Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Hollow Man Blu-ray Movie Review

Total Refund

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 29, 2013

Note: This review is of the edition of Hollow Man available as a bundle with Hollow Man 2 from Mill Creek Home Entertainment. A previous version of Hollow Man released by Sony Pictures was reviewed here.

After Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers, news that director Paul Verhoeven was preparing to unleash yet another sci-fi spectacular sent shivers of anticipation through his loyal fans (myself included). Then we saw the movie and wondered what had gone wrong. How could a talent as singular, extravagant and kinky as the Dutch wildman have produced something so utterly banal? Sure, the effects were eye-popping, groundbreaking and suitably icky (and they still hold up today). But the story was no more than a tale of a nerd who snapped at the office after his girlfriend dumped him for a colleague. The fact that the nerd happened to be invisible made his rampage a little more intriguing than bringing a Glock to work, but not that much. Even Verhoeven's usual windowdressing of nudity, voyeurism and misogyny couldn't disguise the fact that he'd essentially made a slasher film—and a fairly unoriginal variation at that, with a villain who was neither scary nor especially interesting.

Having revisited Hollow Man several times since its release, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is inherent in the script by Andrew W. Marlowe (based on a story by Marlowe and Gary Scott Thompson). Marlowe went on to create the successful and imaginative ABC TV show Castle, but in Hollow Man he and his co-author made a fundamental mistake by endowing invisibility with the same moral significance that H.G. Wells saw when he published The Invisible Man in 1897. In today's world of the internet, tiny remote webcams, satellite surveillance and a myriad other extensions of stealth technology, the notion of a naked man running around unseen so that he can spy on people has become faintly ridiculous. Even the invisible protagonist's physical attacks, many of them sexual in nature, seem unremarkable in comparison to what is daily reported in the news and routinely portrayed on screen—and, in any case, Verhoeven had to cut the worst of it after preview audiences objected. He restored it all for this director's cut, but it's still just heinous behavior. What's transparency got to do with it?

Dr. Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) heads a secret government research project attempting to perfect a process to render soldiers invisible. His teammates are his former lover, Dr. Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue), and Dr. Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin), with whom Linda is now secretly involved. They are assisted by a top veternarian, Sarah Kennedy (Kim Dickens), who monitors the various animals they use as test subjects, and three medical technicians, Carter Abbey (Greg Grunberg), Frank Chase (Joey Slotnick) and Janice Walton (Mary Randle). These latter three resemble the "additional" campers in a Friday the Thirteenth film or a Star Trek crew member in a red uniform; they might as well have "victim" tattooed across their foreheads.

The team reports to Dr. Howard Kramer (William Devane), who has an unspecified but powerful position with the Pentagon and whose word appears to carry weight in Congress. Right now, Kramer is impatient at the team's lack of progress. They have successfully rendered cats, dogs and apes invisible, but they have been unable to rematerialize any of them without disintegrating them in the process.

The first act of Hollow Man follows Sebastian's efforts to perfect a formula for rematerialization. With his usual solid craftsmanship, Verhoeven uses this time to give the viewer a thorough tour both of Sebastian's home and of the secure underground facility where the team works in seclusion, including its labs, animal cages and limited-access elevator. This familiarity will prove essential later in the film when the mayhem begins.

The second act follows Sebastian's successful rematerialization of an ape and his concealment of that development from his boss, Dr. Kramer. Already, Sebastian's arrogance is obvious, as he coerces his colleagues into complicity with this scheme, which is both unprofessional and a violation of their contracts. But Sebastian argues that they will all be shown the door once they report success, and he wants to stay with the project for human trials. Sebastian himself wants to be the first test subject.

The final act begins after Sebastian has been rendered invisible but the team cannot make him rematerialize because human DNA is too complicated for the same formula that worked on animals. As Sebastian grows impatient at his confinement in the underground facility, his attitude toward permanent invisibility begins to change. Maybe it's a gift, not a curse. "It's amazing what you can do when you don't have to look at yourself in the mirror any more", he says, in a line that was obviously intended to be pregnant with moral significance but falls flat despite Kevin Bacon's best effort at a sinister delivery. The human capacity for denial and rationalization being what it is, the world is full of people who do terrible things and have no trouble admiring themselves in the mirror (not to mention on TV and YouTube).

Except as an instrumentality, invisibility has little to do with Sebastian's mind games, molestations and assaults. They're just an expression of who he is and has been from the start. By the end, the inability of Sebastian's co-workers to see him becomes almost irrelevant, as Verhoeven is reduced to standard action movie mechanics involving fire, explosions and heavy equipment. Admittedly, he stages and shoots these scenes like the pro he is. But by the third or fourth time your crazed psycho-killer reappears from nowhere after sustaining injuries that would have annihilated a normal person, it's time to dispense with the pretense that you're making anything other than a garden variety slasher film.

Hollow Man Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Mill Creek's 1080p, AVC-encoded presentation of Hollow Man appears to use the same transfer as Sony's 2007 Blu-ray, which looked quite good for its day and still does. However, the transfer has been remastered for this double-feature disc, with different audio and subtitle options, and the bitrate is substantially lower (18.99 vs. 25.47 Mbps). As hard as I looked, however, I was not able to perceive any diminution in video quality, and when I put on the Sony disc immediately following my viewing of Mill Creek's, there was no obvious improvement. The skills of Blu-ray compressionists have no doubt advanced in the six and a half years since Hollow Man's first appearance on the format. It's possible that large-screen front projection may reveal flaws that were not obvious on my 72" screen. If so, I would like to hear from viewers with such equipment. In the meantime, I see no reason for purchasers to favor one version over the other on the issue of video.

Although Hollow Man pre-dated digital intermediates, so much of the film was digitally composited that it closely resembles a contemporary DI creation. The Blu-ray image is clear, sharp and detailed, with an almost harsh quality to the lighting in the research facility, which was no doubt designed to enhance the "transparency" effects. The color palette is unrelentingly cold, with strong blues and whites (not teal, mind you: blues), and the blacks in the key scenes at night are deep and solid. Cinematography Jost Vacano was clearly going for a chilly sense of sterility, even in scenes involving copious bleeding, and he achieved it.

Hollow Man Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Where the Sony disc offered a choice of 5.1 soundtracks in lossy Dolby Digital or lossless PCM, the Mill Creek disc has a single option of DTS-HD MA 5.1. (An additional Spanish dub track is included as DTS-HD MA 5.1, misdescribed on the Blu-ray jacket as "2.0".) The track makes effective use of the discrete speaker array for such obvious effects as Sebastian's voice moving about the room to convey his invisible travels. Subtler effects like the sounds of the lab facility (steam, electrical switches, machinery) are placed throughout the array and register almost subliminally. Some of the soundtrack's best effects are quiet moments, when Sebastian's presence is revealed by a near-silent exhalation of breath or the sound of a chair swiveling. The true strength of a sound mix is often revealed by how well it handles the quiet moments, and this one does so effectively.

Jerry Goldsmith's score is mixed seamlessly to "punch up" some of the bigger moments. It's not entirely Goldsmith's fault that the score often seem to echo Basic Instinct, since there are points in the film when Verhoeven himself seems to be reaching for some of that earlier film's perverse thrill. (He never comes close.)

Hollow Man Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Mill Creek disc contains no extras. The Sony Blu-ray included an HBO "Making Of" featurette called "Anatomy of a Thriller"; an effects documentary entitled "Fleshing out the Hollow Man"; "VFX Picture-in-Picture Comparisons"; and trailers for other Sony features.

Hollow Man Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're a fan of Hollow Man and are more interested in its sequel than in extras, this disc from Mill Creek offers an attractive and cost-effective option. If you care about the extras, then the Sony disc can still be had for a reasonable price. Both offer good presentations of Verhoeven's film. As for the film itself, it hasn't improved with age, and I don't expect it ever will. No recommendation either way, but the options should be clearly laid out for the prospective purchaser.