7.5 | / 10 |
Users | 4.2 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.4 |
A tale of time travel in which a father and a son reach out to one another across a thirty-year gap to prevent a terrible crime.
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Shawn Doyle, Elizabeth Mitchell, Andre BraugherThriller | Insignificant |
Supernatural | Insignificant |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 2.0
Czech: Dolby Digital 2.0
Music: Dolby Digital 5.1
English SDH, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
The achievement of Frequency is to knit an array of disparate strands into one coherent film not quite like any other you've seen. It includes a sci-fi story about time displacement (but not time travel), a thriller, a police procedural, the dangerous life of a firefighter, a baseball movie, a tale of a father's and son's devotion and a mother's love—and everything fits. The director of this uniquely satisfying two hours was Gregory Hoblit, whose years helming multi-threaded narratives on TV's Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue proved to be the ideal preparation for Frequency. A different director might have tried to simplify Toby Emmerich's script, but Hoblit kept everything while trying to make it more visceral, accessible and compelling. Many of Hoblit's techniques work so well that they're invisible to the audience. Frequency's central scenes, both emotionally and narratively, are the conversations between a father and his adult son across a thirty-year time gap caused by a freak of solar activity. The intensity of the emotional connection in these scenes is just as critical as the information being passed back and forth causing ripples (and more) in the timeline. The two characters don't share the screen, and another director might have filmed them separately, but Hoblit put actors Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel in adjoining rooms connected by microphones with two cameras on each actor, so that they performed these exchanges in real time with each aware that the other was nearby. The result electrifies the performances and galvanizes the film.
The Canadian cinematographer Alar Kivilo (The Blind Side, The Lookout) was the DP on Frequency, and the film is notable for the subtle intensity of its imagery, which Kivilo achieved through a combination of deep blacks and blues, sharp focus and subtle shifts between the color palettes of 1969 and 1999, and then again within 1999 as the activities of Frank and John Sullivan reshape history and the present. (Hoblit says on the commentary that, if he had it to do over again, he would make the shifts less subtle, but personally I'm glad he's forced to leave things as they are.) Warner/New Line's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray presents Kivilo's imagery to fine advantage, with solid black levels, exceptional detail in both dark and brightly lit portions of the frame, and colors that accurately contrast the warmer hues of Frank's convivial home in 1969 with the chillier tones of John's sad surroundings in 1999. A fine (very fine) pattern of natural grain is evident in the image, and it does not appear to have been reduced or stripped by digital processing, nor has sharpness been created artificially by digital means that would leave traces such as "ringing". This is a film-like image like the one audiences saw in theaters, and I did not detect any compression errors to interfere with the viewer's enjoyment.
Frequency's DTS-HD MA 7.1 track has an expansive and involving presence, whose power is immediately evident during the early sequence when Frank Sullivan rescues Con Ed workers trapped in an underground steam tunnel by an overturned gasoline tanker. The viewing room comes alive with the details of dripping water, boots on ladder rungs, halogen tools against metal, sparking cables and a hundred other details that add urgency and immediacy to the action on screen. The same kind of attention to sonic minutia is evident in the later scenes of the warehouse fire that is supposed to claim Frank's life but doesn't, and indeed in every other environment where the story takes its two protagonists, in both 1969 and 1999. Bass extension is deep and powerful but never overstated or bombastic. The dialogue is always clear, unless your ear happens to have trouble with the Queens accent carefully learned by the cast and vouched for as accurate on the commentary track by composer Michael Kamen, a native. Kamen's score, with its varied moods and quicksilver shifts in tone, sounds terrific and has been expertly blended with the film's sound mix so that it underlines the story's emotions without overwhelming them. The pop songs sprinkled throughout the soundtrack, including Carly Simon's special rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and Garth Brooks's original composition (with Jenny Yates), "When You Come Back to Me", which plays over the closing titles, sound equally good.
The extras have been ported over from the 2000 New Line "Platinum Series" DVD. Omitted are the following: a "fact and trivia" track; cast and crew bios; a promo for the Sierra Studios game Ground Control; and various DVD-ROM features, including the film's script synched with the film, the original website and promotional items for what was then the upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy. In addition, the "solar galleries" had an option to be played simultaneously as multiple angles, and the five-part documentary had a "play all" function, which the Blu-ray lacks.
The notion of fixing or perfecting the past ("if only I'd turned this way instead of that") will always exert a powerful hold on the imagination, simply because no life will ever be free from regret or doubt about what might have been. This is one of the potent elements in Frequency's mix, but what gives the film its enduring appeal is the basic desire to see a family healed and made whole again, especially when they begin the story with the warmth that Dennis Quaid and Elizabeth Mitchell lend to the Sullivans. There are few motivations of equal power in storytelling, and Hoblit lets it flow into all of the film's tributaries before they recombine into a mighty river rushing toward the film's conclusion. It's a narrative tour de force that's been capably transferred to Blu-ray. Highly recommended.
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