Brainstorm Blu-ray offers decent video and solid audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
Two scientists, Michael and Karen Brace are developing a virtual reality system that sends sensory inputs into the brain and can record sights, sounds, feelings, and even dreams. The military attempts to take over the project when a senior worker begins to die of a heart attack and uses the system to tape the experience. They will do anything to get it.
Enhanced virtual reality scenes filmed in 70mm, the film switching formats and OAR in them.
Predating Inception by more than twenty-five years, Brainstorm is a trippy, mind-bending journey into the conscious and subconscious that, terribly cheesy '80s conventions aside, doesn't flinch away from asking big questions. Or rather The Big Question. Three-time Oscar-nominated special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, fresh off Blade Runner, hadn't directed a film since 1972's Silent Running, a shakily scripted but fondly remembered cult classic. Between producing little-known sci-fi series The Starlost for Canadian television and slipping on his supervisor shoes for Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Trumbull didn't have a lot of time on his hands. But when an opportunity arose to produce and direct a high-concept psychedelic thriller based on a story by then-upstart screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost, Jacob's Ladder), he couldn't resist. Little did he know that tragedy would nearly derail the project in the middle of production. That the film, originally developed to showcase Trumbull's own 60 frames per second Showscan process, would instead be shot using 70mm Super Panavision and standard 35mm cameras. Or that time wouldn't be so kind to Brainstorm, an undeniably flawed '80s curiosity best known as the late Natalie Wood's final film.
This is your brain. This your brain on 'Brainstorm.'
The highest compliment I can pay Brainstorm is that it's begging, just begging for a proper remake. (Somebody get Christopher Nolan on the phone.) So much so that I'm shocked it a reimagining hasn't already been green-lit. Rubin's story, at least at its core, is fantastic. A group of tightly knit scientists -- relative idealist Michael Brace (Christopher Walken), his withdrawn wife Karen (Natalie Wood), headstrong chain-smoking pragmatist Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher), all-too-eager technician Gordy Forbes (Jordan Christopher) and curious analyst Hal Abramson (Joe Dorsey) -- create a device capable of recording the experiences, emotions and not-so-PG sensations of one person and transferring it to another. But when one of the scientists suffers a heart attack and records the moments preceding her death, Michael is left desperate to know what the brain experiences and perhaps even observes as it dies. Complicating matters, though, is the very real, very deadly risk of triggering his own heart attack if he tries to interface with the full playback, not to mention the death of yet another friend and the forceful intervention of the military, who commandeer Brace's lab, his interface computers and headsets, and the tape documenting his colleague's death. Soon, Michael and the surviving scientists set out to prevent the new technology from being misused, destroy it if necessary, and to discover what, if anything, lies in wait for humans on this side or the other.
Laughably dated tech and junky genre performances notwithstanding, Trumbull, having cut his teeth on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, delivers a taut, competently shot conspiro-thriller with just enough military industrial complex paranoia to make it a true '80s cautionary tale. And while he doesn't mimic Kubrick, or Spielberg or Scott for that matter, the influence of each is apparent, not to mention a welcome Brainstorm boon. When Trumbull sticks to what he knows, he keeps himself, and the already teetering film, upright. When he ventures off the beaten path, he stumbles, unsure in his command of the production and uncertain in his vision. Establishing a consistent tone is the director's real downfall, though. Style, jerky and jarring as it is, trumps substance far more often than it might have in the hands of a more seasoned filmmaker, and the visuals, regardless of how innovative and impressive they may have been in 1983, dictate the rules and sharp turns of the story, rather than vice versa. Worse, Trumbull is so taken with shifting aspect ratios, character eccentricities, and Messina and Stitzel's unsecured spiderweb of government conspiracies that he doesn't seem stop to ask himself if any of it accomplishes as much as it's meant to. The answer: it doesn't. He relies on hokey, cornball dialogue, draws tenuous, almost silly performances from his otherwise talented ensemble (especially Wood, who is, pardon the posthumous pun, wooden), and stages and shoots one of the most ridiculous (and inadvertently comical) hack-the-mainframe sequences ever committed to film.
Only the last ten minutes of Brainstorm strike a balance between Trumbull's ambitious visuals and the script's big ideas. With an uptick in atmosphere and intensity, Michael's climactic look at his former colleague's death tape, shown in its entirety, is daring and arresting even today. Some will criticize the ending's directness, others will be pleased that an answer, rather than a more dubious mystery, is provided. It is a bit too on the nose, even for an '80s genre pic, and bears an unmistakable resemblance to 2001's eye-searing trip beyond the stars, but it's the death experience itself that dazzles and justifies all the misery and schlocky unbearable lightness of being that comes before it. His colleague's parting moments just might make Brainstorm worth the cost of admission, or at the very least worth watching. The imagery works, the visual effects work, the scene works, the performances... okay, maybe the performances still muddy the water. Still, if Hollywood wasn't so intent on remaking good films that don't need remade and were instead in the business of transforming old genre failures into new, intellectually riveting successes, a shoddy brain-bender like Brainstorm could finally live up to the promise and potential of its story.
Fear not, purists: Trumbull's shifting aspect ratios are intact and rightfully presented via a non-shifting 2.40:1 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer. However, the aggressively letterboxed results are more distracting than they are evocative, with the mind-interface sequences presented in 2.40:1 widescreen (1911 x 796 pixels) and the real world scenes presented in 1.67:1 with black bars on all sides (1330 x 796 pixels). The leaps between the two are startling, just as Trumbull intended, and do make the fish-eyed interface shots a bit more visceral. But the vast majority of the film is letterboxed top and bottom, left and right, leaving the viewer watching something that resembles a non-anamorphic widescreen presentation. Worse, the interface sequences are soft and hazy, the real world scenes are flat and listless, and colors and skintones are bland and lifeless in both. Black levels are often muted as well, and contrast is inconsistent. Every now and then a primary pops or a shot erupts with color, but that's the exception. Then there's the encode itself, the integrity of which is undermined by occasional artifacting, banding, unwieldy noise and other anomalies. Brainstorm's presentation is reasonably faithful, particularly when it comes to its handling of Trumbull's shifting aspect ratios, but source and encoding issues cut it down to size.
Warner's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is serviceable, effective even, but it's a bit too hit or miss to make much of an impact. The interface sequences are loud and jarring, and like the accompanying visuals, more unsettling. LFE and rear speaker output increase dramatically and the entire soundfield bristles with activity. The real world scenes, though, may as well be presented via a single channel lossy track. Dialogue is intelligible but ranges from clear to dampened to a bit muffled, dynamics are dull and diluted, and very little draws the listener in. And while much of that can be attributed to intention, it doesn't make for an immersive experience. Yes, Trumbull went out of his way to make the interface sequences larger than life. But to do so, he also deadened the real world scenes. Perhaps that bit of criticism belongs in the movie portion of my review, but it struck me as being more appropriate here.
Brainstorm would make a killer Christopher Nolan flick. Trumbull mismanages the material, though, and rarely delivers on the promise of Rubin's high-concept story. The most notable thing about the film is that it was Natalie Wood's last, and that does little more than increase its status as a curiosity. Unfortunately, Warner's Blu-ray release is almost as dated as the movie itself, with a problematic video transfer, a decent DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, and a near-barebones supplemental package. So rent Brainstorm for its final minutes. Skip a purchase for everything else.
This summer, Warner Home Entertainment will continue transferring its library catalog onto the HD format. The studio will release Blu-rays for sixteen popular thrillers, including The Butterfly Effect, Coma, Hard to Kill, Next of Kin, Outland, and the Blu-ray ...
