6.7 | / 10 |
Users | 2.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 2.9 |
On a faraway mountaintop, eight kids with guns watch over a hostage and a conscripted milk cow.
Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Moisés Arias, Sofia Buenaventura, Julián Giraldo, Karen QuinteroForeign | 100% |
Drama | 66% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Spanish: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Years ago when our sons were still relatively young, my wife and I took a family vacation to Europe, spending quite a bit of time in England, where my father had been born. We did a lot of frankly “touristy” things, and one day we spent hours in various lines at the Tower of London waiting to see things like the Crown Jewels, but one of the most memorable experiences of that day was the literal gaggle of British schoolchildren, all in their little matching uniforms, completely (and I mean completely) out of control and running roughshod over the entire facility, screaming and yelling and even pushing adults out of the way as they frolicked. At one point, I turned to my wife and joked, “Suddenly Lord of the Flies makes so much more sense.” William Golding’s 1954 novel has been rightly celebrated as one of the more incisive deconstructions of often troublesome “human nature”, and it was of course more than memorably adapted by Peter Brook into the 1963 Lord of the Flies. While the 1990 remake probably can’t hold a candle to the original film adaptation, it at least allowed me my first opportunity to share the above anecdote in my review. In press notes that are still available online courtesy of the useful "Wayback Machine", Monos' co-writer and director Alejandro Landes openly admits that Monos owes more than a bit to not just Lord of the Flies, but also to Beau Travail and Heart of Darkness (note that this latter link points to a DVD rather than Blu-ray).
Monos is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Universal Studios with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Captured with Arri Alexa Minis
and finished at a 2K DI (both data points courtesy of the IMDb), this is an often striking looking film, with an interesting greenish grading a lot of the
time which can frankly make things look a bit unnatural, but which lends a certain forested quality to all of the outdoor footage. There are a variety of
stylistic quirks that are employed, and so clarity and fine detail levels can be fairly variable at times, but in the bulk of the presentation, detail levels are
excellent and the wide framings also have considerable depth of field at times.
Note: This disc had a very curious anomaly that I encountered in two different players: this bare bones disc boots to the FBI warning(s) and
then goes straight into the Universal logo and the film. At various times when I would press play, it would do the FBI warning(s), and then the
Universal logo, and then for some reason double back to the FBI warning(s) and then stop itself, which booted me back out to the main menu of the
player. This happened more than once on two different players, but seemed to be random, since both of them also played the disc fine on other
attempts.
Monos features a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track (mostly) in Spanish. Since so much of the film takes place out of doors, there is a glut of nicely spacious ambient environmental sounds sprinkled through the side and rear channels with a fair degree of consistency. A number of relatively violent showdowns can also add energy to the sound design, including some brief bursts of gunfire. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout this problem free track. English subtitles are forced and cannot be removed, at least insofar as I was able to discover.
Not only are there no supplements included on this Blu-ray disc, there's not even a Main Menu. The disc boots to the FBI warning(s) and then goes right into the Universal logo and the film. See the note in the Video comments about some weird anomalies I encountered when playing this disc.
There's a lot of interesting content in Monos, but I couldn't help but think on more than one occasion that there were two films competing with each other in this story. The group of young paramilitary types has a whole coterie of issues it faces, and then there's the hostage drama involving the doctor, and while the two elements certainly intersect, I'm not entirely sure that the film might have been more forceful and ultimately powerful had it been two separate films. That said, this offers some extremely evocative cinematography, and a number of the performances are quite interesting. Technical merits are generally solid, and with caveats noted, Monos comes Recommended.
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