STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: September 9, 2008
STARRING: Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, and Catinca Untaru
WRITTEN BY: Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem
DIRECTED BY: Tarsem
FEATURES: Deleted Scenes
Featurettes
Commentaries with Filmmakers and Cast

The Fall is a visual stunner...but not a very good movie. It's the kind of film that leaves a critic who often defends style over substance a little lost for words. I SO want to defend The Fall. It contains some of the most amazing imagery you will see not just this year but this decade. And I've seen movies without much of a comprehensible plot but powerful visuals that worked for me. It's still primarily a visual medium. But it's when a movie tries to have it both ways that I get frustrated. That's exactly what happens to The Fall. As much as I adore the imagery in the film, everything else from the wooden acting to the deeply flawed screenplay drives me crazy. The Fall is proof that Tarsem may have a stunning eye - he showed it with 2000's The Cell too - but that he doesn't know what to do with it.

Pushing Daisies' Lee Pace stars as a stunt man who has been hurt in a horrible accident and is withering away in a hospital bed in 1920s Los Angeles. He also happens to be lamenting an unrequited love and struggling to find a reason to live. While in the hospital, he meets Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) and convinces the young girl to find him more morphine, first to kill the pain and eventually to kill himself. Yes, The Fall is about a man spinning a fable for a girl to help kill him. It's not your parent's fairy tale. Roy tells Alexandria a tale about a band of five men in a magical land, fighting an evil leader that has wronged each of them in their own way. Like Dorothy seeing her friends in Oz, we start to see people from Roy and Alexandria's real life in the magical fable, until the two heroes themselves have crossed the line between fantasy and reality.

Tarsem shot The Fall in over a dozen countries over three years of his life. The visual component of the film is clearly a passionate part for him, but it's simply not enough to carry the entire film. The themes are poorly developed and there's no dramatic energy to the piece. It's like wandering through an art museum - you'll see some amazing paintings but there's not going to be a lot of narrative cohesion.

Now, if you're going to watch The Fall, the ONLY way to do it is on Blu-Ray. Even when it played in theaters, I said "At home, when a viewer can pause the movie and truly admire the pretty pictures, I think The Fall will work better, especially on Blu-Ray." In theaters, viewers demand more but the visuals will be more than enough for people looking to show off their high definition televisions. It's a beautiful, stunning picture on Blu-Ray, even if the movie is a hollow exercise in cinematography and art design. The Blu-Ray disc also includes deleted scenes, featurettes, and commentaries. Once again, the Blu-Ray release for a movie is better than the film itself.