Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

Terminal Blu-ray Movie Review

Pull the Plug

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 30, 2018

Terminal is the first feature produced by actress Margot Robbie (I, Tonya), and you can see what attracted the rapidly rising star to the project, with its multi-faceted femme fatale lead and dialogue that, at least on the page, must have sounded juicy and exciting. Unfortunately, the movie created by writer/director Vaughn Stein, a former AD making his feature debut, is a headache-inducing mess, a junkyard of semi-coherent cinematic references and genre cliches. Stein says in the Blu-ray extras that he wanted to combine a dystopian landscape with film noir tropes, but the result is more psychedelia than foreboding mystery, more Ken Russell than Ridley Scott. It's a bad trip that takes its sweet time going nowhere.

Shot in Budapest with European financing, Terminal was filmed in 2016, and a rough cut screened at that year's Toronto International Film Festival. But distribution had to wait until 2018, when U.K. rights were acquired by Arrow and U.S. rights by RLJ Entertainment. The film reportedly received a U.S. theatrical release in May, but if so, it was such a minor event that Box Office Mojo has no record of it. RLJ is now releasing it on Blu-ray.

Terminal is set in a neon-encrusted urban landscape filled with cavernous and, with a few exceptions, curiously deserted structures. The main location is a train station (one of the title's several meanings), with a control room filled with work stations and video monitors but devoid of personnel, except for an unseen figure known as "Mr. Franklyn", who runs some sort of criminal empire. The film is so empty of people and businesses that it's hard to imagine what kind of illicit activities Mr. Franklyn oversees, but Terminal isn't concerned with such details.

Into this world comes a mysterious woman identified as "Annie" (Robbie), who wants an exclusive contract to carry out Mr. Franklyn's murders. Since Franklyn already has two hit men under contract, Vince and Alfred (Dexter Fletcher and Max Irons), Annie offers to prove her worth by eliminating the competition, and Mr. Franklyn is obviously intrigued enough to let her try. (There's a specific reason for his interest, but it's only gradually revealed, and even then it barely makes sense.)

Much of Terminal is taken up with Annie's cat-and-mouse games with Vince and Alfred, which are so elaborately drawn out that you have to wonder whether she's really all that good at her job. She seems to enjoy toying with her victims far too much to be an effective "cleaner", and Mr. Franklyn spends so much time watching her antics on his monitors that you wonder when he finds time to tend to whatever business he has that requires hired killers to protect. (Yes, I know one isn't supposed to ask these kinds of questions in the alternate reality that Terminal tries to establish, but the story is so drawn-out that the mind can't help but wander.)

An apparently unrelated subplot concerns Bill (Simon Pegg, making the best of it), who is a suicidal English teacher suffering from a fatal disease that the doctors cannot diagnose (in other words, a "terminal" illness). We first encounter Bill on the station platform, where he is considering jumping in front of the next train to pass, but he's chosen an inconvenient nighttime hour when there's almost no railroad traffic. He ends up in the terminal's appropriately named End of the Line Café, where Annie appears in one of her many guises, this one a waitress with an elaborate blonde 'do, a Cockney accent and an excess of attitude. Their conversations about life, death and grammatical fine points are an obvious attempt to imitate the seductive patter of Pulp Fiction, which Terminal references repeatedly. Annie initially approaches Franklyn in the guise of a dead ringer for Uma Thurman's black-haired Mia, and Vince is initially seen in a black-and-white suit reminiscent of another Vincent played by John Travolta. Mystery briefcases play a key role here too, though none of them emits a golden glow.

But Stein is no Tarantino. His dialogue doesn't draw you in with that unique combination of meandering eloquence and pop culture savvy. Even with a cast of this caliber, the quasi-existential debates between Robbie's waitress and Pegg's dying pedant don't catch fire. And the constant bickering between Fletcher's Vince and Irons' Alfred quickly becomes annoying, lacking the wit and sparkle that kept you glued to Pulp Fiction's repartee between Vincent and Jules.

Limping through the proceedings is the station's janitor, Clinton, who is played by Mike Myers with heavy prosthetics and a thick accent that's only slightly more convincing than his Austin Powers persona. The dearth of other characters and the fact that he's portrayed by Myers are immediate clues that Clinton has a larger role to play, and any connoisseur of modern noir will recall another character who limped all the way to the film's ultimate reveal. Stein is apparently hoping that you'll be distracted from these tipoffs by the combination of bright lights and Margot Robbie's alluring lip gloss, but despite the stylized cinematography and imposing sets (built, as the Blu-ray extras inform us, in massive but deserted Budapest structures), Terminal fails to achieve the essential objective for a dystopian tale, noir or otherwise, which is to construct a credible world that the characters naturally inhabit. That's a tall order for any director, but it's next to impossible with a script composed of genre cutouts pasted in from other movies and driven by big reveals that fail to shock because they're neither earned nor convincing. For all their vamping, Stein's characters never come alive, and neither does the movie.

Terminal Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Let's start with Terminal's aspect ratio. IMDb has no listing on the subject, but the excerpts in the extras are all framed at 2.39:1, and the displays on the monitors in behind-the-scenes footage reflect the same intended aspect ratio. For video, however, someone has decided to present the film at HDTV's full-frame ratio of 1.78:1. It's not a disastrous choice, because there doesn't appear to be major cropping at the sides, just an expansion of the frame at top and bottom, and many of the huge sets built in abandoned buildings actually benefit from the greater sense of height. But for a film where visual style is so self-consciously considered, reframing the image from what the director and DP intended is a dubious decision (unless one of them was involved, which we don't know).

Terminal was shot digitally by British cinematographer Christopher Ross (Black Sea), who has taken his cue from the intensely colorful neon signs that bedeck the film's nameless city. The frame is routinely awash in brightly fluorescent blues, reds, greens, oranges and yellows, with different hues often competing for attention. Reds are especially striking, particularly the signature full-length coat sometimes worn by Margot Robbie's femme fatal. Alternating shadows and streaks of bright light scream "Look at me! I'm noir!", and there's barely a natural flesh tone in sight. Fine detail is superior where it's intended to be visible (mostly in closeups) but routinely fades into darkness or is blown out by intense brightness. If a psychedelic graphic novel is your thing, then Terminal may be the movie for you, and the Blu-ray effectively delivers Ross's intense palette

However, the image is not without flaws. Occasional banding appears, but it's minor and brief. More serious is the subtle but frequent background noise in the riotous clashes of colors, and these recur in irregular background streaks throughout the film. They will be more or less obvious depending on the size of your display and its settings, and they are fleeting enough to pass without major distraction for many viewers, but they shouldn't be there at all, because they are almost certainly an artifact of overcompression. RLJ/Image has mastered the film on a BD-25 with an average bitrate of 19.99 Mbps, which simply isn't sufficient for Terminal's busy images. I suspect the compressionist has done the best he or she could with the limited space available, but RLJ should have sprung the few extra pennies per disc for the BD-50.

Terminal Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Terminal's lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack is loud, and you may find it necessary to turn down your customary volume setting by a few db. It's not the sound effects, which are effective though relatively modest, but the score by Rupert Gregson-Williams and Anthony Clarke (who worked together on Wonder Woman and Hacksaw Ridge). The music has been mixed to fill the entire speaker array, pulsing and throbbing as it does its best to rise to the level of the overcooked visuals. To the sound mixers' credit, the dialogue never gets buried, remaining intelligible and firmly anchored to the front, but, like the bright colors and odd angles onscreen, the soundtrack is working overtime to knock you sideways with suspense and foreboding in a film where, for a very long time, not much happens and the ultimate reveals aren't worth the wait.

Terminal Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Cast of Terminal (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:14): The cast speaks about their characters, and director Stein praises his cast.



• Building the World of Terminal (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:14): This featurette focuses on the technical crew and the film's visual challenges.



• From Concept to Creation (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:05): An illustrative comparison of storyboards to the completed scenes.



• Photo Gallery (1080p): Production stills.



• Introductory Trailers: The film's trailer is not included. At startup, the disc plays trailers for The Limehouse Golem, Pilgrimage and Brawl in Cell Block 99.

Terminal Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Good writing is hard work, and not everyone has an ear for great movie dialogue. Vaughn Stein shows promise as a visual stylist, but he needs a gifted screenwriter, or at least a writing partner. Terminal is a potentially interesting experiment betrayed by the weaknesses of the derivative script. RLJ has given it a merely adequate treatment on Blu-ray. If you're curious, you might as well stream it, given the unfortunate overcompression.