The first thirty minutes of this feels like a whole that could have delivered some promise as an Iron Angels martial arts display. A mature, rounded and aged picture of gōngfū that's gone all out. Alas, it takes a plotted turned to youthful-turned elderly platitudes and wishful-thinkings that'd be better left unsaid. Quan Kế Huy astonishes in his initial scene and that's all that's needed as a buy in, but more is lost in the beyond of the film.
Multiverse…
Sure, it's nice to see a few neat, fairly original (for Marvel) visual touches courtesy of Raimi, but the rest of this next to unbearable and arguably even thinner and more baseless than the MCU usually serves up. The film leans so heavily into its plot seemingly to try and occlude the very obvious matter of why the hell is any of this even happening? It's honestly baffling how unmoored from itself this entry is – nevermind other recent additions…
Really interesting how the digital filmmaking here sits in contrast to its use of classical techniques (i.e. blocking, backlights, very set bound). It's a tension wherein the digital textures re-inforce and -double the whole theme of the constructed nature of images and identity. Everybody's caught up in and pushing against another's story (e.g. the nation's, the military's, a spy's, a wife's). Of course, the real centre of this is Satoko and Yusaka's mutual efforts to insert or remove her from…
Tarnished visions, lost films and abandoned or otherwise destroyed cuts are not unusual occurrences in the history of cinema. Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México! and Ivan the Terrible, Part III, or almost any project of Orson Welles’ following The Magnificent Ambersons speak to the consequences that might await filmmakers whose ambitions stray to close to the sun or come up against the wariness of studios and producers who see a bottom line threatened by artistic largesse.…
