Joan of Arc: The Messenger

Introduction

Apocryphally, when George Bernard Shaw was on his death bed a number of relatives had gathered in his room to pay their last respects. Shaw kept slipping in and out of a coma. At one point he looked dead and his relatives stared wondering if he had passed away. One finally said, "Feel his feet and see if they are cold or warm. Nobody ever died with warm feet" Shaw opened his eyes and said "What about Joan of Arc?" and promptly died.

During the Hundred Years' War, a young girl, Jeanne, began having visions, which she took to be from God, telling her to rid France of the English and put Charles VII on the throne. She travels to meet the Dauphin to tell him of this and, desperate for any help in the fighting, gives her an army.

Her visions continue and she leads her troops to successfully liberate Orléans and Reims, but once the Dauphin is crowned, he turns her over to the English, where she is tried by a religious court, found guilty of heresy and burnt to death.

Video

Picture quality is generally very good, with vibrant colours and deep contrast. The flesh tones are excellent and the battle scenes look superb. However, there is a problem with graining in some wide shots. If this was consistent, I would have assumed it was intentional, but it's not.

Audio

The Dolby TrueHD track is superb, with wonderfully clear dialogue and surrounds that compliment the visuals of the battle scenes brilliantly. Sadly, there's no 7.1 soundtrack, but the HD 5.1 still impresses and is used to good effect in the scenes with The Conscience, as well as the more bombastic sequences. Eric Serra's score is up to his usual high standard.

There are six audio language options and a plethora of subtitle languages to choose from.

Extra Features

Blu-ray technology has the capacity to store hours of high definition footage, access interactive content from the Internet and show picture-in-picture etc, so why is there only a measly trailer here? It doesn't even contain the extra material that was on the DVD releases.

Conclusion

Joan of Arc: The Messenger was apparently supposed to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who left the project when Luc Besson insisted on casting his wife, Milla Jovovich, in the main role. Bigelow was right, Besson was wrong, and Jovovich was woefully inadequate to play one of the most important female figures in history. She was fine as the weird Leeloo in Besson's The Fifth Element, but doesn't have the gravitas or capacity for nuance that this role demands.

I'll make no bones about it; this is a mess of a movie, beginning with a completely unnecessary and badly executed prologue, showing Joan as a young girl when her visions start and she feels compelled to confess to a priest on a daily basis. The film then continually flashes back to this sequence, rendering it pointless: we see Joan's sister raped and her village razed to the ground but Besson obviously felt the need to ram it home or designed the movie for people with short attention spans. I am used to films with wonky accents - actors have dialogue coaches to enable them to lose their own particular twang to play someone from another country (and usually succeed) but here, they didn't even bother as the French nation speaks English in a variety of different brogues. Jovovich almost sounds like she's from another planet, John Malkovich sounds like John Malkovich and the army seems like an invitational affair, with men from all around the world, speaking English with their own accents.



The final act with Joan confronted by The Conscience is brave, trying to show how God is trying her and her own internal turmoil and wrangling with the possibility that she is not The Messenger that she claimed to be but all this succeeds in doing is making her look like a complete headcase; a delusional religious zealot.

If you own this on DVD, stick with that as it'll have features that aren't here, probably the isolated music score, biographies and the HBO First Look featurette. As I didn't see this on DVD I can't comment on the AV improvements, this undoubtedly will look and sound better but, as it's such a poor film and only has a trailer to accompany it, stick with the DVD as the better AV doesn't make it a better film.