6.6 | / 10 |
Users | 1.8 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.6 |
In the very waters where Melville's Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — this is a cosmic portrait of commercial fishing as it's never been seen.
Starring: Brian Jannelle, Adrian Guillette, Arthur Smith (XXXIV), Asterias Vulgaris, Callinectes SapidusDocumentary | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
None
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The biblical Leviathan, a sea monster who appears most prominently in the book of Job, has been a potent, mutable symbol, used for various purposes in literature and theology throughout the ages. In Job chapter 41, the beast is presented as a creature second in strength only to God himself; the passage—in which God declares, "None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?"—serves to humble prideful mankind. In the Middle Ages, the Leviathan conjured up images of Satan and Hell, and in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes used Leviathan as the title of his opus on nascent political science, comparing the all-powerful creature to his conception of an ideal state ruled by an absolutely sovereign monarch with the consent of the people. Of course, in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Captain Ahab's own personal leviathan—the elusive white whale—is invested with a multitude of meanings, from man's desire to conquer nature to the mystery and unknowability of the divine.
It's impossible to judge Leviathan's picture quality by any of the normal rubrics. When Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verana Paravel set out on their documentary voyage, they almost immediately lost their larger, more professional digital camera to the sea, forcing them to use their backup array of tiny GoPro action-cams, the sort favored by "extreme" surfers and mountain-bikers and kayakers. Waterproof and easily body-mountable, the GoPro is ideal for these kinds of applications, but the image it outputs—heavily compressed in-camera, producing visible-from-a-distance macroblocking artifacts—often leaves much to be desired. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel embraced this aesthetic, though, pushing the camera's sensor to its limits and playing with its very flaws. I never thought I'd say that a picture could be poeticized with compression, but that's exactly the case here. It also makes for an unexpected collision of form and meaning. Leviathan's harsh, digitized picture is every bit as ugly and beautiful as the film's subject matter. It works. It has a fascinating texture. It's lo-fi in a Zen, wabi-sabi, accept-the-imperfections sort of way. And with that in mind, Cinema Guild's 1080p/AVC- encoded Blu-ray presentation is absolutely true to source. The blown-out highlights, the crushed blacks, the square patterns of noise when the camera's bit-rate couldn't keep up with the motion in the frame—it's all inherent and unexpectedly appropriate. The high marks may seem odd here, but providing you know what to expect going into this experience, they're certainly deserved.
Similarly, the audio capabilities of the GoPro cameras—especially inside their waterproof dive housings—are seriously limited, causing everything to take on a thin, far-away, muffled quality. Sound designers Ernst Karel and Jacob Ribicoff have worked this to the film's favor, however, creating a 5.1 multichannel soundscape—in the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio codec—that's surreal and unsettling. Ghostly chains clank. An electric winch whirs in the distance. The dim underwater thrum of the boat's propellor gives way to ocean spray, wind, and the cawing of seagulls when the camera is suddenly pulled up into the open air. It's immersive in a claustrophobic way; it almost sounds like we're snorkeling through the film with water in our ears, even when the camera isn't submerged. That there's no music—and no intelligible voices—furthers the isolating effect. No subtitles are included, and none are needed.
Leviathan is less of a documentary than a subjective, pure cinema experience, turning the activities aboard a commercial fishing vessel into a grim poetry of abstractions that can be interpreted—or better yet, felt—in any number of ways. It's isolating, at turns horrific and hypnotic, and it has the devastating effect of stripping away the privilege that we, as humans, assume we have over the rest of the natural world, leaving us adrift in the uncaring ocean of the universe. Understandably, this is no light Saturday evening entertainment, and it does require a certain patience and mindfulness to appreciate. That is to say, Leviathan is no Deadliest Catch. Highly recommended for those who enjoy the more experimental side of the documentary spectrum.
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