Crash dealing with technology. This simple four word description is what I believed
Disconnect to be before sitting down and giving it a shot. I liked
Crash when it arrived back in 2005. Do I agree with it winning best picture? No, not necessarily, but it was a solid movie nonetheless and it elicited some genuine emotion from me and clearly other audience members throughout the film going community. This piece isn't about
Crash though, but what I thought about that film likely informs how I feel about
Disconnect because though it is not the carbon copy my expectations believed it to be it certainly has many of the same intentions and goes about accomplishing them in somewhat similar ways. In all honesty, I was engaged in this film from very early on. There are some films in which you embark on and immediately know you aren't ever going to really get into the material this visual interpretation is exploring and yet there is the other end of the spectrum where you become so wrapped up in the events of what is happening to the characters on screen that you hate to see the signals that the film will soon be coming to an end. That latter reaction is what happened with
Disconnect. It was a very interesting play because it opens with the storyline that ends up becoming the least resolved, but is the most immediately shocking and gets your attention only to segway into the main title sequence that introduces us to our second set of characters against the backdrop of Awolnation's "Sail". Whether it was due to the use of this familiar yet still powerfully resonant song or simply to the supreme confidence director Henry Alex Rubin (
Murderball) and writer Andrew Stern seem to have had in their material there was something immediately gripping and slightly epic about the way the film presented itself and to say the least, I was intrigued.
Disconnect is a sprawling film that never loses its footing and digs deep into the human psyche and past the technology that its title suggests is the main cause of the rifts in the relationships documented here. That not only are these tools that are intended to keep us all connected separating actual human contact further, but allowing us to take advantage of one another in the least humane of ways.
