The Rocket Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

The Rocket Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Svet Atanasov July 8, 2014

Winner of Crystal Bear and Best Debut Film awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, Kim Mordaunt's "The Rocket" (2013) arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of British distributors Eureka Entertainment. The supplemental features on the disc include an original trailer for the film; making of featurette; and audio commentary with the Australian director. In Lao, with optional English subtitles for the main feature. Region-B "locked".

"It is a Sleeping Tiger..."

Laos, North Mountains. Ten-year-old Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe) and his family are ordered to leave their village to make way for a dam. Soon after, tragedy strikes and changes Ahlo’s life forever. While waiting for their future home to be built, Ahlo meets Kia (Loungnam Kaosainam) and her uncle Purple (Suthep Po-ngam), an eccentric ex-soldier obsessed with James Brown. Ahlo and Kia quickly warm to each other and begin spending time together, but a series of accidents -- caused by the reckless Ahlo -- force the family to look for a home elsewhere.

Deeply frustrated with his luck but determined to help his family, Ahlo decides to enter a lucrative rocket-making competition. The winner gets a large cash prize and the right to build a home in a developed area where people try to help each other as best as they can.

Australian director Kim Mordaunt’s The Rocket tells two very different stories. The first is about a boy who struggles to prove that he is not cursed. It isn’t easy -- he constantly makes terrible mistakes which seem to prove precisely the opposite; even his own family seems convinced that he somehow he does bring bad luck. The boy wants to be good, but the harder he tries, the more frustrated he becomes.

The second story is about a country where time seems to have stopped. Laos, the most bombed country on the planet, is a beautiful but dangerous place where most ordinary people are struggling to make ends meet. Many, like Ahlo’s family, are also treated like objects by a corrupt government and foreign businessmen who have arrived to exploit the country’s valuable natural resources.

The idea for The Rocket apparently came from a documentary feature named Bomb Harvest about an Australian bomb disposal specialist, which Mordaunt and his team shot in Laos a few years before The Rocket. Mordaunt spent a great deal of time observing kids from different parts of the country collecting scrap metal and selling it to help their families put food on the table. After Bomb Harvest, Mordaunt concluded that the stories of these kids and their families deserved to be told.

Select parts of The Rocket can easily be used in a real documentary feature about post-war Laos. The abandoned villages, temp camps and even the flooded temples seen in the film are indeed real. Virtually all of the secondary characters are also played by non-professional actors, most of whom faced a number of the same dilemmas Ahlo’s family does.

The film could be somewhat depressing at times, but it never evolves into a miserabilist tale of survival. There is plenty of comic relief in it and during the second half even a genuine sense of optimism about Ahlo’s chances of helping his family find a new home.

The film is complimented by an outstanding ambient soundtrack courtesy of Australian musician and composer Caitlin Yeo. The music blends electronica and beautiful organic sounds.

The Rocket was Australia's official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 86th Academy Awards.

The Rocket Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and granted a 1080p transfer, Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of British distributors Eureka Entertainment.

The film looks spectacular in high-definition. The large panoramic shots from the countryside boast outstanding clarity and fluidity, allowing one to see even extremely small details. Close-ups are exceptionally crisp and vibrant, at times looking like digital photographs (see screencapture #3). Contrast levels remain stable throughout the entire film. There is a wide range of very well saturated, lush and natural colors which also remain stable. Overall image stability is outstanding. When projected, the film looks tight and crisp; there is no edge flicker or color pulsations. Lastly, there are no encoding or compression anomalies to report in this review. All in all, this is the best looking release from Eureka Entertainment that I have seen this year and quite possibly one of the best in the British distributors' Blu-ray catalog. (Note: This is a Region-B "locked" Blu-ray release. Therefore, you must have a native Region-B or Region-Free PS3 or SA in order to access its content).

The Rocket Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There is only one standard audio track on this Blu-ray release: Lao DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. For the record, Eureka Entertainment have provided optional English subtitles for the main feature. When turned on, they appear inside the image frame.

Clarity and depth are fantastic. There are a couple of sequences at the end of the film, during the rocket festival, that could test the muscles of your audio system. Caitlin Yeo's ambient soundtrack is also beautifully mixed (the quality of the music and the manner in which it is used remind of Alejandro González Inarritu's Babel). The dialog is always crisp, stable, and easy to follow. There are no pops, cracks, hiss, audio dropouts, or digital distortions to report in this review.

The Rocket Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer - original trailer for The Rocket. In Lao, with imposed English subtitles. (3 min).

• The Making of The Rocket - excellent featurette with plenty of informative comments from director Kim Mordaunt, who discusses the casting process and talks about the various challenges his team faced while shooting The Rocket in Laos, the most bombed country on the planet. In English, not subtitled. (20 min).

• Isolated score - DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track.

• Commentary - director Kim Mordaunt explains how The Rocket came to exist and discusses how specific sequences were shot, the different challenges his team faced before and during the shooting of the film in Laos, the socio-political climate in the country, etc. Wonderful audio commentary.

The Rocket Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket reminded me of Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly. Both films are set in countries that have been devastated by war and tell similar stories about people who are simply trying to survive. I encourage you to find a way to see both and then think about the things in our lives that truly matter. Eureka Entertainment's technical presentation of The Rocket is simply outstanding. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.