The Machinist
Christian Bale stars as The Machinist, a lonely man who has been an insomniac for a year and the sleeplessness is taking its toll.
Film making 17/25
Cinematography 18/25
Audio 18/25
Bonus Features 15/25
Total 68/100
The Machinist is a psychological thriller starring Christian Bale as Trevor Reznik, a machinist working in a factory who has not slept for a year. His two closest friends are a prostitute he meets on a regular basis and a coffee shop waitress at an airport diner that he frequents.
Trevor is plagued by increasingly frequent visions and hallucinations that start to torment him but he does not know what they mean. When his distraction causes an accident to a coworker he starts things really start to get bad.
He thinks a man that calls himself Ivan is partly responsible for the accident at work because he was distracting Trevor while he was supposed to be helping a coworker adjust a machine. When Trevor tells his coworkers and boss about Ivan they state that no one with that name works at the factory and starts to mistrust Trevor.
He forgets to pay his bills and suddenly a hangman’s note is left on his refrigerator that gets filled in by someone but he can never figure out who it is. Trevor continues a downward spiral with frequent hallucinations and eventually his own conscious gets the better of him and he turns himself in to the police.
A year ago he ran a kid over and killed him then fled the scene and his own mind has concocted the visions to make him come to grips with what he did. The machinist is a hard to follow thriller but was a decent film with a great performance by Christian Bale.
Christian Bale had to go through a grueling fast and lost a consider amount of weight for the part he played as Trevor Reznik. At the beginning of the film Trevor is shown to be extremely thin and weighing about 120 pounds and continues to lose weight.
The film is a deep look at the conscious mind and what it could do to get a person to admit what he has done wrong by creating visions to show you the truth. The film did a great job of showing what the mind can do even when you just want to forget it, this is what many believe can happen with remorse and regret.
The Machinist has lots of imagery that hits just the right spot to give you the creeps with superb lighting and great cinematography. The film was well directed and produced with just the right amount of emotion and a great performance by Christian Bale.
The Machinist on Blu-ray comes with a commentary audio track by director Brad Anderson and three making of features as well as deleted scenes and the theatrical trailer. Manifesting the Machinist is the first making of feature that has comments and insight starting with screenwriter Scott Kosar and director Brad Anderson.
The first feature gets some additional comments and an overall feel for the film from much of the cast and crew in quick snippets. An interesting fact revealed in the first feature is that the film was filmed in Barcelona Spain due to financing coming from there and not the United States.
The second making of feature, The Machinist: Hiding in Plain Sight, dwells on all the puzzles given throughout the film that refer to the tragedy that occurred in the film. The cast and crew talk about the small little hints and clues given that make up the pieces of the puzzle that are the hit and run that took the life of the kid that Trevor hit.
Breaking the Rules, the third making of feature on The Machinist is about the technical aspects of making the film and a bit about Christian’s weight lose. It also touches on the financing issues and has some subtitled spots here due to the producer and assistant producer not being fluent in English.
The making of features are decent and worth a first look but do not have much for repeat viewing, actually the film is not one that would really be worth watching more than once. While The Machinist is a good film, even great in some aspects, it just does not reach that caliber worth watching more than once or twice.
The Machinist starring Christian Bale is definitely worth a rental but not really much of a purchase even though the Blu-ray version is well done. Technically the film was great in high definition and had no flaws with good transfer to high definition and well done audio.
The Machinist is just not that good as a film to be included unless you are more into psychological thrillers but Christian Bale does a great job in this film.