Coma Blu-ray delivers great video and decent audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
After a patient at her hospital emerges from a routine operation in a coma, Dr. Susan Wheeler learns that several otherwise healthy patients have met the same fate, after which they have been sent off to a mysterious institute. But when she tells her doctor boyfriend, he finds the story hard to believe.
For more about Coma and the Coma Blu-ray release, see the Coma Blu-ray Review
Before he settled into his familiar role as a best-selling novelist, Michael Crichton directed a
handful of interesting films. One of them, Westworld, remains a minor classic of science fiction, and Coma remains as
effective a thriller today as it was in 1978, because, let's face it, going in for surgery hasn't become any less anxiety-inducing. The film's producer has
been quoted as saying that he wanted to do for hospitals what Jaws did for the ocean. The
popular novel by Robin Cook—who was, like Crichton, a medical school graduate—provided
excellent source material.
Medical practices and technology have changed substantially in the thirty-four years since Coma, as have many other aspects of the
healthcare system, including costs, access and the very
structure of the physician's profession. But the basic imbalance of power between patients and providers
remains. When you enter a hospital for a surgical procedure, no matter how minor, you surrender
your fate and future to an array of professionals and technicians governed by routines and
procedures of which you know little or nothing and many of whom you may never see. In point
of fact, you no longer know what's going on, and if someone decides to change the program, you
may never know the difference. Cook and Crichton crafted an effective paranoid thriller out of
this common scenario, and they added what was then an unusual element by making their
protagonist a female doctor who is forced to become an action hero.
Drs. Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) and Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas) are surgical
residents at Boston General Hospital, under Chief of Surgery Dr. Harris (Richard Widmark).
They're also a couple who keep separate apartments and are struggling with the balance between
careers and their life together. Susan is especially impatient with the amount of attention that
Mark devotes to hospital politics, as he angles for the chief resident's job currently held by Dr.
Bill Chandler (Michael MacRae).
Susan shortly has more serious matters to consider. Her best friend, Nancy Greenly (future
Moonraker Bond girl Lois Chiles), checks into Boston General for an early-term abortion
disguised as a D&C and emerges from what should be a simple procedure brain-dead from the
anesthesia. The anesthesiologists huddle around the comatose Nancy, but they can't explain what
went wrong. Susan is grief-stricken, and Mark is appropriately supportive.
But then Susan finds something odd in her friend's medical file: a tissue-typing report that was
ordered anonymously. As Susan pursues inquiries into this anomaly, she meets with
discouragement and stonewalling wherever she turns, especially from the head of anesthesiology,
Dr. George (Rip Torn), who is exceptionally proprietary about his department's affairs. Or is it
more than that?
In violation of the confidentiality of medical records, Susan is able to learn of twelve cases of
unexplained coma in otherwise healthy young patients admitted for minor procedures in the last
year at Boston General. Her extracurricular activities land her in trouble with her boss, and even
Mark is pressured to rein her in, but as always happens in conspiratorial thrillers, the bad guys
make the mistake of trying to kill someone who only has suspicions. Now Susan knows she's
onto something, and she has no choice except to press forward.
Coma has a number of effective set pieces that still hold up, in large part because they don't
depend on effects but on Geneviève Bujold's convincing portrayal of Susan Wheeler as a woman
sufficiently driven to find out what's happening but still ordinary enough to be terrified by what
she's doing. Susan's struggles as she climbs and crawls through the ducts and shafts of Boston
General following a lead are realistically shot in a step-by-step manner that is textbook suspense
cinema. Her flight from a deadly assailant through the neighboring medical school makes
inventive use of the surroundings to stage a memorable game of cat and mouse that is probably
not for the squeamish, even though the film is rated PG. (Crichton suggests much more than he
shows in these scenes.)
The most extended sequence is also the source of the film's most famous imagery, because it's
set at the Jefferson Institute, a pilot program facility where long-term coma patients are
efficiently and cheaply warehoused. Under the supervision of the caretaker, Mrs. Emerson
(Elizabeth Ashley), a kind of Nurse Ratched for the inert, patients who will never wake up are
suspended by wires in an environment that's climate-controlled, UV-irradiated and monitored by
computer. Susan visits with a tour group of physicians, but slips away into unauthorized areas,
where she learns some nasty secrets and is then pursued by Mrs. Emerson and her minions
through corridors with video surveillance, onto window ledges and across ceiling beams. Susan
escapes to what she thinks will be safety, but in a paranoid thriller that's always when danger is
closest.
There's an interesting speech near the end of Coma where a villain tries to justify the film's
dastardly deeds, and if you listen closely, the reasoning has nothing to do with what's actually
happening. At the time, the scene played like the ravings of a megalomaniac, but Crichton and
Cook may have been cleverer than anyone realized. From the vantage point of today, one can
hear portents of arguments from all sides of the current healthcare debate, as if the whole toxic
brew were in the early stages of fermentation. As is so often the case, good sci-fi writers sense
what's coming.
(Trivia note: Keep an eye out for a young Ed Harris as a pathologist with a mildly ghoulish sense
of humor. It was his first feature film.)
Coma looks like it should on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which is to say that it's a
low-key affair with a muted palette, a soft but reasonably detailed picture and an evident grain
structure that never gets in the way of the viewer's enjoyment, unless you're one of those people
who thinks all films should have their grain removed. Except for the Jefferson Institute, which is
clearly intended to look bizarre and otherworldly, Crichton was clearly going for an ordinary,
everyday look that would make the increasingly bizarre events of Coma all the more frightening.
His cinematographer, Victor J. Kemper, on whose work I've commented elsewhere, was the
ideal cameraman for the job, especially in urban environments. The one limitation in Kemper's
photography for Coma is that the blacks are almost never truly black, but this is almost certainly a limitation of the source.
As has been typical of Warner's catalog output, I did not see any indication of degraining, high
frequency filtering or detail stripping, nor did I detect any artificial sharpening. The lack of any
special features or multi-track audio options has allowed Warner to get away without even using
the entire BD-25, let alone risking compression artifacts.
Yes, it's a mono soundtrack, but it's a carefully considered one, and it's well-presented in DTS-HD MA. In roughly the first half of the film, where it's
business as usual at Boston General
Hospital, Crichton makes little use of underscoring, preferring to let ordinary sounds of hospital
life create their own sort of tension. Only later, when it's clear that Dr. Susan Wheeler has
stumbled across something nefarious, does Crichton bring in Jerry Goldsmith's suspenseful
orchestra, effective as always. Dialogue is clear throughout, and the dynamic range is good
enough to register a solid impact with a loud tea kettle whistle that plays a critical part in a tense
scene.
The only extra is the film's theatrical trailer (2:29) in standard definition, enhanced for 16:9. If
you already know the film, it appears to give away much of the plot, but everything is so out of
context that I'm not sure it really gives away as much as might appear.
Now that we have Coma, it's time to get more of Crichton's work as a director on Blu-ray.
Westworld is a classic, but right behind it is Runaway, whose star, Tom Selleck, has a small part in Coma.
I'm a great fan of Looker, Crichton's film about the advertising business, which may have dated somewhat, but it does feature Albert Finney,
who is always engaging, and includes some memorable sequences involving a unique weapon based on light. The Great Train Robbery,
starring Sean Connery as a gentleman thief, is a wildly entertaining heist film whose
period detail has been waiting for the Blu-ray format to showcase it. Crichton was an
irresistible storyteller in multiple mediums. Coma is a fine example. Highly recommended.
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 ...
