Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Parts Per Billion Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman June 4, 2014

The end of the world isn't a fun time. Well, nobody can know that for sure since it's never really ended before (unless one counts an event from way back when) but it's fairly easy -- and sometimes even a fun thought exercise -- to explore all of the "what ifs" and "whys" and "hows" behind a "TEOTWAWKI" (The End Of The World As We Know It) cataclysm. Most genre movies explore the destructive nature of nature's end; 2012 is one such film and it does so with a lot of razzle-dazzle. Meanwhile, others like The Road take a grim, up-close look at the human toll in gritty, unsettling detail. Writer/Director Brian Horiuchi's Parts Per Billion attempts to take the a route closer to the latter, exploring the end times through the lives of three couples dealing with the lead-up to and aftermath of a deadly contagion spreading quickly around the globe, the result of chemical weapons usage in an unspecified Middle Eastern war. The result is a movie that feels a billion minutes long, unable to form much of a believable or coherent narrative and failing to present a character roster in which audiences will find sympathy and through which they will experience firsthand the trials of the end times.

A war in the Middle East grows ever more costly when a biological weapons attack kills hundreds in a large radius and forever alters the course of human history. The Centers for Disease Control urges calm and promises no threat to the United States, but when key east coast cities begin to empty and the President is evacuated to an undisclosed location, panic sets in. The media loses all contact with several large cities and both the death toll and panic levels rise. During the chaos, three couples -- aspiring musician Erik (Penn Badgley) and his love-struck fiancé Anna (Teresa Palmer); Erik's wealthy grandfather Andy (Frank Langella) and his wife Esther (Gena Rowlands); and Erik's attorney Mia (Rosario Dawson) and her husband Len (Josh Hartnett) -- come to terms with where they've been, who they are, and what fate has in store for them.

Parts Per Billion seems headed in the right direction but takes a few wrong turns on its way towards the apocalypse. The film lacks both intimacy and scope. It never truly brings the audience deep inside the minds of its characters, leaving them, and all they say and do in the film -- which isn't much -- feeling very much superficial and lacking a deeper context that better relates to the end times. It also never feels very big, like the end of the world is really happening. A fake news broadcast, some sirens, several abandoned cars, and a few dead bodies here and there are pretty much it. Granted, the film aims to paint an intimate portrait of its characters and doesn't necessarily need to offer a sprawling epic of disaster, but a little more effort to paint a more vivid picture of the external challenges they face might have gone a long way into solidifying the story and giving the movie a greater sense of purpose, fear, and closeness amongst its characters and between the characters and the audience.

As it is, the film never does fully draw the audience into the characters' stories or plights. The picture suffers from an awkward out-of-time structure that jumbles the chronology. It's the end with one couple here, sometime before with another there, and just at the beginning with the third. It's not so much that it's hard to follow, it's that there's not much rhyme or reason within the structure. The film frequently feels as if it's pulling the audience in every direction it can and through multiple timelines without any discernible purpose. The jumbled structure and frequent switching of couples never allows the viewer to truly get inside the characters and experience the ups of their relationships and the downs during the struggles they face in the end. The picture simply tries too hard to do too much and the result is a movie that never does much of anything at all.

Parts Per Billion is populated by a fairly strong cast, but the performances are frequently stalled by the jumbled timeline and uninteresting script. The actors are frequently stuck in scenes that seem tangentially important, at best, to the greater experience. In one scene that lasts several minutes, Anna and Erik discuss the contents of a kitchen cabinet and debate the appropriateness of placing cat food inside of it, alongside other goodies like a jar filled with Oreo cookies and, presumably, Goldfish, the search for which sparks the entire scene. Granted, it's meant to further build character relationships, but a movie has to do so with something more relevant, not a throwaway scene and particularly not a throwaway scene in a movie that's already struggling for pace and purpose. Worse, the character connections feel forced and fully uninteresting, even as they, and the disaster, are tied together with Frank Langella's character, adding little to the overall story and never quite building a more coherent sense of doom and the intimacy that the film attempts to flourish in its midst.

Parts Per Billion Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Parts Per Billion features a very flat and glossy HD video-sourced 1080p transfer. It's shiny-clean and nary a bit of it feels out of place, but the inorganic smoothness may not be to everyone's liking. That said, it does reveal splendid detailing across the board; hairs, faces, and clothes are particularly well defined throughout the film, as are any number of well-lit background objects. Colors are nice, frequently favoring a slightly pale, almost artificial look about them. There's a good mix of pasty whites and sickly grays, but the occasional middle ground enjoys nice variety and stability. Black levels tend to look washed out, while flesh tones are often pale and sickly, though seemingly by design. The image seems accurate to filmmaker intent but it's also very inorganic in appearance.

Parts Per Billion Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Parts Per Billion features a healthy and fairly active Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless soundtrack. Musical delivery is nicely organic and evenly spaced, enjoying wide immersion and quality surround support. The track features a good bit of environmental support pieces that enhance the story, place, and time frequently with more command than dialogue and photography. Blaring warning sirens, automobile horn honking, and background radio chatter frequently do a fine job of heightening the sense of urgency that the film otherwise lacks. Dialogue, the track's key ingredient, is delivered accurately and evenly from the center.

Parts Per Billion Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Blu-ray release of Parts Per Billion contains no film related supplemental content; only a selection of previews for other Millennium Entertainment titles, presented in 480i standard definition, are available.

Parts Per Billion Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Parts Per Billion sells a bill of goods that it never delivers. A sound premise within the somewhat tiring end-of-the-world genre is negated by dull characters that cannot be saved by good actors working with a wayward script. Too much time jumping and too little structural coherence and continual purpose contribute to a film that's too scrambled and slow and uncertain of what it's doing, never mind the almost complete absence of world immersion and real sense of peril. Millennium Entertainment's Blu-ray release of Parts Per Billion features very good video and audio. No extras are included. Rent.