Natural Born Killers
July 2008 Reviewed by: Mischa Hayek Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Admirers of director Oliver Stone’s work will be happy to learn that his controversial and oft-cited masterpiece Natural Born Killers has now been released on Blu-ray with a remastered soundtrack in TrueHD Dolby 5.1. Stone’s Natural Born Killers had been released previously in different DVD versions, most notably a Director’s Cut in 2000 that is approximately four minutes longer than the theatrical release and contains more violent imagery, followed by two more widescreen DVD releases in 2006 and 2007 (each the shorter theatrical length).

For those unfamiliar with Natural Born Killers, the film was Oliver Stone’s 13th directorial effort and is a satire on America’s obsession with violence and, in particular, the relationship between violence and the media. Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) are a young couple on a cross-country murder spree. Hot on their tail is a corrupt cop, Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), and sensationalist reporter and star of American Maniacs, Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.). Tommy Lee Jones plays prison warden Dwight McClusky who plots to kill the couple when they are in his custody. The story is based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino that was heavily revised by Stone with Dave Veloz and Richard Rutowski, who kept much of the dialogue word for word but changed the focus from the journalist to the murderous couple.

All the DVD versions contain substantial bonus features, so I was somewhat disappointed that the special features on the Blu-ray release were not updated or significantly expanded from the others. The only new bonus feature is an interview of Oliver Stone by PBS talk show host Charlie Rose, but dropped in this Blu-ray release are interviews with cast and crew and a documentary on the making of Natural Born Killers that were both available in earlier DVD releases. Other than the director’s commentary, the bonus features were not upgraded to a high-definition format.

The director’s commentary is especially interesting and worthwhile. Stone explains in detail his artistic and technical choices when creating Natural Born Killers. It’s clear he respects his audience by the painstaking way in which he expresses his thoughts and the information he provides. Fortunately for us, Warner Bros. also did an excellent job of integrating Stone’s commentary with the film. The soundtrack is not absent, but the volume is reduced when Stone is speaking. (With some director’s commentaries when less care is taken, all background sound is muted and it's as though you're watching a silent film with a voice-over -- not very enticing or effective!)

Evaluating the image quality of this Blu-ray release presents an interesting dilemma: Stone and his cinematographers use a wide array of film and video types to create the final onscreen product. For example, in one scene alone you’ll see the image shift from sharp-and-focused color to grainy black-and-white and then, sometimes, to low-resolution 8mm and 16mm stock, and there’s even some videotape thrown into the mix. The key, then, is to understand how the resulting image preserves the individual look of all those formats. Overall, quite well! In fact, it’s rather easy to discern what Stone is using at a given moment. However, even in the sharpest, highest-resolution scenes, the image seems a touch soft and the contrast a little down. I bet with even greater care in the transfer, we could see something even better.

The sound mix is greatly varied, but there are no sudden shifts in the recording format, even though the original songs were recorded many years apart in some cases. The soundtrack is dense (at one point in the commentary Stone mentions overlaying three songs at once!); however, it’s clean and clear, so very easy to hear detail. The music sections don’t rival a really good CD, but sound quality is good nonetheless.

Natural Born Killers never received the accolades it deserved in 1994 as it was overshadowed by Tarantino’s own landmark film Pulp Fiction, also released that year, and by Robert Zemeckis’s drama Forrest Gump, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. Still, some in the film industry have compared Stone’s Natural Born Killers to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) -- and that’s high praise indeed.

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