For the week of May 7th, Paramount Media Home Distribution is bringing a new 4K remaster of Steven Spielberg's great Saving Private Ryan to Blu-ray. It's hard to overstate the impact that this WWII epic had on the cultural landscape. Aesthetically, one can rank all war movies into two camps: before and after Private Ryan Working with his longtime DP Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg took inspiration from WWII-era documentary footage. As epic in scale as Saving Private Ryan, it has this intimate, grubby realism that's handheld and desaturated, almost to the point of black-and-white. The end result makes the viewer a participant in the battle sequences, and you get why people ranging from Ridley Scott to the Russo Brothers immediately starting co-opting this film's brand of kinetic energy. And that's without even acknowledging the many miniseries that emerged to expand on Ryan's mix of action and horror (the best are still Band of Brothers and The Pacific, and in that order), or the cottage industry of video games that wanted to be Ryan in everything but the name (Medal of Honor and Call of Duty simply would not exist without this movie). And the movie itself? 95% of it holds up like gangbusters. Sure, the story is deeply melodramatic (I don't care if screenwriter Robert Rodat based it on the real-life story of the Sullivan brothers - having one Ranger platoon search WWII-era Europe for one soldier plays like the prequel for Uncommon Valor or something), but outside of John Ford, no American filmmaker is as skilled at burnishing corn as Spielberg is. He commits, whether that's through the uniformly excellent cast (Tom Hanks gives maybe his best-ever performance, but so do Tom Sizemore and Jeremy Davies, although sometimes it's hard to focus on them when you're spot-checking the appearances from the likes of Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Giovanni Ribisi, Dennis Farina, Ted Danson, Leland Orser, Bryan Cranston, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Fillion, and Matt Damon, who wasn't even famous when they started shooting) or his still-horrifying depiction of wartime atrocities. On the subject of the latter: Spielberg creates this Goya-esque nightmare of blood and torn flesh that leeches out any potential for jingoism. Every one cites the Omaha Beach opening as the best/most shocking action setpiece, but as technically impressive as it is, I prefer the final battle where Hanks' platoon teams up with Ryan's men to secure an important bridge. By that point, Spielberg knows how deeply you care about his remaining protagonists, so he can make every subsequent death register like a small tragedy. In particular, he stages a slow, desperate stabbing that remains one of the most agonizing depictions of violence that I've ever seen. Only the bookend scenes don't work. Back in 1998, I valued them as a respite from all the bloodshed, but now, a) the first one provides some unfair misdirection regarding the fate of a major character, and b) the second tries to graft an unambiguous moral absolute onto the deeply ambivalent chaos of the preceding 160 minutes. It doesn't take, and you wish Spielberg had simply faded to black on the face of one young, terrified survivor staring at a just-deceased fellow soldier. Maybe Spielberg thought we weren't ready for such trauma then. Twenty years (and countless imitators) later, I think we finally are.
Of the new remaster, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "is a timeless classic, and twenty years removed from its theatrical debut it's as powerful, fresh, and moving as ever. It would have been a shock and one of the biggest disappointments in home video history if its UHD was anything less than perfect. And that it is. The UHD dazzles. Nothing is fundamentally changed, but rather complimented. The Dolby Atmos track is stellar and the 2160p resolution adds a significant level of sharpness and image clarity while maintaining the movie's gritty façade. Only the Dolby Vision coloring may prove somewhat controversial, but even as it's much brighter with deeper, more expressive colors, the movie's bleak and desaturated tonal balance remains intact."
The other big 4K remaster of the week is Lionsgate Home Entertainment new pressing of Source Code. I watch Source Code, and I weep. Not because it's sad (it isn't), but because it reminds me anew of the promise that filmmaker Duncan Jones squandered. Nowadays, I have to suffer through his bloated Warcraft or his incoherent Netflix feature Mute (which plays like what you'd get if you put Witness and Blade Runner in the Brundlefly machine and then spent the next five-to-seven years administering ECT to their deformed union), but it wasn't always so! Jones roared out of the gate with his 2009 sci-fi character study Moon, and then he proved he could do popcorn thrills just as well as anyone else when he released Source Code in 2011. As the aforementioned Witness-meets-Blade Runner comparison might suggest, Jones loves working in genre mash-ups (something as singular and intimate as Moon grew out of Jones combining Silent Running and Outland as a thought exercise), and Source Code finds inspiration from two tastes that, surprisingly, do taste great together: Groundhog Day and Quantum Leap. To wit, Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a soldier tasked with solving a deadly subway bombing...by getting uploaded into an extremely realistic virtual simulation (kinda like Scott Bakula in that great NBC series - Jones even gives Bakula a cute voice cameo as Gyllenhaal's father) and experiencing the attack over and over again (and again, and again) until he can figure out who caused it. Like Doug Liman's narratively similar Edge of Tomorrow, Jones maintains an appropriately cheeky attitude towards the whole affair (he loves staging increasingly playful/painful demises for Gyllenhaal's avatar), and as such, we experience the proceedings as an enjoyable diversion rather than an exercise in sadism. You could argue that Jones leans a little too far into commercialism - I don't know if we need Michelle Monaghan's winsome love interest, and I do find Jones guilty of belaboring the feels at the end of the movie - but you'll probably be having too much fun to care. One day, I hope we get this Duncan Jones back.
But the best new reissue of the week might be Warner Archive's Blu-ray remastering of the 1950 cult noir favorite Gun Crazy. Logically, there's almost no reason for Gun Crazy to be as good as it is. Take one anonymous journeyman director (Joseph H. Lewis, who had two films of note in over twenty years: this and The Big Combo); two vacuously pretty leads (John Dall and Peggy Cummins, both of whom got overshadowed by the titular entities in Rope and Curse of the Demon, respectively); a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (MacKinlay Kantor) who later admitted he used his onscreen credit as a cover for the film's actual screenwriter, blacklisted Hollywood legend Dalton Trumbo; and mix 'em all up into B-movie dreck, right? Wrong: somehow, this cheapo programmer (it started its existence as a Poverty Row entry) emerged as one of the most subversive thrillers to come out of the 1950s. Like Bonnie and Clyde, the film follows two young misfits (Dall and Cummins) who begin both a torrid affair and a violent crime spree, and like that 1967 classic, the film makes no pretensions about what gets them off more. As early as their lurid meet-cute, a shooting contest that plays like a revised take on "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," our leads can't help equating violence with sexuality. Particularly Cummins, and if nothing else, it's a shame her career didn't ignite after Gun Crazy. She's a feral cat in terms of how she stalks Dall, and I can't think of another noir heroine from the period who seems this wonderfully combustible. Cummins never plays it safe, but then again, nothing about Gun Crazy does, whether we're looking at the misty, fairy-tale environs that host the lovers' doomed final showdown or the virtuoso bank-robbery sequence that unfolds in one take and has the ragged naturalism of a Scorsese improvisation. At a certain point, maybe it's best to stop pondering the hows and whys behind Gun Crazy's origins. The fact remains that it exists, and that fact alone should give us hope.
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment and DCU have released the superhero adventure Batman Ninja. With it, I finally feel like DCU has addressed my chief complaint towards their animated slate. Minus a few exceptions (The Flashpoint Paradox), both the good (The Dark Knight Returns) and the bad (The Killing Joke) of the DCU share a certain visual anonymity. The main characters might look good, but the background art often has the bland texture of, I dunno, an AfterEffects preset. Not so with Batman Ninja. This film is an embarrassment of visual wonders. The anime-inflected look extends into every frame of the film. The environments have the handcrafted texture you might see in a watercolor or Japanese woodcut, so they're always interesting to look at even the characters are bashing away at each other in the film's (many) intricately staged action sequences. Furthermore, I doubt I'll see any DCU picture as rapturous as the lovely sequence at the midpoint when Batman (voiced in the American dub by Roger Craig Smith) finds Red Hood (Yuri Lowenthal). For a few minutes, the film adopts the wispy, impressionistic style of, I kid you not, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. Rarely do I feel like this arm of the DC filmmaking department would benefit from a theatrical exhibition, but I strongly recommend you see Batman Ninja on as big a screen as possible. The film's aesthetic appeal proves so overwhelming that it helps distract from how nonsensical the proceedings are. The opening two minutes are so disorienting that you can miss how important it is to the rest of the film; I would have needed a supplementary plot synopsis to figure out what the hell was happening had Batman Ninja not stopped dead for at least two subsequent exposition dumps about what happens in the opening and why it matters. Essentially, Gorilla Grodd (Fred Tatasciore) uses his Quake Engine to send himself, Batman, and some of the Dark Knight's most iconic adversaries (Two-Face, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Deathstroke, Penguin, and - of course - Harley Quinn and the Joker) back to feudal Japan, and reading that synopsis back, I see now that it barely makes sense on its own. And that's before monkeys help Batman unleash the fearsome Bat God, all those villains start piloting giant power robots that unite (Voltron-style) to form one massive power robot, or Batman learns he may be part of an ancient prophecy to unite all of Japan. I'll say this: all that jazz is so ostentatiously crazy that you gloss over how all the characters from Gotham (which is in America) immediately know Japanese once they go back in time. The answer to that last issue is easy, though - DC farmed Batman Ninja out to Japanese filmmakers Junpei Mizusaki and Kazuki Nakashima, both of whom reimagined the Batman Universe from within their own cultural/social landscape (do yourself a favor and watch the Japanese version on the Blu-ray - you experience much less cognitive dissonance). And for that reason alone, I'll put up with this strange, Batman-inflected take on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time. Mizusaki, Nakashima, and their team of animators create worlds in which you can lose yourself. Here's hoping the subsequent DCU features follow suit.