Big Picture Big Sound

The Film

Based on writer Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel, The Kite Runner is a film by director Marc Forster (Monster's Ball) set over the course of twenty years. It follows the lives of two Afghan boys, Amir (Zekeria Ebrahim) and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada). Inseparable playmates as children growing up in Kabul, the two boys form a close friendship despite ethnic divides. Amir is the son of a wealthy Pashtun, a Sunni Muslim, and Hassan is a Hazara, a Shia Musilm. The descendants of Mongolians, the Hazara are not educated and fill the subservient roles in the Afghan community. Hassan’s father is a servant to Amir’s father, Baba (Homayoun Ershadi).

Still, Baba has a great love for Hassan, and the unexpected reasons are revealed later in the film. The two boys share a love of the great Afghan pastime of kite wars, a sport where kids try to cut down each other's kites in flight.  One afternoon, after a pleasant kite competition in Kabul, Hassan is attacked and brutally raped by neighborhood bullies as Amir watches on, failing to come to his friend's rescue due to his own cowardice. The boys' relationship is never the same from that point on. Amir abandons his friendship with Hassan, ashamed of his own failure to act in his friend's defense, but it is a shame that will haunt him his entire life.

Soon after that, the Soviets invade, and Amir and Baba are forced to flee to Pakistan, eventually making their way to the United States, and the film jumps forward to 1988, Amir, now an adult and a recent collage graduate has adjusted to Western life and is a writer, in keeping with the storytelling talent of his youth, but the memory of his past still haunts him. As he settles into life with his new wife Soraya (Atossa Leoni), and comes to terms with the death of his father, a call comes from an old family friend, Rahim (Shaun Toub) in Pakistan imploring him to come back.

Amir sets off on a journey to Pakistan that will also lead him back to his native land, where he confronts a country ravaged by war and raped by the oppressive Taliban regime, causing him to utter "I feel like a tourist in my own country."

The Kite Runner is a heart wrenching and elegant story that offers a glimpse of Islamic culture that we Westerners rarely see. It's not all terrorists and extremists, but humans struggling with human emotions and circumstances. It also puts a face on the lost children of Afghanistan -- those we don't often see in news snippets. When the film is on target, it's really great, but it does sometimes suffer from feeling a little contrived, overwrought and poorly paced. Still, it is one of the better films about children and growing up that I have seen in a long time.

Have a look at what Joe Lozito had to say about The Kite Runner in his review of the film's theatrical release for an alternate opinion.

The Picture

With its 2.35:1 theatrical aspect ratio intact, The Kite Runner comes to Blu-ray with a high bitrate (~33Mbps) AVC/MPEG-4 1080p/24 encoding. The film's warm midtones and fine grain structure are captured flawlessly in this sharp presentation. Contrast is bright without blooming, shadow detail is strong, flesh tones are natural and textures in clothing and skin is finely detailed in foreground and background shots.

The Sound

The Kite Runner is provided with a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless soundtrack that is labeled as "English," however much of the film is spoken in Dari with English subtitles. The 5.1 mix is front-heavy, though well balanced with a good spread of sounds across the front three channels and good use of ambience through the rear channels. There is occasional use of the surround channels for discrete sound effects such as traffic and the atmospheric sounds from the streets of Kabul, but the mix is most lively during the kite tournament, where the foley effects of the kites cutting through the air whiz by in all directions.

Still, The Kite Runner is a character-driven film that relies on the spoken word and the soundmix does this justice with unsullied and balanced dialogue that sounds smooth with no signs of clipping.

The Extras

The supplements for The Kite Runner are sparse. There's an audio commentary with director Marc Foster, author Khaled Hosseini and screenwriter David Benioff that is very conversational in tone and quite informative on the background of the film and Afghan culture. Additionally, two behind-the-scenes featurettes are provided on both the adaptation of the original novel to the screen and the actual production of the film. After that, there is only the original theatrical trailer, the only extra provided in high definition.

Final Thoughts

In the post-9/11 world, in 2002, along came The Kite Runner, a novel that gave the world a sympathetic look at the real people of Afghanistan, and it became a best seller. Now director Marc Forster has done his best turning it into a film, and although it is not perfect by any means, it is thoroughly engaging and thought provoking. Although the Blu-ray Disc feels a little bare-bones, the picture quality and audio quality are sufficiently presented and make this an easy recommendation.

Where to Buy

• The Kite Runner on Blu-ray Disc (Amazon.com)

Product Details

• Actors: Khalid Abdalla, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, Atossa Leoni, Shaun Toub, Sayed Jafar Masihullah Gharibzada
• Director: Marc Forster
• Writers: David Benioff, Khaled Hosseini
• Producers: Bruce Toll, E. Bennett Walsh, Jeff Skoll, Kwame Parker, Laurie MacDonald
• Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4
• Language: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1, French & Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1
• Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: PG-13
• Studio: Dreamworks Video
• Blu-ray Disc Release Date: March 24, 2009
• Run Time: 128 minutes
• List Price: $29.99
• Extras:
  • Audio Commentary
  • Words from The Kite Runner
  • Images from The Kite Runner
  • Theatrical Trailer