Review: Valkyrie 1

Movie Rating:  

It takes me a while to view films. As many of you know, I refuse to go to the cinema. I’m pretty happy with my home cinema setup, and believe that it provides a better way to see films than a crowded super-megaplex. (although I am a member at the jacob burns film center, and to go there for independent film.) I’ve been watching a lot of films lately, so I thought I’d start writing them up…

Valkyrie was surprisingly good. I didn’t realize how well constructed the casting was: Tom Wilkinson and Eddie Izzard gave great, albeit small, performances, and I feel the Kenneth Branagh ‘carried’ Tom Cruise through this film. I think Cruise is a horrible actor, and this affirmed that he’s entirely one dimensional and about as deep as a puddle of piss. It’s always great to see Bill Nighy, a friend of a friend, delivering his usual awkward (one can imagine him pulling the wings off flies) but solid performance.

In toto, it was a well done film. Historical thrillers run the risk of being either boring the viewer or departing too far from the truth. This seemed to balance the two with mixed commercial success. It’s difficult to present all sides an two hours and a minute, but I felt let down that we couldn’t better understand the motivation of the assassins. Hitler’s comment that Cruise’s character had “sacrificed so much for Germany” and was the “ideal German officer” remind us that the plotters were loyal to Germany, not Hitler, but a bit more emotional background would have delivered a more complete story.

This was a DVD rip from the pirate bay. I ran it through handbrake at 3500kbps and the quality was good. I dumped it on a USB stick and played it through the PS3. This was my first time isolating the audio into all six channels, and it worked, although the audio was a bit bass heavy (Wagner-esque, no?) Of course, when I finished the encoding, I realized there was also a Blu-Ray version, but I didn’t want to wait to download it.

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