6.2 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.7 |
A fictionalized account of the last days of Edgar Allan Poe's life, in which the poet is in pursuit of a serial killer whose murders mirror those in the writer's stories.
Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson, Kevin McNallyThriller | 100% |
Mystery | 51% |
Period | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
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 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Digital copy (on disc)
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Edgar Allen Poe was America's first preeminent "genre" writer. He penned macabre Gothic chillers and dark mysteries. He loved cryptography, helped perfect the short story form, and practically invented "detective" fiction. While his works have quite confidently stood the test of time—influencing everyone from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Stephen King—the author's tragedy-riddled biography, eccentric personality, and enigmatic death have given him a legendary status in his own right. The Raven, from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) and screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare, inflates the myth of Poe further still, inventing an explanation for the alcoholic scribe's mysterious final days, one that involves a frantic mission to stop a serial killer inspired by Poe's own gory tales. This makes some kind of deliciously absurd sense—turning Poe into a fictional, Sherlock Holmes-style deducer, forced to confront the horrors of his imagination grimly realized in the real world—but the execution, so to speak, is sloppy. The Raven is one those unfortunate films that wants to be thrilling, with a score that pounds mercilessly away, trying to drum up tension, but it forgets a key principle of filmmaking—if the viewers don't care about the characters, they aren't going to care at all.
The Raven alights onto Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that does justice to the film's appropriately gloomy cinematography. Shot on 35mm, the movie retains its inherent filmic texture—no signs of digital noise reduction here—with a layer of grain that settles over the image and does noticeably spike somewhat during darker scenes. Of which there are many. If there's one issue with this picture, it's that it's very dark, so try to minimize glare on your screen before viewing. Black levels do crush a bit, although this seems to be an intentional part of the film's moribund look. Otherwise, this transfer is quite strong, with no overt compression issues, no weird digital anomalies, and no encode problems. While not the sharpest film I've seen recently, The Raven's high definition image yields a considerable amount of fine detail, most noticeably in closeups, where facial features and clothing textures are keenly defined. As for color grading, the film alternates between scenes with a chilly blue cast and those with a soft candlelight glow; either way, the picture is appreciably dense, with no wishy-washy grayness in the shadows. Overall, the film has a very stylized look— not unlike the Sherlock Holmes movies it so clearly wants to be—and the Blu-ray presentation seems faithful to both source and intent.
Depressive 19th century Baltimore is brought to aural life with the film's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, a bombastic amalgam of high-intensity music and carefully sculpted sound design. The dynamic mix makes full use of the multi-speaker presentation, with fairly frequent cross- channel effects and quiet but near-constant environmental ambience. The low blow of a fog horn. The clang of a distant bell. Carriages buckling through the rears. Glass bottles broken stage left. The party clamor at the masquerade ball. Claps of thunder, water dripping in tunnels beneath the city, and gunshots piercing the soundfield. The dialogue is always clean and understandable, with voices that seem to accurately reflect the acoustics of their surroundings. Spanish composer Lucas Vidal provides a pounding, wound-up orchestral score that sounds great, even if it does feel like a forced attempt to ratchet the tension. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles—in easy-to-read white lettering—but no dubs or descriptive audio.
And The Raven, as is fitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,
On a crowded shelf inside your favorite local big box store,
A/V specs? Yes, satisfying, but surely there is no denying,
That the film itself is trying, trying hard to make us snore,
The Blu-ray disc will sit collecting dust and, slowly, mold and spores,
It shall be purchased—nevermore!
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