6.6 | / 10 |
Users | 3.8 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Perched on the hull of a wrecked Soviet freighter, a team of deep-sea miners—led by head oceanographer Steven Beck—comes face-to-face with a mutant creature that's the product of a failed genetic experiment. As Beck's crew members begin to disappear one by one, the flesh-eating monster lurks below the surface—and the divers left alive are scared to death.
Starring: Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays, Daniel Stern, Ernie HudsonHorror | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Film nerds (and you know who you are) may still argue about whether Howard Hawks or Christian Nyby really directed 1951’s epochal The Thing From Another World, but whoever was responsible for the film, there’s little doubt that its reliance upon an isolated group of people struggling to deal with some kind of rampaging mutant seemingly singlehandedly created a new subgenre within the ranks of horror outings. There’s no point in trying to deny similarities between The Thing (as its title has regularly been shorthanded) and 1989’s Leviathan, but there’s also no denying that Leviathan is, much like its mutating and morphing monster, a bit of a “casserole” itself, cobbled together from various bits and pieces of other horror films. If The Thing is merely the most noticeable of them, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the only one. Oddly, there must have been something in the water in 1989, or perhaps more accurately, there must have been three things in the water, for Leviathan found itself sandwiched in between two other underwater epics that also came out that year, the decidedly lo-fi Deepstar Six and James Cameron’s The Abyss. (There were actually a few other "all wet" films that appeared that year, but these three are the biggest.) That “middle ground” might also attend to the film’s general quality in terms of this kind of odd little triptych. Leviathan is certainly better scripted and produced than Deepstar Six, but it doesn’t have the impressive overall demeanor of The Abyss. That said, it also doesn’t have the narrative lethargy and high-falutin’ tone of Cameron’s film. Leviathan is in fact kind of a throwback to B-movie drive-in fare of yore, a silly but decently scary thrill ride that has no pretensions about itself, and certainly no untoward ambitions to provide anything other than pure escapism (and the occasional adrenaline rush).
Leviathan is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.34:1. An understanding of the film's production gambits is probably necessary to fully appreciate the image quality. Nothing (or at least not much) was actually filmed underwater. Instead a special stage was built and scenes were shot overcranked, so that they are in just slight slow motion, giving the indication that the workers are struggling against the water. A heavy blue filter was utilized and little bits of debris were blown through the stage to imitate floating objects. Therefore, it's understandable that the "underwater" sequences lack much in the way of sharpness or clarity and in fact very little in the way of detail, let alone fine detail. However, scenes in the interior of the underground control center often look surprisingly good, with nicely saturated and accurate looking color. There are no signs of problematic noise reduction or sharpening here, and the best news is that there are no compression artifacts, even in the dank "underwater" segments.
Leviathan features two lossless audio options, DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. There's a bit of a tradeoff here, for the 5.1 track is certainly much more aggressive in the lower frequencies, offering some fantastic LFE as well as some well placed foley effects in the surrounds that tend to be in the lower ranges. Jerry Goldsmith's score is also opened up in the 5.1 iteration. That said, there's a bit of a focus problem in the 5.1 mix, with dialogue getting slightly buried at times. While obviously narrower, the prioritization in the 2.0 mix may therefore be preferable to some listeners. Fidelity is excellent on both of these tracks, and dynamic range is very wide.
Leviathan doesn't have any pretensions to be anything grander than what it is, a good, old fashioned monster movie. That alone sets it apart from at least one other of its 1989 underwater kin, James Cameron's enjoyable but bloated The Abyss. Why Leviathan has come in for such a critical drubbing is a bit surprising to me, for it's consistently enjoyable and entertaining, and it certainly provides at least a couple of great scares. This new Blu-ray has solid technical merits and the longest of the supplements is absolutely outstanding. Recommended.
2011
20th Anniversary Edition
1998
1975
1957
2019
2015
2017
2009
2018
2009
2001
1982
2011
2013
Director's Cut
1986
1972
1975
2007
1999
[•REC]⁴: Apocalypse / [•REC]⁴: Apocalipsis
2014