Film
A young girl, Lucinda “Luce” Price (Addison Timlin), is sent to the Sword & Cross reform school, having been blamed for the death of a young boy. Luce soon finds herself drawn to Daniel Grigori (Jeremy Irvine , a fellow student, unaware that he is an angel, and has loved her for thousands of years.
In heaven, angels led by Lucifer, have revolted. They are cast down into Hell. Those siding with God remain in Paradise. But, there is a third group, who believe in love. They fall to Earth, cursed there to dwell between two worlds, until they pick a side, a leader, and follow a cause for good or evil.
Fallen has a great premise, and which may well feel slightly familiar for fans of the television show Dominion. With a great premise, there is much potential, but sadly this one falls a bit short. The entire film feels like the first act of something bigger. No sooner do events seem to be starting, when they abruptly end, leaving one feeling unfulfilled.
Each of the cast of characters feels rather shallow, bringing in several who seem almost carbon copies of each other. There is little exposition, meaning we don’t know much about the back stories, or the true allegiance of each. There is far too much guesswork, in what should be a rather straightforward plot.
With such a great look for the Sword & Cross, we know very little of this too. Add on top of this, the slightly amateur looking visual effects, and the whole things feels like a low budget film to watch late one night, out of pure boredom.
A pity things did not work out as a whole, for Fallen, as the story could have gone many places. Not one to avoid, but neither one to rush out to see, landing squarely in the middle, as a mediocre product.
Disc
Overall, the disc is of a decent technical quality, although there are no bonus features on the disc, and with a main feature that is sadly lacking in a few areas.
Fallen is available now, to purchase on disc, in South Africa.
Video
Video is encoded at a high average bitrate, with no visible artefacts on screen. Colours are vibrant where needed, with no visible colour bleed. Blacks and darker scenes maintain a decent amount of detail.
Viewers with larger or higher resolution screens can scale the image up, should they wish.
Audio
Audio is compressed at a high average bitrate. Dialogue is clear via the centre channel, with the weight of the soundtrack carried by the front channels. In stereo mode, there is a slight bit of difficulty understanding some dialogue, due to other sounds, of similar volume, playing at the same time.
Audio is presented in a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, with a 2.0 downmix. There are no other languages available on the disc, and no subtitles.
Navigation
Navigation is simple, with a text menu, as the main menu, and a static background. There are options to play the main feature, and to select a scenes sub-menu.
The scenes sub-menus contain four colour, still, thumbnails. While these are numbed, they are not labelled, meaning some guesswork is required when navigating to a specific chapter on in the main feature.
Bonus Features
There are no bonus features on the disc, other than trailers for Manchester by the Sea, Gold and Lego Worlds.
The trailers autoplay at the beginning of the disc, and can not be accessed again via any menu.
