5.1 | / 10 |
Users | 1.0 | |
Reviewer | 1.5 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
An American soldier stationed in Rome with the Vatican blown up, embarks on a hero's journey to uncover and defend against an unknown enemy threatening the entire world.
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Cristina Chiriac, Valerio Mastandrea, Dounia Sichov, Babak KarimiThriller | Insignificant |
War | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
English SDH, Portuguese, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 1.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
It's fairly common on Blu-ray releases for various people associated with the production to offer brief introductions to whatever is the main feature on the disc, as a putative bonus item. While it's therefore not that unusual to see Ethan Hawke offering bookending commentary both before and after the film via very brief video segments, what is unusual is that these moments are part of the film (i.e., not "extras"), and even more weirdly, they evidently were part of the theatrical exhibition of Zeros and One, though Hawke (and, one assumes, Ferrara) seem to be toying with the audience in this regard, with Hawke mentioning at the end that these bookends are part of the film (in more than the obvious manner). If the introductory video is weird enough, it at least allows Hawke a chance to tout his appreciation for writer and director Abel Ferrara's work, which may already raise an eyebrow or two, but by the time the film is over and Hawke is back with a deer in the headlights look (however intentional it may be), he might as well be doing his Zoom call in front of some kind of custom flashing neon "WTF?" background. The fact that Zeros and Ones begins (and, frankly, often continues) with imagery so dark it's hard to make out what's actually going on (a potential positive?) is just one immediate obstacle to understanding, but when the "story" then takes more or less ten minutes to follow a character wordlessly through abandoned streets, patience may grow thin sooner rather than later.
Zeros and Ones is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. There isn't a ton of technical data on this shoot that I could dredge up online, but I did find one passing comment by Abel Ferrara in an interview he gave where he stated, "We were shooting digital, and with this crazy Bolex camera that [cinematographer Sean Price Williams] had, and we digitally added grain from this '90s Kodak stock." As can probably be gleaned by the screenshots accompanying this review, the imagery has been pretty aggressively tweaked in all manner and forms, and those stylistic choices simply need to be accepted on their own terms. The "grain" is obviously almost comically chunky at times, giving things a noisy, 16mm ambience. There's also outright pixellation at times, and, again as can be seen in many of the screenshots, whole swaths of this film play out in near darkness. Detail levels tend to improve in some of the blue graded material, as opposed to the other frequent grading choice, which is kind of in the burnt umber or even orange territory.
Zeros and Ones features a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that nicely exploits the film's hallucinatory sound design. There are huge washes of low frequency effects that pan through the side and rear channels, and what are almost aural non sequiturs dot the surrounds at various times, giving the soundtrack an off kilter quality that is more or less perfectly in line with everything else about this film. Dialogue can be sparse and intermittent, but is rendered with sufficient clarity. Optional English, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles are available.
If Hawke's prologue and epilogue were supposed to be some kind of "meta" moment, I might suggest that Zeros and Ones might have been better served by having Hawke continue to show up and provide a kind of Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary to what is going on. That would be an Abel Ferrara film worth seeing. My hunch is even ardent Ferrara fans may not think this one is, though technical merits are generally solid (with a contextual understanding of the stylistic quirks on display with regard to the video side of things), for those who are considering making a purchase.
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