Film
To save his girlfriend, Juliette Marne (Felicity Jones – Rogue One, Inferno, The Theory of Everything), an American backpacker, Casey Stein (Nicholas Hoult – X-Men: Apocalypse, X-Men: Days of Future Past), gets involved with an eccentric gangster, Geran (Ben Kingsley – The Jungle Book, Self/less), with a plan to steal from Geran’s partner Hagen Kahl (Anthony Hopkins – Transformers: The Last Knight, Red 2). Casey will be their driver, but as events unfold, he is chased across Cologne high-speed Autobahn.
A high speed thrill ride, with an exceptionally talented cast, leading to less fight, more character. Collide is not one of those non-stop action films that relies on explosions to do its bidding. No, this one brings a good story, with solidly developed characters. Throwing in a few fun chases, crashes, shootouts, and you have enough to keep you going for a while.
Hoult embodies the gallant guy, trying to save his love. Jones is her usual great self as the damsel needing saving, and a delight to behold. With Kingsley’s character one you’re not quite sure if you should see him as eccentric, or crazy, and he wavers unnervingly between each as the story progresses. And Hopkins, calm, collected, evil personified as a nasty that you should never cross.
Pour all this into an electric plot, one that is easy enough to follow, and Collide is a fun way to while away an evening.
Disc
Overall, the disc for Collide is of a high technical quality, with a good main feature. There are no bonus features on the disc, apart from the trailers that autoplay at the beginning.
Collide 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, with no colour bleed, and detail is maintained in darker scenes.
Viewers with the requisite hardware or software can scale up to a larger or higher resolution screen, should they wish.
Audio
Audio is encoded at a high average bitrate, with dialogue clear via the centre channel. The bulk of the soundtrack is handled via the front channels, with use of the surrounds in the more action oriented scenes.
Navigation
Navigation is simple, and easy to follow, with text links on the menus. The main menu has a static background, with accompanying music. There are options to play the main feature, chapter selection, and audio selection.
The chapter selection sub-menus provide four large, colour, motion thumbnails. While these are numbered, they are not labelled, so some guesswork is needed to navigate to a specific part of the main feature.
The audio sub-menu allows one to choose between 5.1 and 2.0 soundtracks.
Bonus Features
There are no bonus features on the disc, except for trailers for The Founder, The Promise, Army of One, which autoplay at the beginning of the disc.
These can be fast-forwarded, but not skipped individually. They can not be accessed again via the disc menu.