Midnight Special Blu-ray delivers great video and audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
After rescuing his son, Alton from a fundamentalist religious sect who are convinced his powerful supernatural abilities are the key to their salvation, Roy, Alton and their bodyguard Lucas are on the run for their lives.
For more about Midnight Special and the Midnight Special Blu-ray release, see Midnight Special Blu-ray Review published by Michael Reuben on June 20, 2016 where this Blu-ray release scored 3.0 out of 5.
"He Is Not Like Us" proclaimed the trailer for Midnight Special, the fourth feature
from writer/director Jeff Nichols and the filmmaker's first effort backed by a major studio. The
trailer then offered glimpses of the eerie phenomena emanating from the boy at the film's center,
including bright lights and powerful energy fields. While the kid in Midnight Special may not be
like us, he is like other youngsters in movies whose outer innocence masks dangerous potential
and who have been a genre staple from Village of the
Damned to The X-Files.
Midnight Special
continues Nichols' efforts to put his personal stamp on familiar tropes following the critical
success of Take Shelter and Mud (both independent features prominently noted in the trailer).
Unfortunately, Midnight Special fails to live up to its promise. Though it might make a terrific
pilot for a TV series, as a standalone film it disappoints.
Warning: Midnight Special drops the viewer into the midst of ongoing events, allowing the
history of the characters and their relationships to emerge gradually. From that perspective, the
following discussion may be deemed to contain minor spoilers.
The "he" who isn't like us in Midnight Special is eight-year-old Alton Tomlin (Jaeden
Lieberher), a delicate and sweet-natured kid who wears blue swimming goggles as a precaution
against the blinding light that randomly radiates from his eyes. Alton has been raised on a remote
Texas farm inhabited by the followers of a preacher named Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), who
deems Alton a messenger from Heaven and has adopted him as his own son. The trauma of
having Alton taken away from her provoked his mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), to desert the
farm's cult. Now, two years later, Alton's father, Roy (Michael Shannon), has followed his wife,
fleeing Calvin's group with his son in tow. An amber alert has been declared, and local law
enforcement has mobilized.
But the police aren't the only ones pursuing Alton and his father. Federal authorities monitoring
Calvin's farm have detected that the child's delphic pronouncements, which Calvin and his
followers treat as holy writ, contain classified information intercepted from government satellite
transmissions. A consultant for the NSA, Paul Sevier (Adam Driver), has been tasked with
assessing the threat posed by Alton's abilities, and he seems to be the only person among the
boy's pursuers who is genuinely intrigued by Alton's unique gifts. The Blu-ray extras confirm
that Sevier is intended as an amalgam of the scientist and his translator played by François
Truffaut and Richard Dreyfuss in Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, but in Driver's
performance, he seems more like the spooky government renegade with a poster in his office
proclaiming "I Want to Believe".
Midnight Special follows the pursuit of Alton and his father, who are assisted by Roy's boyhood
friend, Lucas (Joel Edgerton in an underwritten role), as they alternately run and hide with no
clear plan except to reunite Alton with his mother. Throughout the chase, Alton continues to
manifest strange abilities. (A sequence of what might be called aerial bombardment is
particularly impressive.) As it gradually becomes clear that Alton is being summoned to a
rendezvous much like the alien landing at Devil's Tower or E.T.'s spaceship rescue, Nichols
appears to be building to a conclusion that will introduce humanity to a new race of beings or an
alternate dimension (or both), but Midnight Special fails to deliver the promised encounter,
offering only futuristic tableaux instead of a transcendent sense of wonder and awe.
Part of the problem may be budgetary. At an $18 million production cost, Midnight Special is the
most expensive of Nichols' films to date, but that sum isn't nearly enough for the kind of
operatic effects sequence that Steven Speilberg orchestrated to cap Close Encounters. The bigger
problem, though, is a failure of imagination. As Nichols admits in the Blu-ray extras, he did not
attempt to conceive in full the "other" world to which Alton is mysteriously linked. Having made
the choice not to explore that alternate reality in depth, he should have left it to the viewer's
imagination, offering no more than a glimpse of the ineffable, as he did at the end of Take
Shelter. Like The X-Files, which Nichols' film resembles more than it does a Spielberg-style
fantasy epic, Midnight Special works best as a thriller generating suspense from the inexplicable
and unknown. But as often happened in The X-Files, when the moment arrives to reveal the truth
that's out there, Nichols can't satisfy the expectations he's built up so effectively.
Midnight Special was shot on film by Adam Stone, Nichols' usual cinematographer, who also
photographed the micro-budgeted Compliance. Post-
production was completed on a digital
intermediate, and, as is typically the case with contemporary productions originated on film, the
DI process has smoothed out the grain structure, although the colorist has managed to retain the
subtly textured look of images captured in emulsion. Consistent with its title, much of Midnight
Special takes place at night, both outside and within the dark interiors of dim dwellings or cars
on the road. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray presents a sharply detailed image with
consistently solid blacks, marred only by a few minor instances of banding. White levels are
excellent, as demonstrated, e.g., in a scene set in a government interview room that recalls the
"blank slate" in The Matrix. In daylight scenes, the color palette
is generally realistic, with the
notable exception of the manifestations of Alton's powers and the film's final "reveal". Warner
has mastered the film at an average bitrate of 27.52 Mbps, which is somewhat higher than the
usual rate it provides for non-catalog titles.
Midnight Special's 5.1 soundtrack, which has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, effectively
rises to the big occasions, almost all of which accompany Alton's use of his mysterious powers
and therefore cannot be described in detail without spoilers. Otherwise, surround activity is
largely confined to environmental ambiance and an occasional pan between front and back (e.g.,
of a car hurtling forward). The dialogue is clear and natural-sounding. The expressive score is by
Dave Wingo, who also scored Take Shelter and Mud.
Origins (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:12): Nichols describes the inspiration, sources and central
themes of the film, with comments from the principal cast. Nichols and producer Sarah
Green also discuss the conception and design of the film's "other world". "I spent a lot of
time thinking about where they lived", says the writer/director. "I didn't spend much time
thinking about what they do."
The Unseen World (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:36): Each segment focuses on a specific
character, with comments from Nichols and the cast. A "play all" function is included.
Roy
Lucas
Sarah
Alton
Sevier
Trailers: The film's trailer is not included. At startup, the disc plays a trailer for Batman
v Superman: Dawn of Justice, plus the usual Warner promo for digital copies.
Midnight Special has a fine cast and an interesting premise, and it's unfortunate that Nichols
couldn't find a more effective conclusion for a story that, by its very nature, must remain open-ended. There are good things in the film, but it's
unsatisfying. The Blu-ray will not disappoint, although the extras are slim. Rent if curious.
Midnight Special: Other Editions
Blu-ray
1-disc
Blu-ray Bundles/Box Sets with Midnight Special (1 bundle)
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Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has announced that it will release on Blu-ray director Jeff Nichols' film Midnight Special (2016), starring Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Joel Edgerton, Michael Shannon, and Sam Shepard. The release will be available for purchase on ...
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