Panic Room, 2002.
Directed by David Fincher.
Starring Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam, Jared Leto, and Kristen Stewart.
SYNOPSIS:
David Fincher’s 2002 movie Panic Room gets not just its Blu-ray debut but its 4K Ultra HD debut too in this nice Steelbook from Sony. The film looks great, as you’d expect, and a code for a digital copy is included too. Nothing new was created for this one in the bonus features department but, holy cow, everything was ported over from the old DVD release, and it’s a ton of stuff. I don’t know what else could have been added to the extras, except maybe a discussion about how this story might play out today, with modern technology.
I’ve been a David Fincher fan going back to Alien 3, which I have always maintained is a very underrated movie, especially the Assembly Cut, but I missed Panic Room somewhere along the way, so I was glad to get a chance to check it out.
Released in 2002, this film features a pretty basic storyline that nevertheless gets plenty of juice squeezed out of it, so to say, by Fincher. Jodie Foster is newly-divorced Meg Altman and Kristen Stewart plays her daughter, Sarah, in a role that put her on the map at 12 years old.
Meg has purchased an amazing brownstone in the Upper West Side of New York City, probably paying a price that would be considered a steal today. It comes with an impregnable panic room that’s well-stocked with supplies and features its own phone line as well as monitors for keeping track of the security cameras scattered throughout the house.
Unbeknownst to Meg, the panic room also contains something that a trio of thieves played by Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam, and Jared Leto want to get their hands on. They think they’ve broken into an empty house, but when Meg is alerted to their presence and races into the panic room with Sarah, they have to figure out how to get her to leave. And Meg didn’t get the panic room’s phone line set up yet.
Sure, your initial assumption is probably that Meg and Sarah can wait out the thieves, but David Koepp’s riveting screenplay ups the ante with a ticking clock in the form of Sarah’s diabetes. The young girl could end up going into a coma and dying if she doesn’t get her insulin, which is, of course, not in the panic room.
The thieves also have an advantage in the form of Burnham (Whitaker), who works for the company that designs and installs panic rooms, including the one in Meg’s house. He’s also the most level-headed of the trio, since Junior (Leto) is a grandson of the previous owner and is a spoiled rich kid with a drug problem, and newcomer Raoul (Yoakam) is a hothead who is okay with killing anyone, including a child, to get what he wants.
Despite nearly the entire movie taking place in one setting, Panic Room does a great job of grabbing the viewer by the throat early on and not letting go until the end. You can check the film’s plot points against its 112-minute runtime and see how Koepp and Fincher unspool the story according to a classic three-act structure.
Amazingly, this new Steelbook from Sony marks the movie’s debut on not only 4K Ultra HD but Blu-ray too. It’s part of a small wave of Fincher films coming to 4K Ultra HD in recent months, and Panic Room looks as awesome as you would expect, whether you partake of it on Blu-ray or 4K.
This is my first time with this film on home video, but I’m pretty sure all of the extras found here were ported from the old DVD release, which was pretty packed with content. Even though nothing new was created for this release, what you’ll find spread across a pair of Blu-ray platters is the kind of in-depth bonus features that are typical for a Fincher film. Here’s what you’ll find:
• Three commentary tracks: Foster, Yoakam, and Whitaker serve up the first discussion, while Fincher takes the second one solo, and screenwriter David Koepp is joined by fellow scribe William Goldman for the third track. I like it when multiple commentaries are broken up this way, so we can hear the actors talk about what’s most important to them, the director can give his overall view of the making of the film, and the writer can get into the nuts and bolts of his craft. In the case of the third track, Goldman serves as a moderator for the discussion, which helps move it along.
• Pre-Production (82 minutes): Remember the days of really meaty making-of materials? That’s what we have here: whereas we’re lucky today to get 82 minutes devoted to the entirety of a film, Panic Room gives us that much time just on the pre-production phase.
• Production (62 minutes): Fincher is, of course, a meticulous filmmaker, so this is a great spin around the set that was built for this movie and how the director pulled off so many great shots.
• Visual Effects (82 minutes): I have to admit that I thought some of the shots in this movie involved moving pieces of the set around to accommodate the camera, but there was a lot more visual effects work here than I realized. I have no issue with that, of course — Panic Room is a great example of a movie that has very unobtrusive effects-filled shots.
• Easter Eggs (10 minutes): Remember the days when some bonus features were hidden somewhere on a DVD? They were always a mixed bag for me, but here they’re simply part of the extras, which is fine. The two featurettes you find here focus on real-life panic rooms and Foster’s attempts to break a bathroom mirror during filming.
• Scoring (10 minutes): A look at Howard S. Shore’s musical score.
• Sound Design (15 minutes): Sound designers Red Klyce and David Prior (who also produced the bonus features found here) talk about their contributions to the film.
• Digital Intermediate (11 minutes): This is an aspect of filmmaking you don’t see a lot in bonus features: post-production supervisor Peter Mavromates digs into the color timing and color correcting work that was done to create a digital intermediate of the film. (Since movies were just about always screened on celluloid back in 2002, with some notable exceptions like the second Star Wars prequel.)
• Sequence Breakdowns: Four parts of the film get broken down from start to finish.
A text-based piece called Super 35 Technical Explanation and a pair of trailers round out this one.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
