Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

The Anomaly Blu-ray Movie Review

Edge of...Something.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman September 29, 2015

Sometimes, a movie will ask its audience to simply go with the flow, to accept the unacceptable, and sit back and enjoy a deep story that unfolds gradually, in many complex layers that individually are nothing more than thin membranes but that collectively assembled represent something sturdily impressive and valuable. The Anomaly wants to be one such movie but fails, miserably, in just about every way conceivable. It has "low budget ambitious" written all over it, which isn't a bad thing, but the result is a tedious watch, a movie that's structurally and dramatically confusing and that doubles down for the duration on its narrative haziness. It ultimately leaves the audience more in the dark than the characters, which is never a good thing. It's easy enough to piece together the basics, but the journey towards answers is so laborious that the best answers will be found in the scrolling credits, rising light levels, and a focus on something else. Anything else. There's a decent, if not stale, mixture of ideas here, but the film suffers from too many debilitating shortcomings to make it a worthwhile cinema experience.

What are we watching again?

Ryan (Noel Clarke, who also directs) awakens in the back of a van with a young boy who is obviously a hostage or prisoner. The two escape, but Ryan doesn't know where he is or when he is. He's been previously diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and has been hospitalized for it, but he believes his situation to be real, not a hallucination. He finds himself suddenly shifting realities, waking up in bed with a prostitute named Dana (Alexis Knapp) whom he liberates from her pimp. He also awakens in the middle of a water boarding of a prisoner. He slowly begins to piece together that his mind may be under another's control and gradually comes to understand who he really is, what's happening to him, and why.

The Anomaly takes core ideas and styles from movies like Edge of Tomorrow, Memento, The Matrix, and Equilibrium and somehow mixes them up in a way that results in a horribly foul final product. The film throws a lot of ideas into the mix, but it's all so scattered -- necessarily so by the plot -- that the raw, central mystery gets devoured by too much place and time shifting and, it seems, narrative uncertainty that it's impossible to put it together in any coherent manner. It's one thing for a movie to challenge the audience, and itself. It's another altogether to throw things at the wall and hope one or more of them sticks. The movie never settles into a pace other than confused, hazy frenzy and, worse, neither the journey nor the payoff is worth the headache. The core story feels cobbled together from those movies listed above and the execution lacks the precision necessary -- both on the scripted page and the work behind the camera -- to sort it out in a detailed and clear manner and, just as important, maintain audience interest for the (thankfully brief) duration.

Even the movie's peripherals disappoint. Fighting scenes drag on too long, play out in a comically bad take on "bullet time" slow motion, and lack even a modicum of excitement, in large part because it's practically impossible to emotionally invest in such vacant characters and partly because, well, the technical execution just isn't up to par. The film introduces a lot of futuristic "toys" that look decent enough on the screen but never break any new ground. There's the transparent cell phone, biologically encoded guns that look like tasers, micro surgical robots, glowing gas masks, and other "near future" odds and ends that only serve as a distraction from the rest of the movie, which might be a good thing. Performances are flat, but then again the actors are challenged to work with one of the most jumbled scripts around and shallow characters whose complications feel more like something out of a trying-too-hard DTV Action movie than a thinking man's Science Fiction flick, which this clearly wants to be.

The Anomaly Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Anomaly features a clean and precise, but fairly utilitarian, 1080p transfer. The image is solid yet unspectacular, offering a mildly muted color palette in which even bright green leaves don't explode off the screen. There's an overriding coldness to the color scheme, punctuated by a few warmer interiors. Details are crisp though a bit digital-flat. Basic skin and clothing textures satisfy, as do dense leaves seen at the beginning and various city textures seen throughout. Black levels are fine while flesh tones appear a touch pasty under the source's constraints. Mild noise creeps into the image, but banding, macroblocking, and aliasing are nowhere to be found.

The Anomaly Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Anomaly's Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless soundtrack opens strongly, with haunting, reverberating screaming and gunshots that sound as if they're coming from a metallic enclosure. The track maintains a good deal of energy throughout, exciting with some pulse-pounding musical notes that power through the entire stage with a beefy LFE support element. Even the track's most piercing musical cues find a good bit of precision clarity. Gunfire and other action effects satisfy, with the futuristic guns not quite so impactful as modern day weaponry. City din surrounds the listener at several junctures and other examples of light ambience help better define the film's aural atmospheres. Dialogue remains front-and-center with solid clarity and prioritization throughout.

The Anomaly Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Blu-ray release of The Anomaly contains no supplemental content.

The Anomaly Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Anomaly disappoints in every way. It's slow, confusing, poorly written, and blandly executed. There's a glimmer of potential in the movie, but the problem is that all that potential really just comes from the hints of the other, better movies this one has crammed into its barely coherent plot. Anchor Bay's Blu-ray release of The Anomaly delvers solid enough video and audio. No extras, not even trailers, are included. Skip it.