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Review: Serpico

review | Serpico

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It might be the archetypal ’70s movie—and looks surprisingly good on Amazon Prime—but does Serpico still hold up as a film?

by Michael Gaughn
August 5, 2022

This review was originally going to be along the lines of, Serpico isn’t that great but it’s such a perfect embodiment of the ‘70s film that it’s worth writing up just to provide a guidepost for anyone trying to wrap their arms around that genre. But about two-thirds of the way in I realized that, while the movie definitely has problems, it rises above them magnificently for a while, and in a way that makes it worth anyone’s time to wade through all the rest of it.

I’ve always had my doubts about Serpico, and the years haven’t treated it particularly well. Directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Al Pacino, cut by Dede Allen, shot entirely in New York during the city’s period of worst decay in a gritty documentary-inflected style, it is the epitome of the ’70s film and, as such, helps highlight the virtues and underline the flaws of that genre.

By 1968, American filmmaking was in complete disarray, and throughout the early and mid ‘70s, everyone was just kind of guessing, throwing everything they could think of at the screen. Since nobody was quite sure what to shoot or how it would come together, movies from the era tend to suffer from over-zealous editing, and there are gratuitous bursts of that here. The ‘70s were also the absolute nadir of the film score. With lush orchestral arrangements decidedly out of favor, strait-laced composers struggled, post The Graduate, with how to work pop, rock, jazz, and funk into their cues. Since little or none of that came naturally, the results were often unlistenable—a case Serpico only bolsters. And nobody knew what to do with women. Here, they magically appear for Pacino to bed down and then just kind of hang around for exposition, the obligatory nude scene, and to have something to break up with.

The general uncertainty over who was actually coming to the movies and why resulted in a fact-based film saddled with way too much TV-movie sentimentality, especially during the first half. Trying to cling to traditional notions of good guys and bad guys while also trying to be fashionably anti-authority, it aims for hard-boiled and knowing but often comes across as woefully naive. But even the rawer Taxi Driver isn’t immune from all that, feeling like the product of a hyperactive adolescent who’s trying to reprocess the reality of New York at a more rudimentary level that he can handle. (Scorsese was far from alone, of course, in reacting to the ‘60s and ‘70s by resorting to emotional regression. We wouldn’t have the blockbuster cinema of the ‘80s, which has become the superhero cinema of the 2000s, without it.)

It’s not like Lumet wasn’t capable of better ‘70s films—he aced the genre two years later with Dog Day Afternoon and, in 1981, did a better Serpico with Prince of the City (although it’s been a while since I’ve seen the last named, so it might not hold up as well as memory suggests). Here, you sense him trying to figure out how much to retain from ‘50s and ’60s crime dramas, how much the movie should adhere to the urtext The French Connection while also pulling back from the wall-to-wall brutality, and how much he should strike out on his own. Serpico finally clicks when it gets to the police investigations, and once again, it’s process that comes to the rescue, lending a movie some solid bones when there’s nothing more substantial to be found.

It’s Pacino, though, and not Lumet, who ultimately provides the glue. He does an engrossing job of convincingly and wrenchingly portraying Serpico’s massive struggles with his conscience as he’s left all but alone in an impossible situation. At those moments, Lumet knows enough to just step back and let the acting be the film.

And Amazon Prime’s 1080p presentation (via Roku’s ScreenPix) really brings to the foreground what a—as odd as this word might sound in this context—beautiful film this is. It’s not pretty—true to its documentary influences, every frame is spattered with the requisite grime. And it’s plagued by that fog-filter look that marred almost every movie of the era through Jaws and beyond. But, for great stretches, it’s shockingly good, evocatively expressing the material, which is, of course, the goal. It’s hard not to gape at some of the sequences, this transfer is so true to the original. It’s so good, I fear for what might happen if Serpico gets dipped in the 4K HDR vat—especially if Paramount is doing the dipping.

The music is surprisingly well recorded and effectively mixed in stereo—but, again, really has no place in this film. It reminded me of the mix for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the dialogue was crisp and clean but not very imaginatively placed, while the score existed in a kind of Van Allen Belt outside the movie proper.

Sidney Lumet wasn’t a master filmmaker but a frequently inspired one, so most of his movies are at least worth a watch and some have displayed prodigious staying power. Serpico starts out vaguely in the former camp but begins to become intriguing and then compelling once it crosses the midway point. Pacino did consistently engaging and often riveting work in the early part of his career, sometimes achieving the impossible, and he summons up a standout performance here. So you can approach this as a decent enough effort by some supremely talented people trying their best in a world they don’t fully understand, or you can see that confusion and uncertainty as the very lifeblood of that most important decade in filmmaking—not just for what it created but for the seismic reaction it spawned—and see Serpico as its most apt manifestation. Either way, it makes for a provocative night at the movies.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | While every frame is spattered with grime and plagued by that fog-filter look you expect to see in a ’70s film, this presentation is, for great stretches, shockingly good. It’s hard not to gape at some of the sequences, the transfer is so true to the original.

SOUND | The completely unnecessary score is surprisingly well recorded and effectively mixed in stereo, while the dialogue is crisp and clean but not very imaginatively placed

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Review: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

review | The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

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The big hit of 1944 and maybe Preston Sturges’ best film, this manic romp still delivers, despite an uneven transfer

by Michael Gaughn
August 2, 2022

Reviewing The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, James Agee famously concluded that the Hays Office, responsible for policing film content, had ”been raped in its sleep.” And It’s kind of easy to see why, since the film is about a super horny juvenile who uses wartime hyper patriotism as a cover to bed down with GIs departing for the front, resulting in her committing bigamy (among other things) and having not one but six illegitimate children. On Christmas Day.

Pretty racy for 1944, but that didn’t seem to deter anyone from going to see the Preston Sturges comedy, which ended up being the biggest hit of the year. They might have been deterred if they’d been given a chance to pay attention to what was actually going on, but Sturges keeps the action so manic and cartoonish that contemporary audiences treated the quieter moments, where the plot comes to the foreground for consideration, as little more than badly needed breaks from all the mayhem.

If you know Sturges at all, you probably know all of the above, and if you don’t, you have no idea what I’m talking about. Preston Sturges was yet another bratty rich kid who got to show up in Hollywood and walk pretty much straight into making pictures—like the CEO’s kid who starts in the mailroom and rapidly works his way up to the top. Like he was destined to land anywhere but there. (To be fair, Hollywood was slightly more democratic before the 1980s, and someone born elsewhere than within the upper crust occasionally got to make a movie, unlike the complete stranglehold the wealthy have on the creative end—and every other aspect—of filmmaking today.)

There was always something a bit precious about Sturges—which was OK as long as he held it in check, but helps explain why I’ve never been head over heels about either Sullivan’s Travels or The Lady Eve, which many consider the pinnacle of his work. I find more to savor in Hail the Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours, and even have a soft spot for the tissue-thin Christmas in July. But Morgan’s Creek might be his most satisfying effort because he tries to do as much as possible while trying to make it look like the film is about nothing at all. And it displays—even though it might all be a pose—a disarming humility.

Yes, everyone in the town of Morgan’s Creek is a bit of a dope—and ill-mannered and, often, duplicitous and grasping, and sometimes just flat-out mean. But you can tell that Sturges kind of envies their intimate connections, their elaborate interwovenness. And he expresses that early on through a four-minute long-take tracking shot as Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton stroll from Hutton’s house, through the neighborhood, and into the heart of town. It’s artificial as hell, but it makes you buy into the film because it’s in real-time, and everyone at that time knew it was true to those towns and how people lived in those towns. Without it, none of what’s to come would make sense or would land as strongly as it does. And maybe the biggest miracle of all is that the somewhat aloof and very privileged Sturges could even get onto that more mundane and frowsy wavelength and portray it all so well.

Eddie Bracken is the kind of actor who emerges because the movies temporarily need a certain type—here, an out-and-out schlub—which it then tosses aside when the fad has passed, so it would be easy to write him off as a one-trick wonder. But his performance is mesmerizing, flawlessly timed and turning schtick that would sink lesser comedians into something so telling it’s poetic. It would be similarly easy to dismiss William Demarest, who was typecast—even in Sturges films—as a perpetually dyspeptic grouse. But he transcends that here to play someone who, despite all his bluster, clearly cares about his daughters and his town and, ultimately, Bracken’s Norval.

Maybe the greatest irony of Morgan’s Creek is that this whole raging avalanche of a movie turns out to be nothing but a 90-minute setup so Demarest can do a perfectly timed pratfall in a hospital corridor. And, indulgent as that sounds, it’s worth it.

Morgan’s Creek was shot by master cinematographer John Seitz, best known for single-handedly defining the film noir genre with Double Indemnity. The rule has always been that you never want a comedy to look too pretty or too moody, but, while Seitz never goes overboard, he doesn’t shy away from making his frames nuanced and expressive, in a comic-elegant way. Creek looks passably good on Amazon Prime—as in, you wouldn’t turn it off if you watched on a home cinema-sized screen, but you’d always be wanting more. But the wraparound scenes—the first three and a half minutes and some shots near the end—are curiously flat and washed out.

This film is really just a succession of master shots and long takes, which really allows the comedy to thrive. But while Sturges rises to that self-imposed challenge masterfully, he does indulge in maybe two too many of them—and in too many big physical gags, when it’s inevitably the smaller bits of business that play better—which can make Morgan’s Creek seem a little grating at around the 2/3s mark. But hang in there—it all ultimately pays off. The movie still works on its own terms, and time has leant it some little touches—like finding out the Kockenlockers live in the same house as The Girl from Lover’s Lane, and encountering a newspaper headline that screams “Hitler Demands Recount”—that provide a kind of gruesome pleasure in retrospect.

Little fades faster than comedy—except maybe fantasy. The best silent comedies hold up surprisingly well, especially the shorts, maybe because they’re so abstract and don’t rely much on the world of the time for their effect. And the best of the screwballs remain resilient—most of Sturges’ output and Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday in particular. Go much outside of that and you’re talking the very definition of the ephemeral. So it’s more than worth it to seek out and plumb the best ones, and it’s hard not to be in awe that they even exist at all.

PICTURE | Acceptable when viewed on a big screen, except for a couple of passages, but catching glimpses of what the original looked like only makes you long for a proper restoration

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Review: Touch of Evil

review | Touch of Evil

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Orson Welles’ second-best film remains an evocative, engaging, disturbing, and visually stunning film noir

by Michael Gaughn
July 29, 2022

Labeling things, even if it’s to figure out who’s done something best, is usually a great way of robbing them of their essence because the exercise inevitably makes the best of whatever seem too much like other, more mediocre things when the whole point ought to be to highlight what makes them stand out because they’re different—unique. That said, the best film noir is probably the first, Double Indemnity; the most perverse—because it caused the genre to start eating away at itself from within while it was still in its prime, introducing a fatal dose of doubt into a genre that was already all about doubt—is, hands down, Kiss Me Deadly. And the ultimate expression of noir as stylistic exercise while also being its deepest and most troubling character study is Touch of Evil.

We usually associate style with something superficial, and that’s usually a pretty safe bet to take, especially if we’re talking about any of the giggly, pointlessly gruesome, less-than-human recent stuff that crows itself as neo-noir. But the genius of Evil—Welles’ genius—was to take every element of the film and set it in counterpoint, in the Baroque sense, with every other element. Nobody had done that in a noir before (or has since), and the instances of it in other genres are sadly few. And it’s the furious texture Welles created—both rough as sandpaper and smooth as silk—that makes Evil inexhaustible, as evocative and engaging and disturbing a film now as it was when it was released—in studio-butchered form, of course—in 1958.

And we should all be grateful the studio held sway here—that is, if the so-called director’s cut is any indication what Welles would have wrought if given his editing druthers. Somehow I doubt that last part. The misguided attempt to be true to the long-deceased filmmaker’s intentions—in other words, to read his mind by reading his notes—smacks of being an unimaginative academic exercise leagues removed from Welles’ brilliance. But a lot of people lap up whatever comes out under the “director’s cut” moniker as gospel, without ever stepping back to figure out whether it adds up to anything worth watching.

The studio’s edit actually enhances Welles’ grand design, keeping the film moving in a heedless head-long rush that subsumes anything that might have smacked of pretentiousness into the larger mission. That can’t be said of the sputtering. lumbering director’s cut. And, fortunately, it’s the studio version you get, in 1080p, when you view Evil on Amazon Prime.

Again, saying some film is the most or the best of anything is usually just so much critical bloviation. Too many films have now been made by too many only meagerly talented people, hopelessly muddying the waters, for those words to mean much. But Evil deserves to be placed with some rarefied company, is one of the very few movies where if you say something’s about it’s the best, that word still has some relevance and weight.

In a genre that tends to invite visual flamboyance and outright excess, this is a tough call to make but, of all the noirs, Evil is the most visually stunning. And that’s not just because Welles’ feverish conceptions and cinematographer Russell Metty’s ferociously inspired realization of them succeed in creating a plausible and engrossing twilight world of corruption and menace, but because, for all its exuberance and smart-assery, that visual canvas is integrated into every aspect of the production in a way that’s mutually reinforcing. (Again, that counterpoint.) In other words, it’s all meant in the service of art and not of just showing off.

Metty was a master of both black & white and color—consider his still unmatched work on such Douglas Sirk films as Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life (1959), and, especially, All That Heaven Allows. And having him more than ably manning the camera gave Welles an expressive freedom he hadn’t had since his collaboration with Greg Toland on Citizen Kane. Metty gave Welles wings—and some badly needed discipline.

But putting so much emphasis on the visuals suggests the audio somehow takes a back seat. It’s doesn’t. It, like every other element in the film, is co-equal, and the mix, not in terms of technical quality but of aptness to the material (which is all that should really matter) is pretty much peerless. The sound has as much to do with evoking the relentlessly grimy border town of Los Robles as any of the imagery, and the use of sound during the prolonged climactic scene where Vargas deploys Quinlan’s deputy with a wire so he can lure Quinlan into incriminating himself is both subtle and dazzling. No amount of surround gimmickry could ever improve its impact.

And we meet up with Henry Mancini again, here in his breakout film. Known for his smooth, clean style, this is Mancini at his dirtiest, delivering a perfectly apt soundtrack that’s surprisingly gritty and raw. It’s a kind of warmup to his equally loose tracks for Peter Gunn later that year, but without the mitigating dollop of cool.

At its heart, Evil depicts an almost Darwinian struggle as one group / culture / generation supplants another. And it’s a tale of the Fall, as idealism comes up against the tangled complexity of reality and, as it always does when it tries to impose rather than adapt, breaks apart on the rocks, taking down everyone on board. Welles constructs a fiendishly nuanced moral labyrinth of a kind Hollywood films aren’t built to sustain, ruthlessly questioning everything, but showing an amazing compassion for people who remain true to their innate sense of duty, even when it leads to their downfall. A hell of a mature and discriminating statement from a pampered brat—and one he was incapable of making until this film.

All of which helps to explain why Evil is a kind of Citizen Kane reunion, with many of the secondary roles populated by players from that film. Welles wanted to show how much he and movies had changed since he naively burst on the scene—and then got his head handed to him.

Evil is also a film about faces—even more so than Dreyer’s Joan of Arc—and therein lies its redemption. Every person on screen displays character. While some of the roles might be stereotypes, Welles cast the film so every actor, by their presence alone, could rise above those stereotypes. Which once again brings us to ethnicity, and all I can say about that here is: Charlton Heston is offensive as a Mexican because he’s a bad actor who doesn’t understand the character he’s been asked to play. Akim Tamiroff is brilliant as a Mexican because his Uncle Joe Grandi is fully dimensional, expresses his history and being with his every gesture and word—which is all that ought to matter if you’re trying to create, first, fiction and then art, and not propaganda.

Touch of Evil is, on more than one level, so relentlessly bleak it would be impossible to sit through it if wasn’t balanced by the elegance of its camerawork and wit of its score, and if it wasn’t redeemed by its love of its characters, its humor, and the honesty of its portrayal of inevitable human failing.

PICTURE | At moments, so striking you wish someone would do a restoration that didn’t include mucking with the studio edit

SOUND | About as good as the late ’50s had to offer, but serviceable at presenting the startlingly ingenious sound mix

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Review: The Gray Man

review | The Gray Man

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This may not be a Bond or a Bourne but Netflix’ big-budget Ryan Gosling vehicle is still an entertaining and fast-paced actioner

by Roger Kanno
July 27, 2022

With an estimated budget of $200 million, The Gray Man is Netflix’ latest, and most expensive, big-budget thriller. Starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, and Regé-Jean Page, among other award-winning actors, it is co-directed by the Russo brothers, Anthony and Joe, who have co-directed two each of the Captain America and Avengers movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Based on the book of the same name by Mark Greaney, as with other recent Netflix projects, it is expected to be the start of a film franchise. And like other films from the streamer, The Gray Man received a limited release in theaters on July 15 prior to being made available digitally on July 22.

Gosling plays Sierra Six, a CIA operative and part of an elite unit of highly skilled assassins. He becomes involved in an operation that goes awry and ends up having to run from the very people he works for. The plot is reminiscent of spy thrillers such as those from the Bourne series or James Bond, and like those other franchises, this film features an outstanding cast. Evans is the main antagonist, Lloyd Hansen, a ruthless killer for hire who plays his character menacingly enough but with just the right amount of douchiness and along with de Armas as a highly skilled CIA operative, Dani Miranda, these three are constantly at the center of the plentiful action. The set pieces are impressive with many memorable action sequences including an incredibly complex fight and chase onboard a tram-train that provides pulse-pounding excitement.

While there is plenty of great action, the character development can be a bit uneven. There is some good chemistry between the leads but, at times, their dialogue and interactions seem stilted. At other times, it is snappy and organic, moving the story along smoothly. It’s not the fault of the actors as they do their best with the material they’re provided. De Armas and Gosling are especially convincing as reluctant heroes, when given the opportunity and the means. The Gray Man may suffer in comparison to some of the accomplished spy thrillers that have come before it but taken on its own terms, is an entertaining and fast-paced actioner.

Although the film may be called The Gray Man, the visuals are anything but gray or drab. Establishing shots of a fireworks display are obviously CGI and stylized to look a bit like a graphic novel, but the Dolby Vision grade provides impressively rich, bright colors and deep, dark blacks. As the scene shifts to the celebration indoors, the constantly changing lighting from the fireworks and spotlights on the dance floor looked fantastic on my OLED display. The composition of shots with infinite blacks in the deepest of shadows contrasted by brilliantly illuminated objects such as colorfully backlit keyboards and LCD displays in an internet gaming café didn’t look particularly natural, but the atmospheric lighting and sharply defined images were certainly impressive. In a particularly challenging scene where smoke from an explosion fills the inside of an apartment building, the clouds of smoke appear with such fine detail that there’s a sense of depth and dimensionality as Six fights a team of Lloyd’s henchmen and the smoke swirls and moves around them in perfect unison.

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is excellent, as should be expected from a big-budget action picture. During the tram-train fight sequence, the sounds of small-arms fire, explosions, speeding cars, and hand-to-hand combat mixed with the suspenseful music is dizzying in its clarity and ability to create a holographic aural effect. In addition to the aggressive, directional effects during action scenes, the object-based surround mix is used to effectively place eerily echoing voices and atmospheric music in the surround and height channels and move them smoothly around the room during a flashback scene. There is also some great use of popular music as introduced by characters playing records, such as Mark Lindsay’s “Silver Bird” on 45, which is played a couple of times in the film.

If you’re looking for something light and breezy to pass some time and give your home theater a real workout this summer, give The Gray Man a shot.

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | The Dolby Vision grade provides impressively rich, bright colors and deep, dark blacks

SOUND | The Atmos soundtrack is excellent, as should be expected from a big-budget action picture

Review: Jurassic World Dominion

review | Jurassic World: Dominion

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Expect to see lots of dinosaurs, cast members, and action-scene mayhem in this latest entry in the Jurassic franchise

by John Sciacca
July 18, 2022

Can you believe it’s been nearly 30 years since Steven Spielberg first threw open the gates and welcomed us to Jurassic Park? It’s no surprise that monster hit spawned two sequels; and then, after lying dormant for 14 years, the franchise saw a reboot in 2015 with Jurassic World, featuring a new cast and—of course—bigger and meaner dinos.

I was in the theater opening night in 1993 for Jurassic Park’s debut, and what I remember about that movie is the wonder, mystery, and magic of seeing dinos up on the big screen, more realistic and believable than ever before. Similar to how he handled Jaws, Spielberg showed his digital (and practical) dinos somewhat sparingly, using what you heard off camera and just caught glimpses of to keep the tension and making the moments with the dinosaurs that much more exciting.

Since that movie, it seems the filmmakers have come to rely on the dinosaurs and visual effects as the crutch, and in Dominion we have dinos of all types and sizes everywhere and in nearly every scene, with almost all ready to attack. Perhaps I’m jaded, but 30 years after the original film, the wonder of seeing dinosaurs on screen has passed, and I now expect them to be wrapped in a compelling and somewhat believable story. Just giving me some new, bigger, faster, meaner genetically modified apex predator isn’t enough.

With Jurassic World: Dominion, the sixth entry in the franchise, we have the stars of the original Park—Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and everyone’s favorite chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)—united for the first time with the World cast of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). If that sentence alone suggests Dominion has a lot going on, you’re right.

Trying to bring all of these sub and side stories and plotlines together leaves Dominion jumping around a lot, and trying to pack as much as possible into its 146-minute runtime. It also features a franchise-low Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 30%, dropping from the original Jurassic Park’s 92% and reboot Jurassic World’s 71%. On the flip side, it is nearly tied with the second highest audience score of 77%, just a nick behind World’s 78%, and with some nice, nostalgic call-back moments to the first film, you could say director Colin Trevorrow gave the people what they wanted.

Taking place four years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the opening documentary-style footage tells us dinosaurs are now freely roaming the world and people are “learning” to live with them. This has created some obvious issues, and in an effort to control the dinosaurs, a company called Biosyn Genetics has been assigned global collection rights and created a dino sanctuary in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains where they are studying dinosaur DNA to look for ways to improve human life.

In one major storyline, Grady and Dearing are living together in a remote cabin, where she works to save dinosaurs from a growing black-market industry and he wrangles and relocates stray dinos. They’re also hiding and secretly raising 14-year-old Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a genetic clone of Charlotte Lockwood, the daughter of Jurassic Park’s co-founder, who scientists want to study for her DNA.

And in the other, Sattler is investigating a series of devastating mutant-locust attacks that are wiping out crops around the globe, except these super-sized locusts are sparing any Biosyn-enhanced crops. When one of the locusts is captured alive, she takes it to Dr. Grant and asks for his help. They decide to visit Biosyn in Italy, where they meet CEO Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who gave me a very Apple CEO Tim Cook vibe, and are reunited with Dr. Malcolm. (You might recall that Biosyn and Dodgson—played by a different actor—had a brief but important role in the original Jurassic Park, where he recruited Dennis Nedry [Wayne Knight] to steal dino embryos from rival InGen and deliver them in a special Barbasol shaving can.) These stories develop separately until about 105 minutes into the film, when they almost literally crash into each other and the casts are brought together to save each other and ostensibly the world.

My daughter Lauryn best summed up the film about halfway through by saying, “I’m equally bored and excited.” To me, Dominion is really a series a great-looking and -sounding demo scenes with a thin filament of story binding and stringing them together. My guess is that after the initial viewing, you’ll be more likely to turn to one of the six pre-bookmarked scenes on the Kaleidescape download to wow guests than to actually rewatch the movie from start to finish.

The technical specs show that Dominion was filmed on 35mm and 65mm stock, along with Red cameras at 8K for some scenes. The home transfer is taken from a 4K digital intermediate, and for most of the movie, the images are reference-quality. There’s some light grain present from the film stock in some scenes, but it was never objectionable.

For the most part, what I noticed was tons of sharpness and detail, with clean, clear images. There was also a lot of depth to images while still retaining sharp focus. Closeups revealed loads of textures, such as the scales, claws, teeth, and scratches on the Velociraptor Beta or the grain and stitching in Malcolm’s black leather jacket. You can also see fine facial detail in actors’ faces and clearly see individual strands of hair.

One of the more visually compelling scenes was the bright, gleaming sun-drenched outdoor vistas of Malta. Here, long establishing shots show beautifully clear and razor-edged rows of buildings and roofs, with closeups showing the stonework and mortar lines, letting you appreciate the fine cracks and weathering in the stone blocks and floors.

There are loads of dark scenes, whether at night or creeping around inside of caves, giving the HDR grade plenty of room to deliver. Black levels are dark and clean, with nice shadow detail for natural images with lots of depth. There are quite a few instances of bright headlights and flashlights probing the dark, or bright, red-orange fiery torches lighting a cave system, and other fiery, burning objects, and bright glowing buttons and screens that all receive extra pop from the HDR pass.

Other than a brief, almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, scene near the beginning shot underwater where a bit of banding is visible in the water layers, the video was impeccable. There were several scenes—one where multiple shafts of light are over a forest and another with bright lights and flames in a cave—that could have easily been video torture tests but looked terrific. Visually, Jurassic World Dominion will make your home theater shine.

Another interesting “nerd fact” is that the original Jurassic Park was the first theatrical film to feature an audio mix from DTS, a competitor to Dolby Digital. To this point, none of the Jurassic films released to the home market have included an immersive Dolby Atmos mix, instead opting for the DTS:X surround mix. But for Dominion the Kaleidescape download does have a Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix. (Whether that will be the audio format featured on the disc remains to be seen.)

I found the mix immersive, engaging, and exciting, with near constant use of the surrounds and height speakers for either ambient sounds that open and expand the listening space, or big, dynamic sounds during the action. Frequently you’ll hear sounds of dinosaurs growling, skittering, or making other noises from all around the room, alerting you to danger, or have the sounds of soft blowing breezes rustling leaves, with birds and insects off in the distance in jungles and forests, or city street and traffic sounds. Height speakers are frequently called into play, such as when dinosaurs fly and roar past overhead, leap over vehicles, or during a locust swarm that engulfs the room, when characters are plunged underwater, and during a plane crash.

Bass is also quite deep, room-filling, and tactile. Whether it’s the thundering herds of running dinosaurs, the collision of vehicles, or dino growls and roars that will hit you in the chest with authority, expect Dominion to give your subs a workout in the best way. Even with all of the sonic mayhem, dialogue remains clear and locked into the center channel.

One of the best audio demos is during a chase in Malta involving vehicles, a motorcycle, dinos, and a plane. There are engines revving, tires squealing, dinosaurs leaping overhead and charging, collisions with impacts and debris spilling and crashing all around the room. It’s exciting, intense, and a little ridiculous, but it looks and sounds great. And that kind of sums up the film—go in expecting to have a big, loud, fun time with your family and friends, where you’re wowed by the picture and sound, and you’ll likely enjoy it.

I’m a fan of the franchise, and even though this film had its flaws, Jurassic remains the surest bet for a big summer blockbuster featuring a spectacle of big VFX, a killer surround mix, and the best digital dinosaurs you’re likely to see. Even though they didn’t share much time on screen, it was great to see the old Park crew united with the new World bunch, and if they decide to return for another, I’ll surely come along for the ride.

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | Aside from some light, unobjectionable grain present from the film stock in some scenes, the images are reference-quality

SOUND | The Atmos mix is immersive, engaging, and exciting, with near constant use of the surrounds and height speakers

Review: Ralph Breaks the Internet

review | Ralph Breaks the Internet

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The sequel lives up to the original, giving the characters a new, Easter egg-strewn, adventure

by John Sciacca
February 17, 2019

Ralph Breaks the Internet, the followup to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph, is one of those rare sequels that, if not better than the original, stands equal to it. Like many modern Disney (and Pixar) films, even though it’s animated, Ralph’s story and themes are designed to appeal across a wide range of ages, and offers plenty of laughs and emotion for everyone in the family.

About six years has passed since the end of the first movie, and life remains mostly unchanged in the arcade for Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman), who spend their days playing as characters in their video games, and their nights hanging out together, traveling to different games and throwing back root beer at Tapper’s.

When the steering wheel in Vanellope’s racing game Sugar Rush breaks, the machine is unplugged, leaving all of the characters “gameless” (in other words, homeless). Ralph and Vanellope turn to the Internet to find the part needed to repair the game, starting our heroes on their quest. But the film is really about friendship enduring as people grow and change, and the insecurity one person feels when they are totally happy with the status quo and want nothing to change and the other wonders what more the world has to offer and feels like they need to move on. Ultimately, your friends don’t need to be exactly like you to be your friends and we need to let the ones we love be free to pursue their dreams, even if that means potentially losing them. Heady themes for a kid’s movie.

Ralph checked all the boxes for me: video games, nostalgia, technology, Disney, and Easter eggs aplenty, rivaling Ready Player One for things hidden in the background. (Google the license plate in the shark’s mouth for one great one!)

The film does a great job of visualizing how technology works—from the concept of packetizing data and sending it through a router and off to the Internet, how searches, viral videos, and pop-ups work—what causes the Internet to drop, and imagining what it might look like if it were a physical place that data actually visited.

Without a doubt, the scenes at OhMyDisney.com were my favorite parts, and quite possibly some of my favorite scenes from any movie in recent years. This area of the ‘net brings together virtually every Disney property—classic Disney, princesses, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, hidden Mickeys —into a lengthy segment featuring some fantastic Easter eggs throughout that had me smiling until my cheeks hurt. Instead of just being a cheap franchise tie-in, this scene brings these franchises together in a fantastically organic and entertaining manner. And kudos to Disney for getting all of the original actors back to reprise their voice roles. Great stuff!

Similar to how the first film used different animation styles to differentiate between the worlds of Fix-It Felix (Ralph’s game), Sugar Rush (Vanellope’s game), and Hero’s Duty (Calhoun’s game), Breaks has different looks and styles depending on where we are in Ralph’s world—the arcade, inside different games, the Internet, or the Dark Web.

One of the marquee locales is Slaughter Race, a gritty, smoggy, bathed in eternal dusty-golden-light, crime-ridden world à la Grand Theft Audio. Here we meet ultra-racer/gang leader, Shank (Gal Gadot), who ends up becoming an unlikely mentor and pivotal in Vanellope’s journey as well as contributing to a big-time song & dance number that’s an homage to classic Hollywood pieces of old.

Animation generally looks fantastic in 4K HDR, and Breaks definitely doesn’t disappoint. Colors are incredibly bright and punchy, almost neon when called for, especially in the Internet. Blacks are also deep, with a lot of detail.

Breaks sounds as good as it looks, with an aggressive Dolby Atmos soundtrack that’s used effectively throughout, both to create environment and to add impact to the onscreen action. The overhead speakers are smartly used to create a wonderfully immersive experience, such as the echoing, swirling sounds when Ralph and Vanellope travel into the Internet or the multiple announcements that occur throughout. The carjacking scene in Slaughter Race also sounds great, with a lot of dimensionality and solid bass accompanying the crashes.

While mostly family friendly, there were a couple of scenes in the film’s final act—notably Ralphzilla and Double-Dan (you’ll know him when you see him)—that were a little too intense and frightening for my almost three year old. Definitely continue watching through the end credits for one last great Ralph meme—probably the most perfect end-credits scene a movie about breaking the Internet could possibly have.

PICTURE | Colors are incredibly bright and punchy, almost neon when called for, especially in the Internet, and blacks are deep with a lot of detail

SOUND | The aggressive Dolby Atmos soundtrack is used effectively throughout both to create environment and to add impact to the onscreen action.

Review: Toy Story 4

review | Toy Story 4

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Pixar adds a new chapter to the series without feeling like it’s succumbing to sequelitis

by John Sciacca
October 2, 2019

When I initially heard about the plans to release Toy Story 4, I was actually upset. Not because I’m not a fan of the franchise—rather, exactly the opposite. It’s because I’m such a big fan and I felt the story arc had been so wonderfully and perfectly completed in Toy Story 3 that I feared any additional movies would only dilute the emotional conclusion of that film, one that never fails to cause me to tear up no matter how many times I watch it.

Sure, give us some further exploits of our toy friends playing with Bonnie such as the Toy Story Toons Hawaiian Vacation, Small Fry, and Partysaurus Rex or the longer shorts Toy Story That Time Forgot or Toy Story of Terror, but let Toy Story 3 remain the perfect end note to the main story. However, with its early release in 4K HDR at the Kaleidescape Store (a week prior to the UltraHD Blu-ray), I decided to take the plunge and complete my Toy Story film collection.

I’ve watched Toy Story 4 twice now, once in theaters and once at home in 4K HDR, and my heart has definitely softened to this latest entry in the series. While much of the story feels more forced than the more organic events of 1—new toy, Buzz, comes in and shakes up things in the toys’ world; 2—Woody is stolen and discovers he is a celebrity; and 3—the toys come to terms with Andy growing up and leaving them behind, it gives our toys another great adventure while advancing Woody’s story and ultimately giving his character some nice closure (and a new beginning).

The movie opens nine years in the past, showing us what happened to Sheriff Woody’s true love, Bo Peep, when she is given away to another child. We then cut back to the present where, following the events of Toy Story 3, young Bonnie is growing, and Woody finds himself being played with less and less. On the first day of kindergarten, he sneaks into Bonnie’s backpack to make sure she has a good first day, and while at school, Bonnie crafts a new friend, Forky, from miscellaneous scraps of trash. When brought into Bonnie’s room, Forky magically comes to life and spends much of the movie trying to throw himself in the garbage.

When Bonnie’s family takes a road trip, Woody tries convincing the other toys—and Forky himself—that Forky is important to Bonnie, but Forky throws himself out of the RV’s window and Woody goes after him, setting the stage for a variety of adventures, and the reunion of old friends and new acquaintances.

All of your favorite characters from the previous films are here including Buzz, Jessie, Dolly, Trixie, Rex, Hamm, and Slinky Dog. Significant among the new characters are Gabby Gabby, Ducky and Bunny, and ultimate stuntman Duke Caboom.

Toy Story 4 is Pixar doing what Pixar does best, which is putting a bunch of interesting characters together in humorous situations and milking each scene for maximum humor and heart. They nail the little moments like Rex being impressed with how long Forky’s pipe-cleaner arms are or Snow Combat Carl (Carl Weathers) missing out on a high five. This is definitely not the best of the Toy Story films, but it is still a lot of fun to watch.

We’ve been having a bit of a resurgence of Toy Story watching in our house, as my three year old has become obsessed with the first three films, wanting to watch them on our Kaleidescape system over and over. What you really notice is the generational leaps in animation improvement from film to film. Whereas the first movie now looks almost like a student project, this one has many moments that border on photorealistic. The opening scenes look stunningly real, with incredible depth and detail in every frame. Taken from a 4K digital intermediate, there is striking micro detail in every closeup, a testament to the fanatical level of attention paid by the Pixar team. From the ultra-fine texture in Bo’s bonnet to the detail in every one of Bonnie’s eye lashes to the scuffs and scrapes on Woody’s hat (visible only in certain lighting and angles, mind you), each frame is bursting with detail. Just sit and watch as each rain drop in the beginning hits, splashes, and ripples. It’s amazing work.

The outdoor scenes all look unbelievably real—from the exterior of Bonnie’s school to the road and landscape while Woody and Forky are walking to the interior of the Second Chance antiques store, it’s all 4K eye candy. One scene in the antiques store where Bo and Woody look at a variety of illuminated chandeliers is especially fantastic-looking.

The colors throughout were a bit subdued and muted. Whether this was to give it a more grownup, filmlike, and realistic look or due to some other creative choice, colors aren’t as overly saturated and pumped up as they are in many animated titles, including the other Toy Story movies. There are still scenes where colors pop, such as the shimmer of Bo’s deep purple cloak, the flashing colored lights in the secret club inside an old pinball machine, the midway at the carnival, and especially the carnival lit up at night. This film is gorgeous to behold throughout and reference-quality video in every way.

The Dolby Atmos audio track was mostly restrained, with the vast majority of the audio action happening in the front of the room. There were some nice moments where the height speakers were called into creative use for some expansion of on-screen dialogue—for example Woody hearing things inside Bonnie’s backpack or Ducky and Bunny talking off screen—or where the audio soundstage is expanded with a variety of ticking clocks in the antique store, but Toy Story 4 is not really an audio showcase. Having said that, this is frequently a dialogue-driven film and the dialogue is always clear and easy to understand, and there is appropriate use of surrounds when called on, but just not aggressively.

If you have kids or grandkids, or just want a fantastic-looking movie with a bunch of heart, Toy Story 4 is sure to please.

PICTURE | The photorealistic animation is filled with detail, and while the color palette is a little subdued, there are plenty of moments that pop

SOUND | The Atmos mix is mostly restrained, with most of the audio happening in the front of the room, but there are some moments where the height speakers are called into creative use

Review: Incredibles 2

review | Incredibles 2

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Fourteen years after the first film, this sequel picks up where the original left off without skipping a beat

by Dennis Burger
November 6, 2018

Incredibles 2 shouldn’t work—at least not as well as it does. It’s been 14 years since the original film, after all, and the world—our world, the real one without superheroes—has changed. A lot—socially, politically, cinematically. So, to pick up this sequel right after the end of the original film seems a myopic decision. One can’t help but wonder, as the film opens on the familiar closing scenes of its forebear, if Incredibles 2 will ever rise above the level of nostalgic romp.

Thankfully those apprehensions are unfounded. Perhaps it’s due to the retro-futuristic tone, style, and aesthetic of the Incredibles universe but somehow the film manages to catch up with a decade-and-a-half worth of sociopolitical progress and regression while managing to feel like a fluid and organic extension of the original. And it does so while somehow managing to be less preachy and more nuanced.

Another reason Incredibles 2 feels like something of a risky move is that it has the courage to be a lot of films at once. It’s an unabashed superhero flick, sure. It’s also a girl-power anthem and a slapstick masterpiece rolled up into one, with a side helping of commentary on all forms of media (new, social, and mainstream). There’s teenage romance, there’s thrilling action, there are poop jokes and technological warnings that are about as subtle as a 1958 Pontiac Parisienne. There’s also an epic (and epically hilarious) battle between a trash panda and an infant, for goodness’ sake. But somehow this mélange of themes, tones, and styles coalesces into something that works wonderfully and cohesively.

If there’s one criticism to be leveled, it’s that from 30,000 feet its main plot is sort of just a gender-inversion of the original film’s main storyline. In many ways, that works to its advantage, though. It gives the longtime fan something to latch onto—a sense of comforting familiarity that in many ways makes the narrative and thematic departures hit home with a little more oomph.

More than anything, though, the themes of Incredibles 2 build on those of the original in a seemingly seamless way. Whereas the first film dealt largely with issues of individuality, the sequel in many ways wraps its arms around the internal struggle between defining ourselves as individuals and accepting that who we are as people is often a function of who we are to the other people in our lives, especially when viewed through the lens of the family.

That isn’t really any sort of insightful observation on my part; it mainly comes from the film’s exceptional collection of bonus features. If you saw Incredibles 2 in cinemas and thought you were done with it, you owe it to yourself to explore the shockingly revelatory and honest supplemental material. If you’re on Kaleidescape, that means downloading the Blu-ray-quality version of the film as well as the 4K HDR, since the extras are limited to the former.

It’s well worth downloading both, though. The Kaleidescape HDR version sets itself apart from the other home-video releases thanks to unique color grading that focuses less on the absolute blacks and eye-reactive highlights and more on the subtlety and richness of shadows that simply look more cinematic to my eyes. Kaleidescape’s TrueHD Atmos soundtrack (otherwise found only on the UHD Blu-ray release) also has a leg up on the Dolby Digital+ soundtrack found on the streaming versions. Not necessarily in the booming bass of big action sequences (of which there are many, with oodles of sonic impact, something Disney hasn’t always gotten right as of late), but more in the subtle details that deliver ambience and atmospherics. And above all else, Incredibles 2 is nothing if not atmospheric.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The HDR version sets itself apart from the other home-video releases thanks to unique color grading that focuses less on the absolute blacks and eye-reactive highlights and more on the subtlety and richness of shadows

SOUND | The TrueHD Atmos soundtrack delivers plenty of sonic impact during the big action sequences as well as all the detail of the more subtle atmospheric cues

Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

review | Breakfast at Tiffany’s

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Miss Golightly, I Must Protest!

Some thoughts on Yunioshi

Because this film has been so viciously damned, and Blake Edwards was so relentlessly hounded, for Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi, and because those misperceptions still hang over Tiffany’s like a shroud, I would be remiss to review the film without weighing in.

Talking about the merits of Rooney’s performance is probably not the right way to tackle this, but I think partly what irks the political reeducation crowd is that Yunioshi actually is funny, even at this late date. Yes, there are a couple of moments that are a little too broad, but we are talking about Mickey Rooney after all.

The better tack, probably, is to talk about the glaring double standard that’s been applied to the film. Why hasn’t anybody gotten their dander up about Sally Tomato? Here’s a Jewish-American actor—Fred Flintstone, for chrissakes—playing an Italian in a stock-ethnic way just this side of Chico Marx. If one ethnic caricature is offensive, then they should all be. The seemingly endless number of warnings at the beginning of this innocuous film includes “yellowface.” It should say “goombah” as well. And yet Tomato raises nary a peep.

Following all this to its logical conclusion, Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone—a mongrel Midwesterner playing an Italian mobster—ought to be damned as well. But—and maybe I’m just being short-sighted—I don’t ever see that day coming. If it does, we should all give up on the movies and play solitaire instead. But then someone would take issue with how the figures are portrayed on the playing cards.

If you want to get pissed off at anybody in Tiffany’s, it ought to be Paul Varjak. That was a creaky conception from the start that unintentionally exposed all the many biases of the time and ultimately created more problems than it solved. And George Peppard could never act his way out of a rain-soaked paper bag. That’s offensive.

—M.G.

Ignore all the culture-wars propaganda—this ultimate Audrey Hepburn vehicle still reigns as one of the great romantic comedies

by Michael Gaughn
July 17, 2022

There are so many things to be said about Breakfast at Tiffany’s—not in a nostalgia-dripping stroll-down-memory-lane kind of way but more in a “this thing still reverberates like crazy—why?” kind of way. And, like anything with potency in the present moment, those reverberations have an inevitable dark side.

But let’s tackle the upside first. It’s a little too obvious to begin with Audrey Hepburn, but how can you not? What she does with her character is still breathtaking, somehow managing to stay true to the depth and nuance of Truman Capote’s original conception of Holly while shepherding her through all the standard-issue Hollywood attempts to blandify her, emerging with a conception that somehow manages to synthesize and transcend both.

She owns this film, in a way very few other actors have ever owned a film. And, yes, I know that’s what everybody loves about Tiffany’s—but that tends to be because of all the charming, kooky stuff, not because Hepburn succeeded in investing Holly Golightly with a soul.

Usually, you’d give the director some credit for that, and Blake Edwards was brilliant in many ways, but no other female character in his work even comes close to being as fully developed or compelling. Golightly exists leagues beyond what he was able to accomplish elsewhere.

And keep in mind Edwards was still pretty much a yeoman when he made this film, with really only a couple of slapstick-driven service comedies (The Perfect Furlough and Operation Petticoat) under his belt. The sudden growth in his maturity as a filmmaker is more than obvious, and, as much as I love the original Pink Panther film and some of his other work, it’s a tremendous loss he never did another movie like this one—which suggests that Tiffany’s was one of those born-of-the zeitgeist miracles, like Casablanca, less the product of individual will and more the product of spontaneous generation.

Other things to praise: Like The Apartment, Tiffany’s manages to capture the spirit of New York at that early-‘60s moment when the city was at its peak, unknowingly perched on the edge of a precipice. And it does this despite—or maybe because of—having been made mostly on LA soundstages and only partly on location in NY. It remains a beautiful film to look at—much more beautiful than it deserved to be considering the production values of other similar productions from the time.

When I was a kid, one of the Toronto stations would broadcast movies after midnight that weren’t available on American TV. I would sneak downstairs after everyone else was asleep and gorge myself on fare I was probably too young to be watching. (In the case of Bloody Mama, definitely too young.) That’s how I first saw Tiffany’s, and it was the first time I remember being entranced by the look of a film. It was so much more vivid than anything else I’d ever seen that it seemed almost magical.

If I saw it again today presented that way, I’d probably be horrified. But there was something inherent in the quality—maybe best called “power”—of those images that wasn’t quashed by the limitations of the medium or the device. Tiffany’s, seen in 1080p on Prime, was faithful to that experience. I can’t say I was entranced—too much time has passed—but I was engaged and impressed. Can 4K improve on that? Possibly—but only if Paramount can resist inflicting the same “grain—bad; digital—good” revisionism that made a travesty of The Godfather.

The dialogue tracks are surprisingly clean—so clean you can easily make out whenever there’s a dubbed line. Originally mixed in mono, there’s nothing particularly good or bad about the stereo version here, except for a couple of jarring instances of hard panning. My biggest beef is that Henry Mancini’s score is presented in the Living Stereo style of his soundtrack albums, with that unrealistically wide soundstage making it feel like the music exists somewhere outside the film.

It’s hard to watch Tiffany’s and not get a little wistful about Mancini. His scores for this and The Pink Panther three years later are probably his best—evocative, ingenious, tasteful, never bombastic, setting the appropriate mood instead of telling you what to feel, polished expressions of the second American renaissance. But the British Invasion left him lost without a rudder and he could never recover his bearings long enough to ever summon up anything half as good as what he did so effortlessly in the early ‘60s.

The film’s biggest problem is structural, and might come from Edwards never having dealt with material this complex before. The whole thing starts to unravel around the 2/3s mark, which is when most movies start to come apart when the director doesn’t fully grasp his material. The problem is, Tiffany’s isn’t just a light and fluffy romantic comedy. Edwards and screenwriter George Axelrod had retained enough of Capote’s novella that its darker undercurrents start to deeply trouble everything at the point where the filmmakers have to start pulling all the threads together, causing the movie to go full-blown schizophrenic, oscillating wildly between dramatic scenes and silly vignettes that tend to rob the more serious moments of their power. This created an insoluble dilemma that led to the infamous “I own you” conclusion, with the now thoroughly unpleasant George Peppard asserting his blond-haired, blue-eyed straw-man’s rights over the beaten Golightly. All of that somehow doesn’t sink the film completely, but it’s a hell of a note to end on.

Miss Golightly, I Must Protest!

Some thoughts on Yunioshi

—M.G.

PICTURE | Tiffany’s, seen in 1080p on Amazon Prime, is amazingly faithful to one of the most beautifully shot Technicolor films ever

SOUND | The dialogue tracks are so clean you can easily hear when there’s a line dub, but the stereo mix of Mancini’s score fails to integrate it with the rest of the film

Review: The Sea Beast

review | The Sea Beast

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This solid animated adventure from Netflix features an impressive, but somewhat inconsistent, visual style

by Roger Kanno
July 14, 2022

Netflix Animation’s fantastic new full-length feature, The Sea Beast, received limited release in theaters on June 24 and debuted on its streaming service beginning July 8. If you didn’t know that Netflix Animation is a thing, you’re likely not alone. Formed only in 2018, it has had a few critical successes but remains relatively undiscovered. And with the recent upheaval at Netflix, some projects have been cancelled and some staff have left the studio. Still, they have many projects in development and Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion animated version of the classic tale of Pinocchio is expected to be released in December. With that and the release of The Sea Beast, the studio’s profile looks to receive a significant boost in recognition.

Chris Williams, who worked on numerous high-profile Disney projects, including co-directing Bolt, Big Hero 6, and Moana, co-wrote the screenplay with Nell Benjamin and directed this film. The Sea Beast can be a little predictable at times but its story about a time when sea monsters ruled the oceans and posed great perils to sailors is more thought-provoking and character-driven rather than a typical action-adventure tale. There is plenty of action, though, to keep the story moving, some of which might be frightening to young children, but it is otherwise suitable for viewing by the entire family.

The cast includes Karl Urban voicing the character of Jacob, one of the celebrated hunters who fight the sea monsters under the command of Captain Crow (Jared Harris) on their storied ship, Inevitable. He takes a young girl, Maisie (Zaris-Angel Hator), under his wing and together they embark on a journey to capture the Red Bluster, the most dangerous and feared of all the sea beasts. The story is filled with a diverse cast of interesting characters and manages to avoid most of the clichés of a nautical animated adventure.

The CGI animation presented in Dolby Vision can look fantastic. Sunlit scenes have a very natural look with the light glistening realistically off the water and the motion of the waves perfectly mimicking that of real life. The movement of the tall ships as they cut through the water and the gentle swaying of their rigging is perfect down to the the most minute detail; the faded individual strands of the ropes, the green oxidation on the brass fittings, and weathered decking all look amazing. The attention to small details is stunning. The captain’s long, dark-gray jacket exhibits great specificity in its stitching and differences in the texture of its well-worn surface that reflect light in different directions. It also moves convincingly with each stride he takes along with his baldric and heavy shirt that each move with the same cadence, but independent of one another. I was often mesmerized by these visuals.

While there is much to admire about the quality of the animation, there were still times when it could look a little cartoonish. Somewhat surprisingly, the rendering of the Red Bluster is quite simplistic, with a mostly smooth body and skin and uniformly red coloration that is fairly nondescript. In contrast, the crab-like sea beast it battles looked much more impressive with its spiky claws and legs with varied textures and colors exhibited by its gorgeous purply-blue, mottled shell.

The Dolby Atmos audio presentation is also very good at times, even though there could have been more use of the surround and height channels throughout the film. The sound design begins promisingly in the first scene when a young Jacob is lost at sea and attempting to cling to a piece of wreckage from his ship. The sound is enveloping and exciting as the crashing waves and wind surround him, and as he becomes submerged, the ambient sounds of the water fill all of the channels. However, during the subsequent battle scenes with the sea monsters, there was relatively subtle use of the non-front channels to provide a sense of envelopment but little in the way of exciting directional effects. And while the sound always remained clean and well-delineated, there was only occasional use of subsonic bass to provide a real visceral punch to accompany the terrific visuals.

Chris Williams’ The Sea Beast is not perfect but it brings all the charm and well-crafted storytelling of his previous efforts for Disney to his new partnership with Netflix Animation.

PICTURE | The CGI animation presented in Dolby Vision can look fantastic, with natural-looking sunlit scenes and stunning attention to detail

SOUND | The Atmos audio presentation is very good at times, even though there could have been more use of the surround and height channels

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