5.1 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.4 |
Determined to make the most of his new job at Wyatt Telecom, Adam Cassidy is horrified after a felonious mistake earns him the wrath of unforgiving CEO Nicholas Wyatt. Typically, Wyatt's first response would be to throw a law-breaking employee under the bus. But this time Wyatt is willing to cut a deal; should Adam agree to infiltrate Wyatt Telecom's chief rival, the CEO will turn a blind eye to his employee's error. In no time Adam is climbing the corporate food chain straight to the top. Upon realizing that his success is a mere illusion and that he's become a simple pawn in a much bigger game, Adam hatches an ingenious plan to get out of the game before it's too late.
Starring: Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford, Amber Heard, Lucas TillThriller | 100% |
Drama | 1% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Digital copy (as download)
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 1.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Paranoia is one of those films that probably looked great on paper—and maybe even on its actual promotional poster—but which is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Or even worse, wallpaper. (Wallpaper doesn’t dry, but I digress.) This supposed thriller posits Liam Hemsworth as Adam Cassidy a young buck at a high tech firm who dreams of migrating across the river into Manhattan and taking the world by storm. Unfortunately, he’s stuck in a low level job as one of countless drones living out their days in cubicles while watching their superiors take home obscene bonuses. Adam has come up with a brilliant idea he wants to pitch to his company’s Chief Executive Officer, Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman), something to do with smartphones being able to access social media (ummm—isn’t that already a possibility?). Wyatt is singularly unimpressed and fires Adam and his cohorts on the spot. Adam then makes the really smart decision to use a corporate expense credit card he still has to take his former work colleagues out for a night on the town, racking up a bill of $16,000 (hey, it’s New York and it isn’t happy hour any longer). He catches the eye of a pretty lass at a club and the two end up in bed together. The next morning he’s summoned rather brusquely into Wyatt’s executive suite where he’s issued an ultimatum: either agree to be groomed to infiltrate Wyatt’s chief nemesis’ high tech firm in order to steal corporate secrets, or go to prison for credit card fraud. Adam is pained, yes pained (Hemsworth’s expressions throughout this film seem to indicate he’s passing rather large kidney stones quite a bit of the time), but of course agrees. Things aren’t all bad, though, since Wyatt’s coterie of henchmen (and women) line up to remake Adam in a socially acceptable corporate image. That includes new clothes, a new car and a super luxe Manhattan apartment. We’re barely fifteen minutes into this heaping pile of pretension, and already it has strained credulity to beyond the breaking point.
Paranoia is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Relativity Media with an AVC
encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. Shot with the Arri Alexa system by cinematographer David Tattersall, the film has a sleek,
glistening appearance that ably supports the story of very wealthy people living and working in very tony surroundings.
Colors, while occasionally graded artificially (often toward a kind of amber-orange), look generally accurate and are nicely
saturated, especially in some of the outdoor scenes (look at the screenshot of Adam walking around the grounds of Jock's
palatial mansion). The film utilizes the ever popular aerial establishing shots (repeatedly), and a couple of those have just
very slight stabilization issues, with extremely minor shimmer wavering through some of the skyscrapers' parallel
lines. Fine detail is exceptional here, showing every weathered crease in both Ford and Oldman's faces, as well as picayune
elements like the nubs of fabric on the towel Hemsworth wraps himself in after darting out of a shower.
Note: For those of you who like to at least occasionally watch Blu-rays on your PC drive, I should mention that this is
literally the first Blu-ray I could not get to load using PowerDVD (I typically check resolution of supplements using this
program). The Fox logo would load, and then the disc would just sit there with a black screen. It's definitely not the
program itself, as I tried a number of other discs and all of them loaded perfectly well. This did play just fine in my PS3.
Paranoia's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is very well done, though the film tends to resort to supposedly hushed, "intense" dialogue scenes most of the time, which leaves surround activity relegated to things like the busy cityscape of Manhattan or the quieter confines of the sylvan grounds of Jock's estate. Dialogue is very cleanly presented and the track has no problems of any kind to report. There's a surprising amount of source cues used for a film like this, as well as a "score" by the excellently named Junkie XL, and those all sound great, utilizing the surround channels very effectively.
This movie about evil, evil smarphones is just plain dumb. A game cast and some good location work can't save this train wreck. Even fans of any of the stars will be hard pressed to find anything worthwhile here, though at least the technical merits of the Blu-ray are first rate.
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