incoherence intruded, and this gargantuan Russian science fiction epic had a box office take that was rather seriously deflated, maybe like one of those infamous footballs Tom Brady allegedly handled back when he was a Patriot. And in fact football is kind of an underlying plot element here, since the titular game kinda sorta resembles it. This is another film that, kind of like the also intermittently confusing Chinese blockbuster Jiang Ziya, begins with a quick animated sequence that attempts to provide some "mythological" backstory for everything. But instead of offering clarity, the prologue may ironically only further muddy the waters. ( Cosmoball resembles Jiang Ziya in another way, in that it was evidently screened in 3D, but Well Go USA is only offering a 2D Blu-ray.)

The back cover of this release provides the following synopsis, and I think it might be charitable at best to say that it provides more information than might be readily gleaned from the film itself:

After a brutal intergalactic war causes worldwide famine and devastation, life on Earth is desolate, brightened only by "cosmoball", a dangerous, high flying sport that requires unimaginable speed, reflexes, and courage. While the world scans the sky religiously to catch the death defying tournaments, no one suspects that with each match, four gifted humans are fighting furiously to ensure the survival of mankind.

Unfortunately, even this largely comprehensible summary fails to include all sorts of things that Cosmoball just kind of stuffs willy nilly into the proceedings, including the fact that the "brutal intergalactic war" evidently led to the destruction of the moon, which in turn has also evidently affected weather. There's also a shamanic type named Belo* (Yevgeny Mironov) who just shows up at random intervals as the kind of quasi-trainer of the Earth's Cosmoball team, and who is looking for someone who can teleport, which it turns out focal character Anton (Yevgeny Romantsov) can do. There's also a bad guy (an alien) named Cherno* (I haven't been able to discover an actor's name, so maybe he's totally CGI), who needs some kind of magical "proto-gene" that is inside of Anton. But, wait, you also get: Valaya (Maria Lisovaya), who is Cherno's shapeshifting daughter who has been tasked with killing Anton, and Natasha (Viktoriya Agalakova), who is the captain of Earth's Cosmoball team.

As such, there is a lot going on almost incessantly in Cosmoball, but it's so seemingly haphazard that: a) it doesn't make sense most of the time, and; b) you end up not caring what's happening because it doesn't make sense most of the time. The film is a bizarre mashup of everything from Rollerball to Tron, and there's no question that there's a lot of visual splendor going on, and that the sound design is unabashedly overpowering. Production design is often off the charts, if again derivative of any number of outings like The Hunger Games (especially in terms of elements like costume designs), but the story just kind of careens like the orb in another kind of game: pinball.

Note: I guess it's probably a good thing that I was so confused by a lot of Cosmoball that I devoted quite a bit of time to doing some background research, because I actually ended up learning something. In that regard, in my internet sleuthing I discovered that 'Belo' is the Russian word for "white", while 'Cherno' is the Russian word for "black". In that regard, it further came to light in my digging around that the word "Chernobyl" actually refers to the black grasses of that region - and that was before the nuclear catastrophe.

Cosmoball Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cosmoball is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb doesn't have any relevant data points, and I haven't been able to dredge up any authoritative data on the shoot, so once again I'm assuming a digital capture finished at a 2K DI. This is a hugely appealing looking film from a purely aesthetic standpoint. The opening animated sequence is minimalist in comparison to the rest of the film (see screenshots 5 and 10 for two examples from this "cartoon" prologue), but once the film gets into its main story, while there's an absolute glut of CGI, detail levels are often surprisingly strong. Texturing on the digitally created creatures is typically decent looking, and if some establishing shots are a bit on the "impressionistic" side, both practical sets and costumes as well as CGI close-ups typically show good detail levels and a really nicely suffused palette. The film tends to ping pong between blues and yellows in a lot of scenes, but fine detail levels are only marginally affected.

Cosmoball Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Cosmoball features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks in either the original Russian or an English dub. There's a definite disconnect between lip movements and sounds coming out of them in the English dub, but otherwise I noticed no huge variances between the two languages in terms of mixes or amplitude. The surround tracks are rip roaring affairs that rarely let up in either LFE or immersion, and the result is actually kind of exhausting after a while. Effects zing and pan through the soundstage during the game sequences in particular, but even some of the kind of post-Apocalyptic "village" life offers good placement of ambient environmental effects. Tony Neiman's score also fills the side and rear channels winningly. The film is often very noisy, but things are very well prioritized throughout, with dialogue (such as it is) rendered cleanly and clearly. Optional English subtitles are available, and it's kind of fun to have them on while the English language version plays, since there are some comical differences (in one moment, a dunderheaded guy is called an "idiot" on the English language track, while the subtitles, which I assume are translating the original Russian, offer a more sarcastic "clever boy" instead).

Cosmoball Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailers includes:

  Trailer (1080p; 1:59)

  
  

  Trailer (English Dub) (1080p; 1:59)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the supplements have been authored to follow one another automatically (so that clicking on the the Trailer under the main Trailers menu option is essentially a Play All button). After the Trailer (English Dub) for this film plays, the disc has been authored to automatically move on to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

Cosmoball Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I say this with tongue only maybe slightly in cheek, but if you don't care what a movie means and just want to watch phantasmagorical imagery and listen to nonstop sound effects, Cosmoball may be just the ticket. There's an interesting story buried somewhere underneath all the CGI wonderment here, but it can be awfully hard to find a lot of the time. Technical merits are solid for those who are considering a purchase.