The War
(HD-DVD)
Picture: B Sound: B Extras: D Film: C+
Jon
Avnet’s The War (1994) attempts to
tell the parallel stories of a father (Kevin Costner) trying to put his life
back together after suffering and surviving duty in the Vietnam fiasco and his
son (Elijah Wood) trying to build a simple treehouse with some friends. Both start having problems and when the son
is bullied, how should he handle it and what is the best way to do so?
Kathy
McWorter’s screenplay is ambitious, but the film is overlong at 125 minutes and
never knows how to conclude with endless run-ons. Costner’s character tries to teach
non-violence, but simply cannot get that to gel with what he has been
through. The film wants to have it
several contradictory ways, one of which is trying to learn pacifism after a
mess of terror and genocide, but it is bound to loose in the shadow of Michael
Cimino’s masterwork The Deer Hunter
(1978, reviewed elsewhere on this site) and part of the problem not
wanting/needing/going to Vietnam.
The other
is trying to be like the “he’s coming home” cycle of films before Cimino’s
where Vietnam is ignored/denied. The
result is the feeling of some of the rollback politics of films on the subject
since the 1980s where Vietnam is not addressed or revised as a “winnable war”
or that the U.S. was somehow inarguably correct to be there, which is
wrong. The film cannot be ambiguous
about this either or land up by its book-like narrative siding with the
rollback crowd. At least Costner once
again tried to do a film about something.
The 1080p
VC-1 1.85 X 1 digital high Definition image h as some great moments, but they
are so interweaved with soft, lame ones that it ruins what could have been one
of Universal’s better back catalog HD-DVDs.
Director of Photography Geoffrey Simpson, A.C.S., comes up with the
occasionally good shot among standard ones, and I never found the film so
visual compelling, but it did look good.
The Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 mix are laidback for the
most part, though the TrueHD is better by default, making this a good
dialogue-based sound mix at best. Thomas
Newman’s score is fairly good. This was
originally a DTS theatrical sound exclusive.
There are no extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
