2.40:1 DVD capture: Red Eye The DVD

Buy the RED EYE poster at Moviegoods (click on image) DreamWorks presents Red Eye on DVD in a luxurious 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer.* Despite traces of DVNR, the image is gobsmackingly clear and proves that Rachel McAdams, at least, will have nothing to fear when the planet goes HiDef. The accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 audio saves its energy for the numerous take-offs, landings, and simulated turbulence, though Marco Beltrami's cheesy score fills the room and the dialogue has exceptional clarity. Extras include two featurettes that distil the content of the attendant commentary track partnering director Wes Craven with producer Marianne Maddalena and editor Patrick Lussier, late of the Dracula 2000 franchise. Lussier dominates the yakker, which plays a lot like a more palatable version of the Farrelly Brothers' trainspotting sessions, interspersed as it is with backstory on the production and interesting if not earth-shattering observations about such things as the (disappointingly absent) trailer's impact on the pacing of McAdams' and Cillian Murphy's early scenes together. In the fairly standard "The Making of Red Eye" (12 mins.), we get a little bit more information on the genesis of the script straight from the horse's mouth (screenwriter Carl Ellsworth), while "Wes Craven: A New Kind of Thriller" (11 mins.) finds Craven simultaneously lamenting his pigeonholing as a horror filmmaker--something he needs to stop doing before he begins to sound like a cast member of "Star Trek"--and boasting that his knack for scares probably intensified the formula set-pieces of Red Eye. Interviewee Brian Cox emerges as an unlikely but vocal champion of the man who gave us Freddy Krueger. An exhausting 6-minute gag reel (uncensored, à la the Serenity DVD's) and startup previews of Just Like Heaven and The Island round out the disc.-Bill Chambers *Also available in fullscreen.

The Film
excerpted from a longer review found here

If it barely registers at under ninety minutes, Wes Craven's high-concept thriller Red Eye is carried along by a couple of excellent lead performances (from Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams) and a revenge subtext that lends surprising gravity to the lingering sensitivity of a sexual assault victim's scars. Red Eye plays its 9/11 hand--and what else would you expect from a film about an assassination attempt on the Director of Homeland Security that takes place mostly on an airplane--as a metaphor for rape, because rape, after all, is as good a metaphor as any for a terrorist attack on native soil. Look to the glut of home invasion films (of which this is also one) in 2005 as further clarification of that connection--aliens of an inscrutable nature and purpose (and morality, it goes without saying) have come into the places we thought most sacred and taken what they wanted of our innocence: our once inviolate sense of security. Heady stuff for a film that is essentially Nick of Time on a plane, and indeed it may ultimately be too slight a framework to support the amount of topical sociology I'm tempted to ask it to bear, but there are moments now and again weighted with so much proverbial baggage that Red Eye, with its melancholy regret, sucks the air right out of the theatre.

Take a closer look at the decision in the picture's first act (as well as its trailer) to position Red Eye as a run-of-the-mill example of the romantic comedy genre, of which McAdams threatens eternally to become the new queen. She's Lisa, a confident, competent hotel manager schooled in conflict resolution and, as is the convention of romcoms, inexplicably single as the film begins. Lisa meet-cutes fellow traveler Jackson (Murphy) in line at the check-in for the titular red-eye flight that will take her home to Miami and her teddy bear daddy (Brian Cox). They flirt as beautiful people in garbage like Must Love Dogs do, and we almost forget a moment in the airport bathroom where Lisa changes out of a soiled jacket and we see an angry red scar over her breast. She frowns at herself in the mirror: she doesn't like herself, and it's a serious dislike, not a movie starlet dislike. Later it's revealed that she's lied to Jackson about her favourite drink--that she's insulated herself with deception against the possibility of love; the fact that people always ask her if she's sure she's all right might have an animal logic source that's impossible to hide. She gives off the "abused" pheromone--so suddenly the romcom conventions of the piece take a serious beating under the hand of interpersonal reality.

Soon, after Jackson plays coy in explaining what he does for a living ("But I did tell you, I overthrow governments"), their relationship issues become complicated by the fact that Jackson is a hired killer whose job it is to get Lisa to change the room assignment of the Dept. of Homeland Security (Jack Scalia) at her hotel to make him more vulnerable to an attack, the result of which will look a lot like what it looked like when an airplane compacted against the side of a tall building. The price of not cooperating is the murder of her father, so Lisa's resistance seems ridiculous until the key revelation that yes, indeed, Lisa has been the victim of violent crime and there is no allegiance to honour that takes precedent over her need to avenge that indignity. Red Eye is about a woman wronged who kicks ass, and it doesn't equivocate about that: Lisa is strong from the moment of crisis up to its resolution. (Fascinatingly, Lisa manages to be the kind of creature I believed could only exist or survive in Asian cinema: she's a feminine, beautiful, non-masculinized woman who's tough as nails.) Lisa is a rare beast--and if Jackson becomes a typical slasher bogeyman by the end of the flick, note the way that Lisa's superior knowledge of home turf is used to her advantage in smart, sometimes delightful (a sly reveal of a shelf loaded with field hockey trophies in her childhood bedroom is one of the best moments of the year) ways.

It's a minor film, no question, but it's also one that could exist in no other time with this kind of resonance. It repositions Craven as one of our canniest social commentators of the last four decades (class and generational discomfort in Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes in the '70s, the Reagan fandango in Nightmare on Elm Street in the '80s, the meta TV post-modernism of Scream in the '90s, now the homeland insecurity of Red Eye), and it re-establishes genre fare as the vital indicator species for a generation's fears and dreams of empowerment.-Walter Chaw

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