7.5 | / 10 |
Users | 5.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.8 |
In 1973, a squad of National Guardsmen on an isolated weekend exercise in the Louisiana swamp must fight for their lives when they anger local Cajuns by stealing their canoes.
Starring: Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, Fred Ward, Franklyn Seales, T.K. CarterThriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
DVD copy
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
If Southern Comfort is supposed to be an allegory for the American experience in the Vietnam war—and this Blu- ray’s supplementary documentary makes it clear this is at least a debatable proposition—it’s an amazingly on the nose one, at least in certain respects. While the film deals with so-called “weekend warriors”, a ragtag troop of Louisiana National Guard guys, the location, a backwoods swamp in the bayou, is a near perfect visual metaphor for that oft repeated “quagmire” term that is used to describe Vietnam. The fact that the Guardsmen seem to be more or less hapless victims who through their own stupidity cause a battle with the local native Cajun population might seem to be at odds with the historical record of the American government’s involvement in Southeast Asia, but there’s an emotional veracity to the reactions of these guys who find themselves in way over their individual and collective heads that rings true for anyone who has experienced war, whether that be in Vietnam, Korea, Germany, or any of the more recent theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan. Director Walter Hill is sometimes thought of as a kind of “poor man’s Sam Peckinpah”. Like Peckinpah, Hill delights in the camaraderie of men under pressure, and also like Peckinpah, he finds a certain odd lyrical grace in extremely violent deaths (something co-star Peter Coyote takes him to task for in the included documentary featurette). But in the case of Southern Comfort, Hill might be thought of less as a cinematic sibling to Peckinpah than to John Boorman, for this particular film often plays like a slightly more militarized version of Boorman’s great Deliverance. The film is also more than a bit reminiscent of another Hill opus which came out just a couple of years before Southern Comfort, the somewhat better received The Warriors . Both films posit a group of guys trying to survive against considerable odds in unfamiliar territory. Neither film is as concerned with the mechanics of that survival as with the interplay between the characters as relationships devolve in the heat of more and more atavistic situations.
Southern Comfort is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Shout! press materials tout "a new high definition transfer" without explicitly addressing the issue of whether it's newer than (and different from) that used for the lackluster British blu-ray released by Second Sight. I don't own the British version, but a cursory comparison of screenshots suggests that if this is the same master, at the very least some color correction has been done. The color of this presentation, while often intentionally muted and muddy looking, is often quite striking, especially in the deeply lush greens of the tangled vines and other flora of the Louisiana bayou. Unfortunately, this presentation suffers from several of the same anomalies my colleague Dr. Svet Atanasov noted in his review of the British version. While grain is more than abundantly in evidence, it clumps at times and is littered with slight but visible video noise, especially in some of the dimmer sequences. There are also compression artifacts afflicting the image, typically in the lower half of the frame, some of which look almost like splotchy pixilated overlays on the image. That said, the brightly lit close-ups reveal excellent clarity and fine detail. Some midrange and establishing shots are relatively soft by comparison, a tendency exacerbated by the diffuse lighting utilized for some sequences. While the bulk of the image is stable, there's some fairly jittery telecine wobble during the credits.
Southern Comfort features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which offers a surprisingly full sounding low end (making the many gunshots sound viscerally impressive) and featuring overall excellent fidelity if a generally somewhat shallow sound. Cooder's score is brightly and clearly presented, and the film's dialogue is always easy to hear, even in some noisy environments. There is no appreciable damage to report.
Walter Hill argues that "I make films, not metaphors" in the featurette accompanying this Blu-ray as a supplement, but the fact is it ultimately doesn't matter if you choose to see Southern Comfort as a symbol of something else or simply a viscerally exciting (and often quite disturbing) film depicting desperate men in a desperate struggle for survival. The film has a rather ironically lyrical visual aesthetic, something that plays out as counterpoint to the raw emotions on display. This new Blu-ray has some video issues, which the audio and supplements help to counterbalance. Recommended.
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