Pathfinders: In The Company Of Strangers (2011/Inception DVD)/Seal Team Six: The Raid On Osama Bin Laden (2012/Weinstein/Anchor
Bay Blu-ray)
Picture: C/C+ Sound: C+/B- Extras: C-/C Films: C/C+
With
Katherine Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty
arriving in theaters during awards season, a couple of home video releases have
also turned up to capitalize on the War genre’s renewed interest; both low
budget productions.
Curt
Sindelar & Michael Connor Humphreys co-directed Pathfinders: In The Company Of Strangers (2011) about the necessity
of a key radio squad to make it behind enemy lines during WWII so the title
unit could make the key invasion of Normandy
possible. To its advantage, this is not
boring, war porn or sloppy, but due to its financial limits, is more about
talking heads and much running around than it should have been.
Having
two directors might have sped up production, but it also cut into any vision
the final cut could have had and with more footage in the dark (though not
always overly darkened despite the color being narrowed) than it should have
been without enough in the background often enough to show or develop a visual
sense of place. This is not a stuck-in-a
story either, so there is little excuse.
The actors are not bad, but none of the performances stand out and when
this fell flat, I kept thinking of John Woo’s underrated Windtalkers (see Blu-ray review elsewhere on this site) and the
technology that did exist could have been addressed more to give us a better
sense of things, especially in this cyber era.
So the
result is watchable, but for the curious only.
A trailer is the only extra.
John
Stockwell’s Seal Team Six: The Raid On
Osama Bin Laden (2012) is a docudrama, matter-of-fact retelling of how Bin
Laden was tracked and killed using several news footage sources, new digital
graphics and other visual effects with actors playing most of the roles (we see
President Obama as himself throughout) giving a serviceable version of
events. It still think it only goes so
far and it did not add much to what I already knew, but it is not bad.
Cam
Gigandet, Freddy Rodriguez and William Fichtner were among the faces I
recognized and there is a sense of underlying energy among the actors as you
watch that they know they are among the first to cover this material. Slightly better than Pathfinders, 90 minutes
is just too short and the true impact of what happened is not delivered as much
as I wanted it to be, but all involved did an honorable, respectable job here
and it is worth a look for those interested.
The only
extra a Making Of featurette.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Pathfinders
is soft and flat throughout, not helped by trying to render it somewhat
monochromatic so it looks like it takes place in the past, but that does not
always work, can be repetitious and even generic since the manipulation is not
thought out all the way through. The
1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Team does look better, but thanks to the limits of actual press footage,
degraded digital images, the limited quality of digital visual effects and
other tricks like night vision, the overall playback performance is not great
and from this, would expect a DVD version would not look so good.
The lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 on Pathfinders is
actually not as good as the PCM 2.0 48/24 2.0 Stereo track which shows the
limits of the recording and that true multi-channel sound was not thought
through during production, though this is often dialogue-based. The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix
on Team is towards the front
speakers, in part because the lack of soundfield includes barely stereo news
footage audio and other audio that is purposely limited. Also, the general recording is limited, but
could not sound better than it does here.
- Nicholas Sheffo
