Film
Howard (Will Smith – Suicide Squad, Concussion) is a successful advertising executive in New York. His company is thriving, everyone loves him, and he is successful. But of late, he has retreated from the world, following a tragedy. His friends and co-workers, Whit (Edward Norton – Sausage Party), Claire (Kate Winslet – Triple 9, Divergent) and Simon (Michael Peña – Chips, The Martian) are concerned, and decide they need to intervene, for Howard’s sake, and for the sake of the company and all who work there, or are connected to those who work there. The friends devise a plan, and seek the help of local actors Brigitte (Helen Mirren – The Fate of the Furious, Woman in Gold), Amy (Keira Knightley – Everest, The Imitation Game) and Raffi (Jacob Latimore – The Maze Runner, Ride Along).
As part of trying to cope with the terrible emotion that has befallen him, Howard writes letters to Love, Time and Death. He ventures near a support group, run by Madeline (Naomie Harris), but struggles to get up the courage to actually approach them.
Collateral Beauty takes an extremely talented ensemble cast, and places them in an engrossing, and heart warming story, with a script that gifts the viewer a rather different take on the usual, and oft-portrayed, story of love, loss and family.
There are enough plot twists and reveals to keep the viewer engrossed, even if they are not already sold in the emotion of each character, feeling for them, and the goal of healing.
Collateral Beauty is a film that one should see at least once, as it is well constructed, tells a very relatable story, and is presented in the best of ways.
Disc
Overall, the disc is of a decent quality technically, with a good main feature, despite being very light on bonus material.
Collateral Beauty is available now, to purchase on disc, in South Africa.
Video
Video for the main feature is encoded at a high average bitrate. There are no visible artefacts on screen. Colours are vibrant where appropriate, and there is no visible colour bleed. Detail in darker scenes is decent.
Viewers with the necessary hardware or software can scale up to a larger or higher resolution screen, should they wish.
Video on the menus, and bonus feature, is a bit more compressed than the main feature, but this allows for more space on the disc, meaning the main feature would need less compression, meaning better video quality.
Audio
Audio is presented in a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. While there is a track with descriptive audio, there is no stereo 2.0 downmix, so viewers would need to use their own hardware or software for this purpose, if needed.
Dialogue is clear via the centre speaker. with a large portion of the weight of the soundtrack carried by the front channels. Surround channels serve to broaden the on-screen world, and further draw the viewer into the story. There is not an exceptional amount of use for these channels, given the genre of the film.
Navigation
Navigation is simple, and easy to follow. The main menu is a static screen, with a collage of images as background, and accompanying music. Navigation takes the form of a set of standard icons, with text labels, for playing the main feature, scene selection, language, and extras.
Scene selection comprises of two sub-menus, each with five large, colour, still thumbnails. While these are numbered, they are not labelled, so an amount of guesswork is needed to navigate to a specific spot in the main film.
The languages sub-menu provides a text list of audio languages, and subtitle languages to choose.
The extras sub-menu has the one bonus feature as a text link.
Bonus Features
A Modern Fable: Discovering Collateral Beauty – This short featurette has some input from cast and crew about the meaning of the film, and the message behind it, and what each viewer might take away from the story. Some insight for the viewer, into what went into creating this movie, and worth a view.
