Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

The Wall Blu-ray Movie Review

Yours, 'Mine', and Ours.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 13, 2017

In case you haven’t been paying attention for the past year and a half, our body politic has been rife with discussions about construction of a border obstacle, so perhaps it should be stated at the outset that The Wall is not about that structure. Instead The Wall deals with a ramshackle ruin in the middle of the Iraqi desert, some vestige of a larger building that sits forlorn in the vast dusty expanse, seemingly delimiting the infinite. The film’s titular barrier turns out to be a refuge of sorts for Sergeant Allen Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a “spotter” for sharpshooter Staff Sergeant Shane Matthews (John Cena). The two Army buddies are on an outcropping above the wall, where a number of deceased individuals lay in place, testament to the aiming skill of an infamous Iraqi who is only known by the code name Juba. The two guys are trying to figure out if there are still any Iraqi operatives hiding out at the scene, and after 22 hours of absolutely nothing happening, they decide there isn’t. Big mistake. When Matthews decides to throw caution to the siroccos (so to speak) and journey down to examine the site up close and personal, perhaps none too surprisingly he’s almost immediately taken out by a bullet coming from some unseen location. Isaac, who goes by the nickname Ize, rushes out himself to help his partner, at which point he’s hit, too. Ize manages to haul himself behind the wall, the only thing in the area that can offer even the hint of protection. Badly wounded himself and already certain that Matthews has met his maker, Ize is literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the rest of the film plays out with Ize strategizing how to get out of an untenable situation. The Wall was unavoidably reminiscent to me of another film I reviewed recently, the Armie Hammer war thriller Mine, which found that film’s hero sharpshooter stranded in the middle of the desert with his foot on a mine, forced to stand and/or crouch there for days as he devolved into a kind of lucid dreaming state. Ize at least can move a little bit, but both films want to allegorize America’s involvement in long running conflicts by positing soldiers who are quite literally stuck in a quagmire, that is if quagmires can exist in the desert.

Mine and The Wall are weirdly interchangeable in a number of ways. Both films begin with two guys on a hilltop surveying a desert scene, with one of them being a sharpshooter and the other one being his spotter. Soon enough one of the two is mortally wounded, and the other one finds himself stranded and unable to move due to individual circumstances. One interesting difference is that The Wall really doesn’t have even the passing (and at times hallucinatory) supporting characters that Mine allows to wander into its hero’s frame of reference. Instead, the film plays out in a number of interesting “conversations” that Ize has with Juba, who has managed to reconnoiter a radio and ends up “answering” when Ize tries to call for help.

One other major difference between the two films may actually split audiences in terms of how they react to the various properties. As I mentioned in the Mine Blu-ray review, that film tipped over into overheated soap operatic elements as it started to explore the inner world of its focal character. The Wall pretty much resolutely refuses to indulge in any navel gazing, and as such Ize is never really developed as a character. He’s a symbol stuck in another symbol, and the film admittedly does fine on that level, but those looking for an introspective analysis of a soldier under incredible pressure will probably find themselves blinded by the metaphorical duststorms Dwain Worrell’s surface deep screenplay invokes, perhaps to keep this film from tipping over into that melodramatic ambience.

If Mine went a little off the rails in detailing its hero’s inner life and struggles, The Wall tends to wobble a bit itself, albeit in a kind of fascinating dialectic that ensues between Ize and Juba, as they have a series of unexpectedly philosophical discussions. It’s here that The Wall really finds some compelling material, and I wondered if perhaps finally revealing the Iraqi sniper might have given this aspect a bit more force. Despite the fact that film features a pinned down main character, director Doug Liman, who typically goes for the gusto in his adrenaline pumping blockbusters (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Edge of Tomorrow), manages to give the film unexpected sweep, somehow bringing the appropriately claustrophobic feeling to a physical environment that would seem to be insanely wide open. Taylor-Johnson is generally fine in what amounts to a one hander, though his performance is hampered by a screenplay that (as mentioned above) never wants to explore the character’s inner life, and so is basically in reactive mode the entire length of the film. Taylor-Johnson and Armie Hammer may want to form their own support group for actors suffering from PTSD after portraying war heroes stuck in the vast expanses of a desert, trying desperately to find some reasonable way out.

The Wall Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Wall is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Unless I'm not remembering an older title, I believe this may be the first transfer I've reviewed that is culled from a 16mm source with a 4K DI, and the results are rather interesting. The palette has been blanched throughout the presentation, with color stripped away to suggest the hot, dusty environment, and as such the only real pops of color are the occasionally gruesome looks at various injuries. The incredible brightness of many scenes can give an almost hallucinatory ambience at times (see screenshot 17), but generally speaking detail levels are rather high, especially in the many close-ups that are employed (see screenshot 3). Grain is fairly thick a lot of the time, as should be expected, and that, along with sometimes variable clarity, can slightly diminish fine detail at various moments. Despite the prevalence of really bright lighting situations, there are no issues with banding or other compression anomalies.

The Wall Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Wall delivers some nuanced surround activity in its DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track courtesy of things like the windstorms that blow through the desert, but this isn't a slam bang, action adventure outing that offers "wow" sonics. A lot of the film is actually fairly quiet, with Ize engaging in near metaphysical discussions with his unseen assailant. That part of the film's sound design is always delivered cleanly and clearly, with excellent fidelity and good prioritization.

The Wall Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Feature Commentary with Director Doug Liman and Actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson


• Facts from the Front Lines: A Visual Journey Through The Wall (1080p; 11:09) is a perhaps unexpectedly interesting piece on some of the rigors of the location shoot in the Mojave Desert.


• Behind the Scenes Vignettes (1080p; 9:54) offers a selection of briefer EPK items, with some good behind the scenes footage and okay interviews.

The Wall Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Wall encounters a few obstacles itself, but it's an arguably more satisfying enterprise than the somewhat similar Mine, though the trade off here is philosophizing in the place of that other film's tendency to wallow in navel gazing. Liman keeps things surprisingly varied from a visual standpoint despite being anchored at the titular edifice, and Taylor-Johnson does what he can with a basically one note reactive character. Technical merits are strong (and visually extremely interesting), and with caveats noted, The Wall comes Recommended.