Film Review: Duel - Breaking it all Down

It might be a universal thing about Car Culture, especially in places that lend themselves to having big trucks haul things from docks or rail hubs, to be scared to death of cars that are larger than yours. So, that makes for how well Steven Spielberg’s second film (after the pilot film of Colombo), Duel, has held up over the years.

The semi truck and David Mann's coupe at a filling station in Duel

Duel, in brief, is about an ordinary guy, David Mann (Dennis Weaver) who is trying to drive through a portion of rural Southern California, only to be terrorized by a semi truck driver who is out to kill him.

We don’t see the truck driver. We don’t hear their voice. Nothing about their truck says anything about their worldview except it looks like a War Rig from the Mad Max stage of the world (instead of the Road Warrior stage of the world). It is just a menacing presence, a force of nature that Spielberg brings tremendous life to through sound, through camera framing, and the score.

For a film that was made for TV, there is a deliberateness to the movie that makes it feel like it was made for a bigger screen – which is probably why it got an overseas theatrical release. It’s also why the film works with a 4K UHD release now. It does a tremendous job of building a sense of dread for a work that was meant to be seen, originally, on a very small screen – and we now get to see, still in the comfort of our homes, on a significantly larger screen, with the ability to embrace a level of detail invested into the work that (depending on your set), most audiences at the time would not have been able to see.

Is this Spielberg’s greatest work? I don’t know. But I would say that if you want to get Spielberg, you need to see this movie.

Duel is available from Amazon.com (Affiliate Link – I’m linking the Blu-Ray release, there’s also a 4K release that Amazon doesn’t have, which is what I watched), or other stores that sell movies on physical media.

It’s streaming on: