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Paranoia (Blu-ray)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Entertainment One Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (16th March 2014). |
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The Film
 Paranoia (Robert Luketic, 2013) Adapted from Joseph Finder’s 2004 novel of the same title, Paranoia is a thriller focused on the world of corporate espionage. Set in Manhattan, the film depicts a society dominated by two huge telecommunications giants: Wyatt Corp, headed by Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman), and Eikon, headed by ‘Jock’ Goddard (Harrison Ford). Goddard and Wyatt were once allies, but their friendship became fractured, and they are now rivals who are driven by a deep-rooted desire to destroy one another’s business. Adam Cassidy (Liam Hemsworth) is a six year employee of Wyatt Corp who struggles to care for his ill father (Richard Dreyfuss). After failing to gain support for his latest idea from Nicolas Wyatt, Cassidy embezzles money from the company and throws a party for his colleagues. Catching wind of this, and recognizing the potential within Cassidy, Wyatt calls the young man to his office and threatens to turn Cassidy over to the police unless he co-operates in his scheme to bring down Eikon. Cassidy becomes a ‘plant’ within Eikon, and he is told by Wyatt to steal the plans for ‘Type X’ – a mobile device that, instead of GPS, uses 3DPS, which allows a three-dimensional representation of the location of the device. Cassidy acquires a job within Eikon by highlighting the potentials of the 3DPS software for sale to the military. Things become complicated when Cassidy begins to fall for Emma Jennings (Amber Heard), who works within the marketing department at Eikon, and also finds Goddard to be increasingly sympathetic. The film opens with a suggestion that the viewer will be confronted with a tech thriller riddled with neo-noir elements. We are shown a canted, high angle shot of an alleyway at nighttime, the darkness fractured by chiaroscuro light; the selfconscious noir iconography reinforced by a voiceover (by Cassidy/Hemsworth) which states, ‘I’m not giving you excuses. I asked for this. All of it. I did it to become someone else. I wanted more. I belonged to a generation who watched our future get stolen out form under us. The American dream our parents knew has been hijacked by men who are willing to lie, cheat and steal to protect their wealth’. However, this opening sequence, which hints at a hardboiled, expressionistic approach to the corporate world (and perhaps a ‘hunted man’ thriller along the lines of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, 1947) soon gives way to more naturalistic photography, predominantly glossy Manhattan settings and a fairly static tale of corporate war waged over the ill-defined ‘Type X’ (a Hitchcockian ‘MacGuffin’). As Cassidy, Hemsworth plays the ‘fish out of water’ type: a working class boy who has attempted to work his way up the corporate ladder. Discovering that the system is not the meritocracy he initially believed it to be, he finds himself caught between two corporate giants. Wyatt and Goddard wage a war for Cassidy’s soul, whilst the health of his ageing father, who worked the same job for thirty-two years, deteriorates. In its handling of Cassidy and his relationships with his father and both Wyatt and Goddard, Paranoia strongly resembles Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), in which stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is taken under the wing of the successful Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), whilst his relationship with his ageing, defiantly working-class father (Martin Sheen) becomes increasingly strained. However, despite characteristically interesting performances from both Oldman and Ford, Paranoia lacks a character as interesting as Gecko: Cassidy’s relationship with his father, with the clear implication that Cassidy is afraid of falling into the same ‘rut’ as his parent, is in some ways more interesting than the main plot. However, Dreyfuss is given too little screen time his character, and this aspect of the narrative is sidelined in favour of exploration of Cassidy’s relationships with Wyatt and Goddard. There are suggestions that Goddard, who has lost a child, sees Cassidy as a surrogate son, and Cassidy begins to look up to him as a father figure; but again, this subplot figures in no more than a couple of scenes and is given too little room to develop. The film’s casting is obviously designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, with popular young performers like Hemsworth and Heard sharing the screen with Ford, Oldman, Dreyfuss and Embeth Davidtz (as Wyatt Corp’s psychologist, Dr Judith Bolton). As the ruthless Nicolas Wyatt, Oldman reinforces the character’s ‘blue collar’ origins and thus his similarities with Cassidy by employing an exaggerated working-class London accent: ‘I grew up like you’, Wyatt tells Cassidy at one point, ‘Different streets, same dream’. However, as Cassidy, Hemsworth is difficult to sympathise with: he embezzles money from Wyatt Corp and, as Nicolas Wyatt notes later in the picture, instead of using the money to care for his ill father, he blows it on a party for his friends at a trendy nightclub called Rise. In its handling of Cassidy’s ‘rags to riches’ story, Paranoia is somewhat reminiscent of Luketic’s previous thriller 21 (2008). The film hints at a theme of omnipresent surveillance, through the device of the 3DPS software; and visually, through the use of aerial shots, and high-angle shots depicting the perspective of a surveillance camera, often containing digital overlays detailing the names of characters (the suggestion presumably being that the system identifies them via gait analysis and has all of their personal details stored digitally). However, aside from a few brief discussions of the theme of surveillance in the dialogue, much of this is throwaway and inconsequential to the main narrative. There is a very brief discussion of the distractions provided by digital technology, but this is limited to a couple of short dialogue scenes and has little impact on the rest of the narrative: at one point, Goddard tells Cassidy of his plans for ‘Type X’ as a system of gathering data about its users. ‘You think people really want all that personal information under one roof?’, Cassidy asks. ‘It’s not the roof that matters, Adam’, Goddard tells him: ‘It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of the house under it. People are so distracted these days, they don’t know who they are. But we will. We’ll know them better than they know themselves’. However, this dialogue, though loaded with significance, has little ‘follow through’ in the rest of the film: we are never shown the impact of Type X or anything similar to it. Occasionally, the script struggles to explore issues arising from our relationships with technology, but retreats into more traditional thriller territory. During his presentation to the head honchos of Wyatt Corp, Cassidy reflects on the explosion of social networking, noting that ‘We don’t want to be connected anymore. We just want to feel connected while we isolate’. Similarly, much later in the film Goddard tells Cassidy of Eikon’s aims for Type X: ‘Imagine walking around with nothing but your cell phone: no wallet, no keys [….] It’ll be your driver’s licence; it’ll be your credit card; it’ll be more than that. Super slim. Foldable with a battery that recharges itself from any ambient electrical sources. It’ll know where you’ve been, who you’ve been with. It’ll track your priorities, expenditures, your health, calendar. It will know who you are’. However, this theme goes nowhere: without a direct representation of Type X and its effects Paranoia struggles to offer a ‘pay off’ to these loaded moments of dialogue. There is a brief scene which seems to allude directly to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974): realising that he is under surveillance, Cassidy tears apart the apartment he has been given by Wyatt Corp, so that he may find the ‘bugs’ that he believes have been placed within it. The sequence strongly recalls the ending of Coppola’s film, in which Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) destroys his home after realising that he, the ‘king of the buggers’, has himself been bugged. However, the sequence is a throwaway moment of narrative ‘excess’ that is simply serves to reinforce Cassidy’s awareness of the ways in which he is being used as a pawn by both Wyatt Corp and Eikon – whereas the similar sequence in Coppola’s film is part of a layered examination of the role of surveillance technology and its effects on those who are both its operators and its targets. Likewise, whilst coaching Cassidy so that he may work from within Eikon undetected, Judith tells him, ‘You have to fit in to get in’ – but the film does little to explore this suggestion of the way in which the corporate environment values conformity.
Video
Presented in an aspect ratio of 2.40:1, the film has a handsome 1080p presentation on this disc. Encoded with the AVC codec, the presentation benefits from strong contrast. Although as noted above, the opening sequence, with its obtuse angles and chiaroscuro lighting, suggests a noir-ish aesthetic, much of the film is shot in brightly lit scenarios, mostly in daytime. The film was shot digitally, using Arri Alexa cameras. The film’s colour palette shows evidence of digital trickery, with some scenes taking on an amber hue. On the whole, Paranoia is a very slick-looking thriller. Colour consistency is good, and there’s a strong sense of depth and definition throughout the whole film.
Audio
The disc provides the viewer with the option of two lossless tracks: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track; and a LPCM 2.0 stereo track. The former is rich and as slick as the visual presentation. Quiet dialogue scenes are enlivened by ambient sounds, and during more dramatic sequences the music swells, filling the soundscape. English subtitles for the Hard of Hearing are provided.
Extras
The disc includes bonus trailers which play on startup and are skippable: Divergent (2:23); 12 Years a Slave (2:28); The Family (2:00). Four deleted scenes are accessible from the ‘Extras’ menu: ‘Cubicle Row’ (0:45), in which Cassidy argues on the telephone with another colleague about his handling of the presentation; ‘Adam’s Rehired’ (0:32), in which Cassidy celebrates his return to Wyatt Corp; ‘Wyatt’s Got a New Job’ (0:54), which features Cassidy telling his friends of his new job at Eikon; ‘Privacy’ (1:44), a short dialogue scene between Cassidy and Emma. Three featurettes are included: ‘Privacy is Dead’ (5:59), a superficial discussion of the prevalence of surveillance technology in our lives; ‘The Paranoia Begins’ (5:50), focusing on the origins of the film in Finder’s novel of the same title; and ‘The Players’ (5:22), which extols the virtues of the cast. These featurettes are nothing more than short promotional ‘fluff’ pieces and offer little insight into the film or its themes, although ‘Privacy is Dead’ attempts to situate Paranoia within the context of the modern world’s perceptions of privacy – but offers little more than soundbites of Luketic the actors (ironically) discussing the omnipresence of cameras.
Overall
A slick Hollywood thriller, ultimately Paranoia is a watchable, reasonably entertaining but deeply frustrating film: given advances in technology and the increasingly public ways that people choose to live their lives, the time is right for a paranoid conspiracy thriller, but Hollywood refuses to deliver one. Paranoia hints at some interesting themes and the ubiquity of surveillance (all of the security personnel within the film seem to come equipped with tablets, for example – even the bouncers at the Rise nightclub) but goes nowhere with these ideas, focusing instead on elevating Hemsworth’s status as a ‘beefcake’ star (he’s frequently shirtless). The opening sequence’s promise of a neo-noir thriller never materialises, and Luketic (perhaps unwisely) allows many scenes to play out in glossily-photographed daylight rather than threatening shadows. (The amber hue, no doubt created digitally, that is cast over many scenes would arguably have been more effective had it been replaced with a colder palette.) Greater disparity between Cassidy’s home and his work would have given a stronger sense of the road that this character has travelled and what he fears falling back to (which, as Wyatt suggests, is embodied in the character of his father, a now-retired and desperately ill security guard of thirty-two years). Luketic offers us a few scenes depicting Cassidy at home, and Wyatt threatens Cassidy into subservience by showing Cassidy a surveillance video of Cassidy’s father at home, but Cassidy’s home is never shown in context: arguably to the detriment of the film, Cassidy’s interactions with the wealthy Wyatt and Goddard are never offset with scenes showing Cassidy interacting with the neighbourhood in which he was raised. A more focused contrast between where Cassidy has come from and where he aims to be would perhaps have made the character more sympathetic (especially in his decision to use the money he has embezzled from Wyatt Corp to throw a party for his friends rather than pay for his father’s treatment) and would have given the film a greater sense of dramatic momentum. At one point, Wyatt tells Cassidy, ‘If you let no-one in, you get burned by no-one [….] You know what Picasso said: “A good artist borrows; a great artist steals”. There’s nothing original left in this world, Adam: we’re all stealing from someone’. Later, Wyatt tells Cassidy, ‘Everybody steals; everybody lies. There’s no right or wrong, just winning or losing’. These exchanges are at the heart of the film: Wyatt, it is revealed, is intent on destroying Eikon so that he may gain access to (or ‘steal’) the ‘Type X’ prototype. Like Wyatt, Paranoia’s script seems to offer ‘steals’ from a number of corporate/surveillance thrillers (The Conversation, Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State, 1998, the current television series Person of Interest, 2012- ). However, its examination of the issues it raises is unfocused and many ideas are suggested by the dialogue and left undeveloped. Type X is vaguely defined – and unlike, say, the Great Whatsit in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the lack of detail regarding Type X works to the detriment of Paranoia. Ultimately, Paranoia is a slickly entertaining film; but released in a year which also saw Costa-Gavras deliver a similar corporate espionage thriller, Capital, by comparison Paranoia offers a frustratingly vague perspective on the issues to which it alludes. This is largely a weakness of the script, which is also burdened with some cumbersome dialogue (the opening narration is notably ‘clunky’). However, the film could have been made more interesting had it been presented in a different way, with a more expressionistic approach to the photography that might have underscored some of the themes within the film (and its title, ‘Paranoia’). Reading between the lines of the featurette ‘The Paranoia Begins’, one might be left with the conclusion that the two credited screenwriters (Barry Levy and Jason Hall) pulled the film in different directions, with Levy constructing a script that was an adaptation of Finder’s source novel and Hall ‘bring[ing] a very strong youth energy to it’. Nevertheless, the presentation of the film on this disc is very good: both video and audio-wise, the disc is more than satisfactory.
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