5.6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
In a future world, a physicist's experiment to harness unlimited energy goes wrong. Chased by drones and soldiers, Will Porter must race through an imploding world and retrieve the Redivider box to save his family…and all of humanity!
Starring: Dan Stevens, Bérénice Marlohe, Tygo Gernandt, Charity Wakefield, Bas KeijzerSci-Fi | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Perhaps because elements of both stories have been used interchangeably in various cinematic adaptations through the years, it can be hard at times to separate aspects of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. (The links serve mostly to identify something approaching the original titles of Lewis Carroll’s tales, not to suggest that either of these films is an accurate recreation of those works. The sequel was actually originally titled Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.) One of the salient differences between the two stories is how Alice gets to her alternate reality. In the first tale, of course, she follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, while in the second saga she steps through a mirror in the room where she’s playing with her cats. Once she’s on the other side of the mirror, she discovers everything is (once again, of course) reflected, meaning that when she picks up a book (which ends up containing Carroll’s immortal Jabberwocky), she discovers the print is “backwards” and she needs to read it by holding it up to a mirror. There’s something at least somewhat similar going on in early, initially unexplained, vignettes in Kill Switch, an intermittently interesting science fiction tinged thriller that finds a NASA astronaut named Will Porter (Dan Stevens) on a mission to a “looking glass” Earth where things like printing are in fact reversed. That gives the film an immediate visual hook that is quite compelling, though another artifice the film employs may be more noticeable. Long swaths of Kill Switch are told “POV” style, courtesy of a minicam that is part of Porter’s computer interface. This gambit may bring to mind other “first person” offerings like the 1947 noir based upon a Raymond Chandler story, Lady in the Lake, a film which told its story more or less resolutely from a “first person point of view”, giving the audience views of its hero Phillip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery, who also directed) only courtesy of things like mirrors he passes in front of. Kill Switch isn’t totally consistent in this regard, going for the first person conceit in “current time” sequences detailing Porter’s adventures on the mirror planet, which is called The Echo, while exploiting more traditional “third person” narrative techniques in long flashback scenes detailing how Porter came to this precarious situation.
Kill Switch is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. I haven't been able to track down any authoritative data on the shoot, but this looks digitally captured, and it features what might be termed intentional resolution variances, with a lot of the first person "neural interface" cam work looking less sharp and well detailed than the flashback material. The flashback material is often pretty coolly graded, offering a glut of grays and blues, and The Echo is similarly often shorn of any vivid hues, so the palette doesn't really pop with a great deal of immediacy (one notable exception is the 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque trip through the portal to The Echo, seen in screenshot 9). In the flashback sequences detail and fine detail levels are excellent, at least with regard to practical sets and the humans in them. Throughout the film a lot of the CGI looks fairly soft, and when combined with the POV lower resolution shots, detail levels are definitely affected.
Kill Switch's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track has a good amount of surround activity, with regular placement of effects in the side and rear channels, something that actually helps the whole "videogame" feel of the film when it kicks into first person mode. A few thunderous sound effects offer powerful LFE. Dialogue is cleanly delivered and well prioritized, and fidelity remains excellent throughout, supporting some wide dynamic range.
Kill Switch's deliberately disjunctive structure may not help build much narrative tension (and it's notable that the film ultimately goes pretty exclusively first person), but there's an intriguing story at play at the center of the film, despite some inherent silliness and some overly melodramatic touches. This is an interesting debut for Smit who, armed with a bigger budget and a more cohesive screenplay, might offer something more powerful (sorry) down the line. Technical merits are strong for those considering a purchase.
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