Alasdair Stuart's Blog

By this stage, Prometheus has been dissected, reviewed, criticised, lauded and pulled apart a few hundred different ways. Ridley Scott’s prequel / do over on the ideas presented in Alien, the film is one of those fascinating pieces that brings out entirely different responses in everyone who sees it. To my mind it’s both massively ambitious and massively flawed, and it’s been fascinating to see how the blame — or perceived blame — has fallen on some elements of the production more than others. In particular, one thing regularly cited as a major failing in the early reviews is Marc Streitenfeld’s soundtrack.

To me, the soundtrack is one of the strongest elements of the film. There’s some fascinating work done with the refrains from the Alien soundtrack, linking the two films musically as well as visually. Similarly, one of the film’s major closing action beats is scored with music of an almost religious tone, as well as the usual action bombast, giving credence to some of theories presented about what’s actually going on.

There’s one track which utterly fascinates me. ‘Life’ is heard for the first time very early in the film, and it musically encodes the central conflicts of the movie — religion versus science, humanity making it’s way out into a bigger universe and realizing how little it matters –  into 2:30 of music.

Here’s the piece.

The first thing you hear is that rumbling, low noise we’re programmed to associate with the vast. It’s lower than normal too, until a single, slow drum beat sounds. The meat of the piece lands with the opening horn refrain, alone against that rumbling background bass note. The refrain rises, finishes higher than it started and the emotional response it evokes is instantaneous. This is brave new world stuff, astronauts gazing up and out of recruitment posters as they stare towards the infinite they will soon conquer. It’s a Starfleet style call to arms and, yet, it’s slightly mournful. This isn’t just about the grandeur and vastness of space, the big answers that Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway seek. This is about realising how small we are, how little we matter. The grandeur, the scope of human achievement and endeavor is embodied both in the Prometheus as a ship and in the refrain we get here; proud, heroic, noble and complete over shadowed by the constant, rising bass note. As the strings come in, they pick up the refrain and build on it, whilst the bass note continues to rise in the background. The refrain builds and turns, handed off between the strings and horns.

The choir kicks in last and here the piece becomes overtly religious. This is the sort of music we’re programmed to respond to with awe and wonder, the sort of music that Stephen Spielberg happily used to show how wonderful alien life is, how beautiful and intricate and glorious the universe is around us. It’s ascendant, aspirational: this is where we should be, we’re taking our place in the universe. The choir is deliberately angelic, but they’re always a little out of reach, a little too high and breathy. Beautiful voices just out of reach of understanding, always leading us further out into the black as they rise. Angels? Or sirens?

Then the percussion hits, hard, and the piece curdles. This is the moment everything goes wrong, the moment the expedition realizes how horribly out of it’s depth it is. A single group of humans, two years from help, trapped in the middle of events far larger than they can comprehend. Each note is stretched, the tempo increases, the piece builds yet again and then … stops. We’re left, like the crew, in the middle of nowhere with no way home.

It’s a fascinating, smart, mournful piece of music and the complex reactions it evokes mirrors the complex reactions people have had to both the movie and the main character, Doctor Elizabeth Shaw. Science versus religion, faith versus fact, belief versus action. It’s all here waiting to be discovered like the Engineers themselves.

As for what you find? Well…  that’s an entirely different matter.

You experience every second of violence. The polite lie Hollywood tells is that fights happen in jump cuts, going from initial clash to high spot, plucky hero to villainous cheat. You get beaten down and you pick yourself up, spit blood onto the ground and dare the other guy to try it again. He does, only this time you’re ready, this time you take the best he can throw at you and you hurt him, scare him, make him bleed, choke him out and absolutely do not stop until you are the only one left standing. The music swells, the girl plasters herself to your side, the adoptive father figure smiles in approval and the man you just beat, in both senses of the word, becomes your new best friend.

Lies. Every word.

A fight is long, dull and frequently decided by nothing more heroic, nothing more romantic, than cardiovascular fitness. If you have more breath, if you can keep your pulse rate lower, then you will fight smarter, and harder, and longer, than your opponent. The more you breath the more oxygen you get, the more oxygen you get the calmer you are, the calmer you are the more you can think and the more you can think the more you can work. Adrenalin is a cold glass of water to the face and it has exactly the same effect; over 170 beats per minutes your fine motor control disappears and if that happens you can’t move, can’t block, can’t punch or kick or knee or headbutt or choke or dive headlong into the red pool that lies at the heart of us all. You will get hit. You will bleed. You will lose the fight. He will beat you and you will feel every second of it. Your opponent’s breath on your skin, the dull, sand thump of punches hitting flesh, the audible crack as your nose breaks, blood in your mouth and on your face and him looking at you the whole time, his eyes locked on yours as the pair of you meet to deliver each other catastrophe.

There are two ways around this. The first is the easy one; you train. You run and you lift and you punch and you stretch and you sculpt your body into a weapon. It takes dedication, discipline and, worst of all, patience.

The other way is much worse, and much easier; you remove your capacity to be polite. Make no mistake, violence can be polite and frequently is. Even when you meet in the random, frantic, alcohol soaked combat of a Saturday night neither of you is particularly interested in killing the other or crippling them. There’s courtesy in brutality but there is none in savagery. That can make the difference, if you’re prepared to deal with the consequences.

Once more into the fray,

into the last good fight I’ll ever know,

Live and die on this day,

Live and die on this day

Ottway’s father paid that price, a lover of poetry and violence in equal measure. Four lines, an apology and an epitaph all in one, written on his wall, framed, contained and that simple action proving that even his father, a man as big as the world, couldn’t beat everyone. Every fighter loses. Every fighter gets to choose when they leave the ring forever. None of them ever choose well.

That thought haunts Ottway, as does one other. Her face, her smile, the feel of her skin, paper thin and stretched tight but still somehow her, somehow warm and filled with life. She smiles at him and he reaches out and-

Cold gun metal in his mouth.

Not pulling the trigger. A wolf howls out, past the fences.

Ottway knows the drill; Keep them moving, keep them warm and keep them angry because God help him the anger is still something he can default to even after all this time. Anger is a rock solid foundation, one that you can stand up on, push against, bludgeon with. Anger is a shield from your enemies and from your realisation, just for a while. Because he knows, and they know and that’s the other lie they’re all telling one another; hope. You can survive, you can make it out of the snow, the GPS watch will trigger.

No more of you will die.

The wolves come early and fast, almost apathetic in their effortless demolition of Ottway’s survivors, his pack. The irony of that isn’t lost on him or the other men, and again, it’s not something that’s talked about. Because if they’re a pack he’s the Alpha, and if he’s the Alpha then they are all subordinate to him and these are not men that like being subordinate to anyone. So they curse and they yell and they fight and they die and John Ottway watches, mitigates the damage, does what he can even as the weather beats them senseless and the wolves just wait.

The last good fight he’ll ever know. His father standing above him, red on his knuckles. His wife, so pale she almost isn’t there, wrapped in bedsheets of ice. Snow and blood, the Scylla and Charybdis of what he knows is going to be the last stage of his life. None of them will live, but all of them will try, at least whilst he’s Alpha. Playing chess with men’s lives against an opponent who is as inhuman as he is invisible.

Snow falls.

More die.

They keep moving.

The structure of his pack begins to present itself. The quiet, faithful Doctor, the older Parent, the scrappy youngster and the wild eyed Omega, looking for a fight with anyone who makes eye contact. The Omega is a problem, he knows, so when the time comes he puts him down, hard and fast. He’s his father’s son and even as he does it, even as he feels the clenched fist in his soul slam forward, his opponent, out in the woods, makes his only mistake. The Alpha sends his own Omega in, and the wolf never comes back out. Hope flares brighter than the fire and his Omega cuts his fallen enemy’s head off and hurls it out into the snow.

The Alpha appears and Ottway’s pack falls silent. Ottway feels something in his chest settle, a perverse comfort, a homecoming; this is his equal, his intimate, this is his opponent. His last good fight.

Soon.

The next deaths come harder and faster. The Parent goes well, and he knows the man was with his daughter when he died, but it’s the Omega that surprises him. Injured in a fall, he hobbles through the snow with them for hours before finally, at the bend of a river, he does the one thing no fighter ever does; he chooses when to stop. The man he leaves, the man who is at best minutes away from a hideous death is a soul at rest, one less for him to worry about, one saved if only for now. He smiles as they leave, is still smiling as the wolves break from the tree line. His end, when it comes, is cruel, awful. But the moments before it give him the one thing the Omega has never experienced; peace

The Doctor is next, taken by the river, trapped beneath its surface as they run from the wolves that chose not tohelp kill the Omega. Ottway wants to think it’s a mercy, wants to think the Doctor is at peace, knows he felt his soul leave, just like he has before. Like his father. Like his wife, a woman for whom his ultimate act of love was a tiny act of violence, flicking a switch, ending a life. Like his pack. His poor, ragged doomed pack.

Ottway pleads, he begs to be saved, for the miracle that each drop of blood has paid for and that he knows will never arrive. So in the end, as always, he does it himself. He buries his pack, he readies himself to survive and it’s as he does that that he sees the animal bones, smells the rotten meat, knows where he is even before the other Alpha steps into view.

The wolve’s den.

A ring. An arena. A fight.

He’s home.

Bloody knuckles and paper skin, his father’s eyes and his wife’s smile. A knife in his hand and glass in his fists.

Once more into the fray,

Into the only good fight I’ll ever know,

Live and die on this day,

Live and die-

Henry keeps secrets. He has a soldier’s build with military shoulders, a precise gait and hair just long enough to be rebellious. He’s the quiet man in the corner of the room who keeps checking the exit. When you ask him, he’ll say he works for the Highway Department and you’ve seen him hold forth on the vagaries of dual carriageways and how important it is to get parity of testing standards for driving tests across the country so many times you’ve lost count. You can see the person he’s talking to’s eyes crossing, see them start to find the excuse to leave and see Henry sag, just a little, with relief, when they do.

Then one night, Henry’s the last one there. He’s drunk and maudlin and desperately English and his opening line, hand to God, is ‘I keep secrets for a living’ and you almost laugh and he does and with something that sits halfway between flirtation and curiosity you say ‘You’d best tell me some, then. I’ll put the kettle on.’

You hand him some tea, he starts talking and as he digs in, as he tells you what he has to watch for a living you can feel yourself tensing up, hunching a little further forward. It’s not what he’s saying, although God knows the videotapes of a family tormented by something as invisible as it was impossible will stay with you for a while. No, what bothers you is how matter of fact he is.

‘On Monday I had to watch footage of what really destroyed that Tagruato oil rig. On Tuesday I had to watch three generations of a family record the gradual destruction of their sanity. On Thursday I watched three young men fly.’

That one brings you up short. You ask him to tell you more and he smiles. The tone in the room has shifted, he’s centre stage instead of invisible and he’s drunk on that as much as anything else. He drains his tea, picks up a wine glass and starts talking about Matthew, Andrew and Stephen and the thing they found in the caves. He tells you about the rocks and the way they shine, the way the three young men seem…absent, even before they find it.

‘The problem’ he says ‘is that you only ever see what they recorded. Early on there’s a moment where Steve mentions how lots of people used to be obsessed with the caves and if they were triggered, or enhanced or…whatever IT did then…’ His voice trails off. ‘We don’t have all the answers, but we do have what Andrew recorded.’

‘What did he record?’

Henry smiles tightly, unpleasantly. ‘Very nearly everything.’

He doesn’t tell you everything, of course he doesn’t, a good magician never reveals their tricks. Instead he tells you about what stayed, stays, with him from the tape. Steve looking utterly peaceful as something organic unfurls down a glowing crystal towards his head, the static, the things Henry thinks he heard in it, and what he thinks the techs may find when they’ve done treating the film. The fact that the amount of time missing from the film is so precise, almost as though it was erased or Andrew was…compelled…not to record.

He changes the subject then, deliberately lightening the tone. He tells you about the boys acting out, using their incredible abilities to prank people, move cars and play football in the clouds. There’s a cheerful banality to their antics and you find yourself wondering what exactly you’d do in their position. You’re still wondering that when Henry tells you about the man they nearly kill, and the rules, and Andrew’s tragic home life. The tone changes again and you can see Henry keeping something contained. He knows how this ends, but that’s not what’s bothering him. What bothers him, what horrifies him, is the fact that given astonishing, superhuman capabilities, these three young men could only relate to them through the lives they already had. They could fly, pull things apart with their minds, protect themselves from any damage and they spent their days pranking grown ups, rigging talent contests and making themselves popular. Boys with motorbikes, boys with booze, boys with guns, boys with superpowers. Children in a grown up world, he says, almost to himself and you know what’s coming.

It ends badly. Not as badly as it could, but when he tells you about the Seattle earthquake and what really caused it, you feel another scale slide from your eyes. Two teenagers, two hormone explosions tore a city apart, one trying to kill, the other trying to save. He tells you about the bus being hurled thousands of feet into the air, the chase where an entire parking lot is used as a melee weapon. His voice breaks, not through sadness but through fear and somehow that’s what tells you this is real. This happened. He saw it. Henry starts to tell you what happened, how it ended, something about a statue and his voice breaks. The mood, the spell, goes with it. You pat him on the shoulder and he stands, says something desperately English about how it’s late and sorry to trouble but would you mind if he called a taxi and you hug him. He hugs back and shivers and something a lot like a sob escapes him. Then he stands, collects himself and smiles and it’s wide and broad and utterly genuine.

‘Flying boys.’ He kisses your forehead and whispers ‘Thank you’ and leaves. At the door you turn and ask what happened. He turns and looks at you and he’s weeping. ‘Tibet.’ he says and leaves. The next time you see him, weeks later, he’s doing the Highways department spiel and looks over at you. To your utter surprise, he winks and makes a flying gesture with one hand. You smile, make it back and turn away. Henry keeps secrets, and now, you help him.

d his voice breaks. The mood, the spell, goes with it. You pat him on the shoulder and he stands, says something desperately English about how it’s late and sorry to trouble but would you mind if he called a taxi and you hug him. He hugs back and shivers and something a lot like a sob escapes him. Then he stands, collects himself and smiles and it’s wide and broad and utterly genuine.

‘Flying boys.’ He kisses your forehead and whispers ‘Thank you’ and leaves. At the door you turn and ask what happened. He turns and looks at you and he’s weeping. ‘Tibet.’ he says and leaves. The next time you see him, weeks later, he’s doing the Highways department spiel and looks over at you. To your utter surprise, he winks and makes a flying gesture with one hand. You smile, make it back and turn away. Henry keeps secrets, and now, you help him.

Everyone knows the stories about the marshes. The coach that got lost there, the lights that lead down impossible roads, the sounds. The music. Everyone knows and everyone, as they do in all the places which are old and not quite uninhabited, keeps it in the corner of their eye. There are certain conversations you don’t have, certain things you must accept as part of village life. On occasion, certain funerals to attend.

Sam’s old guard though, from the time before the time. He’s alone now, his poor wife passed a few years back and he keeps himself to himself. There was some business with the old house, something unpleasant that he was indirectly involved in and it broke him. That much is clear from the moment Sam comes in; he’s a little stooped, unsure, grey where he used to be black, the magnificent old motor car outside,once the first in the village, now as old and as slightly tattered as it’s owner. There’s still marsh mud on the wheel hubs and it’s matched by the mud on his shoes. Sam’s been out walking, and that’s never a good thing.

She walks in the marsh.

But then again, no one talks about that. Except Sam.

He’s greeted warmly though, the old guard knowing what he’s been through, what’s coming, happy to see part of the town’s history alive and well and muddy-shoed. Sam politely checks in with the few old faces he remembers, listens with interest to the few young faces who’ve survived to adulthood. For their part, they look at Sam the same way they look at his motor car; like a fascinating antique, something in surprisingly good condition because it’s been left alone for years and years. He’s vintage, a class act, proper, completely and totally out of place. Everyone checks in on him, not just because it’s been a while but because they know why he’s here.

It’s the story.

It’s always the story. The one about the woman, and the young man and the deaths.

There are empty chairs in the pub because of the story, your school photograph was tiny because of the story. The story has been part of the town from the start and whilst you always knew Sam had been a part of it, you never expected to see him here, in the flesh. Sam and the young man, and the dead woman, and the ghosts, were part of whispered conversation after dinner, the one word in three you caught crouched on the stairs listening to the grown ups talk. Listening to them weep. Watching them hold each other through the bannisters. It was all a game, all grown up and adult and exciting and all on the other side of the coin to the endless funerals, the bitterness in the Priest’s voice, the dead eyes of parents with no one to look after. Now it’s real, now it’s in front of you, now Sam is talking about the fire. The way the young man, Arthur Sam thinks he was called and you know, you know he knows full damn well the young man’s name. The way Arthur dived into the flames, what he said he saw there. The more Sam talks, the more animated he becomes and you can see the years fall away like the mud from his shoes. This is a man recanting an adventure and as he keeps talking, you get a sense of the showman to this polite old man as much a part of the town’s history as the Earth it’s built on. He’s changing the language, the timbre of how people talk, adapting it for his modern audience and whilst he falters a little he never loses the beat, the pace of the events. The dog, that you know was vital to so much, is relegated to a guest appearance whilst the horrors the young man saw, the things Sam has no way of knowing for sure, are embellished and polished. In his hands, in his words, they become oil slick pieces of night, a horror moving across the world with as much sadness as rage.

He stops short and you know what he’s not talking about, see the shape of it in the story. You can see the chubby little boy, his face mottled by years beneath the waves, hear his voice as he calls to his father. You can see every inch of this man wanting to do nothing but more run to his child and knowing that the second he does, he’s lost. Sam was wounded by this town long, long ago and he’s never recovered. The only way he’s kept going is by seeing, understanding, trying to throw his arms around the impossible, give it shape and form and imprison it.

Lock her in words so she can’t take any more children.

He failed. He knows it. It’s not killed him and he wishes it had. You can see that from the way he moves and talks, the way the story follows a parabolic arc out of his mouth and up to the glorious, horrifying insanity of Sam and Arthur hauling a carriage with a dead child aboard out of the marshes and down to the moment where he says goodbye to Arthur, unaware of exactly how final that goodbye will be. For a brief shining moment, you see him for what he was; a proud, vital, kind man who had refused to let tragedy break him and loved his wife desperately. In a kinder town Sam would have been a mayor or a headmaster. In this town he’s an antique people forgot to polish.

There’s silence after he finishes speaking, as always there is. The entire pub has gravitated towards and around him and his silence is like a light going out, it changes the tone of the room. Sam, bless him, knows when his time’s up and makes polite, faked excuses and leaves. You see him look at every empty chair on the way out and, against your better judgement you watch him leave.

You’re not alone in doing it. At the far end of the street, positioned so Sam can see her but no one else can, is the woman no one talks about, the one who hasn’t been alive for decades now. She makes Sam see her as he drives past and there’s just a hint of a chubby face and a smile to her right side. You close your eyes and remember the old man’s broken voice, just for a second. Then you open them and watch as his headlights become an abstraction, a hint, a ghost. Sam does this every few years, and he won’t be back for a while. He’s told the story, warned a new generation. Now he’s just another of the ghost lights, twinkling dimly, somewhere over the marsh.

Speed and skill versus size and endurance. Do you hit faster, more often and more accurately or do you eat the shots to get close enough to land a single devastating blow? Who’s more experienced? Who can stay calm when they take the first punch? Who’s plan survives contact with the enemy?

Who wins?

She’s brand new, the first fighter. Tall and athletic, raven black hair and a look which is both classical and slightly eccentric. The camera can do nothing but follow her as she comes on screen, wearing street clothes, a woollen cap, rolling her wrists, cricking her neck. She moves with the casual experience that only professional fighters have, the awareness of where their body is at all times, the odd sense of gravity working just a little bit differently for them. She circles her opponent, bunching and unbunching her hands and smiles. She wants this, this is going to be fun.

Her opponent doesn’t move. He’s older than she is, has maybe fifty pounds of muscle on her and decades of experience. He’s dressed simply, wearing black trousers, a black t-shirt, his hair occasionally slicked back, occasionally longer than it perhaps should be. In a certain light he’s Bond, in another, he’s Bourne, in another he’s Ethan Hunt. What remains the same, regardless of his face, of his ability, is the shape he makes in the story. The seasoned operator, the grizzled spy, the lone troubled man doing the best he can in a world where his ethics and morals are challenged and he can only redeem himself by killing an awful lot of people. He’s a contradiction, a man on the edge who stays on the edge, a man pushed past his limits who knows exactly when to push back. He doesn’t smile, this isn’t going to be fun. But he wants it too.

Their eyes meet and there’s a split second of acknowledgement and she moves. She darts forward, bringing her hands up and pushes off from one foot, clearing the ground and hammering her right hand into his face, her entire bodyweight behind it. His head snaps back, his arms pinwheel and she follows him as he staggers, throwing alternating kicks to his chest and head and grabbing him by the back as he slumps forward, driving her knee into his chest and face over and over again. There’s nothing flashy, nothing showy about this assault, it’s all function dictated, very slightly, by form. She moves fast, she hits hard, she does damage and we watch it all, locked off in mid shot. Every grunt, every thud, every crack as bones break, and they will.

He slumps and she backs off, drops her hands. The camera pans round him as he takes a breath, spits a gobbet of blood out onto the floor and looks up at her. He stands, in slow motion of course, and she raises her hands, her eyes blazing as she dares him to come meet her and he does. He’s slower, and she lands another punch as he closes but it doesn’t matter. He’s inside her guard now and they grapple, him using his superior weight to control where she goes, her using her speed and flexibility to get out of one out of every two moves he tries. This is a conversation as much as a fight, red in tooth and claw and syntax and as she scissors her legs around him and he drives her into a wall there’s a moment which is one part intimacy and one part rage. They’re the same these two, hero and heroine. They may be evenly matched, they may not, but that’s something they’re here to find out. That’s the end of the conversation, the resolution, and the only way they get there is through her letting him go as he smashes her into a wall, him throwing her through a flat screen TV, her taking his legs away and trading punches as she kneels on his chest. Smaller vs bigger, experienced vs new.

He stands, she folds around him again and he bounces her off another surface. She puts an elbow into his nose as she drops and he staggers, blood running as she slumps and tries to collect herself. She’s good, the best since Ripley, Conner, Summers, and she’s got a real shot at this, at taking his title, taking his slot. She’s got real life experience, years as a Thai Boxer, as a Mixed Martal Artist, real world, applicable skills that teach her how to wound, how to strike, how to take a punch and keep going.

She’s never fought an archetype before though. That’s what he is as much as a man, a stereotypical spy, an archetypal antagonist, someone with as many faces as years she’s been born. She breaks James Bond’s nose and Jason Bourne punches her in the face. She chokes Jason Bourne out and Ethan Hunt throws her against a wall. She kicks Ethan through a plate glass door and John Scott stands up in his place. There are so many of him, each fresh and ready and each in control of the space as much as the fight. The camera’s locked off and that certainly gives her space to move, to hurt, but it also gives him time. There’s no pace to this fight,these fights, just an endless stream of long shots and knee strikes, pans and right crosses, bloody knuckled algebra being worked out in the middle distance with desperate urgency for everyone in the fight and mild interest for everyone outside it. There’s violence here, there’s emotion but it’s at two removes. No one cheers her on.

But no one cheers him on either. He’s first up this time and it hurts. He’s slow, unsteady and telegraphs his first three punches. She dodges them, fires back with a pair of kicks that knock him sideways and follows with a knee strike to the temple, looking to end this once and for all.

He catches it, picks her up and half runs, half falls through a door into the bedroom. She barely has time to close one foot in the crook of the other knee, constricting his head between her legs before he slams her off the bed. He’s bright red, bleeding from his lip, his nose, his cheeks. She’s as bad, she can tell, an ugly cut on one eye, blood streaming from her nose, her ribs throbbing from where he’s struck her.

She ignores it. She realises he can’t. He flails, throws one, two, three more punches to her face and she eats them all because she can, because she’s winning and she wants, needs, him to see that. His throat bubbles and surges, his eyes roll up into his head. Seconds left.

She rolls them off the bed, hitting him in the back of the head with the floor, her legs still tight around him. She lets go, just a little, demands answers about why this is happening to her. He begins to explain, a halting, almost apologetic tone to his voice. His right hands moves to the underside of the mattress, where she stashed her gun. She pretends not to notice.

He explains that it isn’t personal. That she was simply the right woman in the right place at the right time. This wasn’t about her, even with the camera so fond of her, even with the space left in the story for her and her talent for violence. It’s a revenge story, plain and simple, one where she’s a pawn not a Queen.

His hand closes on the grip of the gun.

She digs further, asks why her, what the plan is, who’s betrayed her. He tells her ‘Everyone’ and smiles as for the first time she feels real pain as a result of his actions. Her boyfriend, her colleagues, everyone she let get close has let her down. Everyone she trusted to get behind her hands, under her guard has used that lack of distance to hurt her so efficiently, so badly, she almost didn’t notice.

He sees her put it together.

He draws the gun

She hits him, once, takes the gun off him, pulls a pillow from the bed and puts it over his face.

There’s a single gunshot.

She gives herself a moment, just one to feel pain. Then she stands up, drags the body into the bathroom and showers their blood off her. The equation’s been solved, the answer’s been reached and she has a lot of work to do, more than she was expecting. This is a victory, but not a clean one. She has work to do, pace to improve on, and she can do it. But this isn’t her world, at least not quite, yet. So she showers and she changes and she runs, not away from her enemies but straight at them. Because she’s brand new, and it’s time to fight this war in a brand new way. Somewhere out past the film reel, her next opponent bunches his fists and waits. She’s ready, but he’s no longer sure if he is.

The man on the stage is big. He’s not so much poured into the dinner jacket as it’s built around him, emphasising his powerful shoulders and neck. He’s top heavy, the sort of top heavy you get from extended periods of training. He should lumber, thudding across the stage like a large, angry, tuxedoed wall but instead he moves fast and light, feet and hands always in motion. He waves to the crowd, capers, dances. He’s the centre of attention and he’s arrogant certainly but he has reason to be. His latest film is a success, he’s handsome, rich, successful and has a spectacular dog. Life couldn’t be better.

He’s not alone up there either. His wife pirouettes in from one side of the stage, a little resentful, a little bored, but she’s smiling and he’s clearly delighted to see her. From the other side of the stage, the owner of the studio strides into view, waving and smiling and counting the empty seats, the sad faces. His smile is a little more fixed, a little more hungry. Behind him comes our hero’s chauffeur, a tall, older man with a severe look but kind eyes. He takes up position the same place he always does; to the right of our hero, standing at attention, ready. They’re joined in turn by a leading lady, a gaggle of extras and a dog. Always the dog. Mimicking our hero exactly, keeping pace with him, a silent partner, the other, arguably more important part of the double act.

Our hero is turned, walking backwards, waving and playing with the dog when a woman steps out of the audience. He cannons into her and down they go, a tangle of limbs and excellent hats, elegance and glamour dropped on top of each other from a great height. The theatre falls silent as our hero helps the woman to her feet, everyone waiting for him to berate her for breaking the routine. Instead he looks her up and down, laughs and applauds her. She starts dancing. He applauds more and laughing, she dances in place as the entire theatre turns to face her. She stumbles a little and our hero jumps in next to her, their feet sympatico, the smiles on their faces the same. He can’t stop looking at her and as a result doesn’t see the things starting to happen behind him. The leading lady talking to the movie mogul, the increasingly angry look on his wife’s face. There’s just her and the music and him and-

Sound.

Our hero stumbles.

The audience’s attention shifts.

Our hero dances a little faster, smiles a little wider and the audience’s attention shifts back to him. Not completely though, the sound echoing around the theatre and settling in particular around the head of the girl from the audience. The audience’s attention follows it and our hero dances a little faster, smiles a little wider as he realises that fewer and fewer people are looking at him.

Clearly he must work harder. He breaks out every single move in his arsenal, every slide, every jump, every acrobatic trick, throwing his big frame around the stage with grace and speed and just a little desperation now. He hits all the right spots, makes all the right choices and lands, centre stage, waiting for applause.

The theatre is empty. From next door, he hears the leading lady speak and the audience applaud. He hears the girl from the audience speak, and his heart breaks. The lights go out and, even then, he stays on his stage, alone apart from the chauffeur, and, of course, the dog.

There are things our hero doesn’t see, and those things start the moment his reflection ends. He’s a good man, a great man in many ways, but he’s completely convinced of his own greatness. That sort of self confidence can take you to incredible places but it will never, ever drive you home from them again and as our hero finds himself forced to let his chauffeur go, he shrinks even further into his own private universe.. He used to be great. He used to be successful. He used to be somebody. He used to dance. His life is two dimensional now, rendered down to a strip of film, a perfect, lush, black and white image packed with glamour and charm but an image nonetheless. Something which will only keep you warm at night if you burn it. As the flames rise, our hero finds himself faced with one last choice, one so elemental that it’s completely eluded him; who’s music is he dancing to? His own? Or the audience’s? And why is he dancing alone?

The man on the stage is big. His dinner jacket is tattered now, scorched and covered in soot but it still emphasises his powerful shoulders and neck. He’s top heavy, the sort of top heavy you get from extended periods of training. He should lumber, but instead he smiles, stands, takes the hand offered to him and begins to dance a very different number. One where you can hear his shoes against the floor, where he’s part of the film instead of the thing that stands in front of it. He’s still the centre of attention but he still has reason to be and this time he’s not alone. The girl from the audience dances next to him, the studio head applauds from behind the camera and as the music he’s never heard before swells, he smiles and lets go. Sound isn’t for him, even now, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is he’s still elegant, still dancing. And now he’s dancing in company. And, of course, the dog is still spectacular.

We need to talk about film for a minute. In fact, we could take about film for days, film is very much my text, my safe place but that’s for another time. Instead, we need to talk about A Knight’s Tale, what it means to me and what it means to my study of Judo.

A Knight’s Tale is the story of William, a knight’s squire who, when his master dies on the way to a tournament, is urged to take his place by the other apprentices. They’ve not eaten for days, Will was always better with a sword anyway, and he secretly revels in the attention, so they put him in the armor, strap him up and he wins. In fact, he keeps winning and in order to maintain the illusion they find themselves having to recruit a female blacksmith, played by Laura Fraser and Geoffrey Chaucer, played by Paul Bettany. In any other film, Bettany would walk away with it, and, truth be told, he pretty does here, but the entire cast is flat out magnificent and the film unpacks its concepts in fascinating ways. Will’s relationship with the Black Prince is beautifully sketched, the interplay between Mark Addy and Alan Tudyk as the other apprentices is wonderful and there’s a single stylistic choice which is one of the closest approximations of pure joy that I’ve ever seen on the screen. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, because you should, for that scene if nothing else.

I mention A Knight’s Tale because at one point, this being a sports movie (Just one which is a bit clankier), Will is inevitably arrested and the villain of the piece, played by Rufus Sewell, misquotes the Book of Daniel stating that he has ‘been weighed, and measured and found wanting.’ It’s a line which the film returns to, and it’s a line which becomes the heart of the second half of the film. Will’s an apprentice, a nobody and he’s committing a crime just by being there. Whether or not the fact he’s good at it, or his knightly demeanor have nothing whatsoever to do with it. He puts in a ton of hard work and there’s no guaruntee that it’ll do anything other than get him arrested or killed. He puts everything on the line, knowing he might still fail. That has a certain emotional resonance the week of my grading.

I have never passed a physical test. Ever. I was one of the two kids in my class who failed their cycling proficiency test at Primary School, I sat my driving test multiple times and failed each one, I captained my school’s second Rugby team for no reason other than I’d been there longer thnan every other player and the first time I went to boxercise I was told, strongly, to get a drink when I turned a deeply purple colour. I don’t pass physical tests. I’m a sharp brain in a doughy body, someone who has spent their whole life two steps back from the world because I take up too much room. Or to put it another way I have been weighed, I have been measured and I have been found wanting plenty of times so the concept of being examined in how good I was at Judo filled me with something close to terror.

Actually that’s not true, what terrified me was the idea of failing where everyone else succeeded. There are four white belts and as far as I knew all four of us would be grading. Steve’s done Judo as a kid and Karate as an adult, Jim and Ollie both did Brazilian Jujitsu prior to joining the club and I can spell Brazilian Jujitsu and have watched Karate videoes on youtube, whilst eating a cheese sandwich. If anyone was going to fail, it was going to be me and that’s even before you factor in my weight, my lack of good eyesight and a dozen other different factors. As a result, I spent most of the day being haunted by one image; Steve, Olli and Jim getting their yellow belts, me failing by the tiniest of margins. The version of me standing across the mat smiling, turning and walking away. Weighed, measured, found wanting.Again.To make matters even worse, I’d sat out the Friday session the week before, which, it turns out, was essentially a How to Pass Your Grading Session.

Weighed. Measured. You know the rest.

So, on Steve’s suggestion, we turned up early and asked for mat space to practice. Grading is actually a very simple process; you just have to answer two questions, know some Japanese terminology and be able to demonstrate five throws and five holddowns. Simple, right? Especially after ten weeks.

I knew three hold downs. I was okay on two throws out of three, not five. We worked pretty hard as a result, walking through multiple practices of each technique both the motions and completing it. We did it at half speed, because we’re not idiots, but even at half speed this is a tough sport. You get picked up and put on the mat, hard, over and over and by the time the lesson started, we were both very, very warmed up and as ready as we were ever going to be. We even had a plan; obviously we’d be working together so on the hold downs we’d struggle enough to look convincing but not so much that we’d tire the person being assessed out. Easy, simple.

Wrong.

After the warm up, Steve was called over to do his grading and I was put in with the class. To the wet, apologetic sound of our plan collapsing under the weight of logic, I sparred with five different people as we worked on how to do throws right and left handed, going backards, forwards, sideways, stationary and at speed. Backwards throws are particularly fun because if you’re moving backwards your opponent thinks they’re on a winner, they step forward, you sweep their legs away and you both hit the mat. The secret is, make sure they hit it first.

Sparring at the top of the lesson is always a little weird because there’s no aggression but a lot of energy and focus. It’s also really interesting to do as a white belt because you’re essentially getting one to one coaching some of the time too, in between the violence. I remember sparring with a green belt who put me down, I got back up and he said ‘You got a grading tonight?’ I nodded, said I was worried and threw him. He got back up, smiled and said ‘You’ll do fine, your osoto otoshi’s great.’ and threw me again. Polite violence, a good conversation, reassurance. All those things and more in nothing more complex than four motions and a breakfall.

My last bout was with Wes, the US marine who also teaches at the class and by this stage we were drilling to land a throw, move to newaza or ground work and put our opponent in a hold. We locked up and Wes, as usual, didn’t make eye contact. He and a couple of the others never do this and it’s interesting because you don’t need to look at your opponent, you can feel where they are, what they’re doing. He threw me, put me in a hold, I did the same and suddenly, he was looking at me. In fact, he was looking at where I was positioned, whether I was actually holding him down. I was being assessed and after a few seconds he nodded, said ‘good’ and up we got. This went on until the last hold I was going to be graded on, the chest hold. I put Wes down, locked it in and he looked at me and said ‘What are you doing?’

‘The chest hold?’

‘Push down, come on! A guy your size I shouldn’t be able to breathe!’

So I did and then some more and then some more and finally, he nodded and up we got. We locked up again one alst time and he smiled and said ‘You’re not nice to your opponent on the mat, on the mat? You crush them. You buy them a drink in the bar afterwards, that’s when you’re nice.’

Show up. Work hard. Fight. And in my case, be graded. I was up.

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Steve, just got called over and bounced on the balls of my feet until it was time to go. I felt weird, calm, focussed, not worried, just…ready. I wonder if getting ready to compete is going to feel the same. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot more fear and nausea followed by hysterical laughter when I finish my first fight.

This time though, there was no laughter. Just Phil calmly telling me to execute a back breakfall, which I did, followed by a side breakfall. I did a front one and he gently pointed this out and even more gently guided me through the ten seconds of ‘OH GOD I’VE FAILED ALREADY’ hysteria that was clearly written all over my face. It turned out I had to do three front break falls anyway so I did my side one, then two more front. By the way, a front break fall is a forward roll off one shoulder and I’m surprisingly good at them. Backward rolls? Let’s just say my natural grace is in the mail.

Techniques were next and two of the yellow belt throws are amongst my favorites. Osoto Otoshi is lovely, nothing more than stepping to the side of your opponent, putting one foot behind them and shoving them backwards. I nailed that and nailed Deashi Barai, my other favourite following it. That’s as simple; wait for your opponent to move forward onto you, sweep their outer leg and power them into the mat. Again, it went well, something I was massively relieved with given I’d seriously practiced it for the first time an hour previously.

Uki Goshi followed that, or the Pussycat Dolls Hip Bump Throw as I still think of it. On big guys that’s a little difficult for me but Dave, a Scottish brown belt with a spectacularly deadpan sense of humour was very easy to throw. Plus, he sold for me like an absolute pro, executing perfect breakfalls despite being thrown by a scrappy, slightly panicked whitebelt.

So that was the vocab out of the way and the next stage was a few sentences in Fight. We did the throws again, this time transitioning through to a different hold down every time. Hold downs? Are very much my bag, as, when it comes down to it, all they actually are is restraining your opponent and lying very flat on them. Wes’ words echoing in my ears, I followed through, pushed my chest as far as I could down onto Dave’s and again, we were done. Break falls, throws, throws to hold downs and following that, escapes from hold downs all came naturally. The version of me on the other side of the mat suddenly looked further away, a little uncomfortable, a little like he was going to be beaten.

Vocab Test.

Two words, a single, completely blank mind. It was oddly restful in there, all I could hear was my breathing, echoing softly around in a lot of empty space. The other me, on the other side of the mat, began to laugh and saluted me. He turned to go, he’d won, he didn’t need to see the rest.

I scrabbled to keep the panic down, scrabbled to get focussed again. I was so close, so close that I could feel it and the image of me as the last white belt left in the shop was just that; an image. It wasn’t going to happen, I wasn’t going to let it.

I was going to think my way out of this. I paid attention to what was being said to me, how it was said, I put the bits I could remember in line and I…guessed. I had a decent shot, I knew most of it and all it was was language. I can do language. I can’t do physicality, I suck at physicality but language? Language I can damn well do.

I guessed, I got it. Phil looked up at me, smiled and said ‘You’ve passed, well done mate.’

I swear to God the triumphant Top Gun guitar theme started playing in my mind as I walked over to the rest of the class. A Steve shaped pink blur looked over at me and I gave him the thumbs up, he gave me one back. We’d done it. We’d done it and after two hours of physical exercise I was all set to go again. Put me in, set me in front of someone else and whether or not they’re going down they’re damn well going to have to work to put me down. I felt great, I felt strong, I felt ready and that feeling lasted exactly as long as it took me to get two steps into the warm down. Everyone else was moving with grace and speed and control. I was, well…let’s just say I was moving. For a while. Then I stopped.

We lined up and Jamie told the class we’d passed. We were called out one by one to get our licences and clapped on the way back to the line. As we were dismissed, Wes shook our hands, Gareth congratulated us and Phil quietly reminded us of the phrases that, it turned out, we’d both tripped up on. Florien, who six weeks earlier had dropped me very hard on my shoulder, even stopped to congratulate us.

Someone else didn’t. The version of me I always stand across from didn’t congratulate me. He looked at me, for a long time and didn’t say anything. He wasn’t smiling, and he still isn’t. He knows he’s in a fight now.

I’m writing this the Sunday after the grading and it’s taken four days to get my knees working properly again. I’m tired, I’m sore and I’m very aware that I no longer have a safety blanket. I’m not a white belt anymore, my job is no longer to fail better next time. My job now is to get better and to keep getting better, because no one’s going to go easy on me anymore. I’ve got a belt, I’ve got a rank and that means I need to work harder not just for me, but for everyone else. For the next tubby thirtysomething white belt who doesn’t know if this is a good idea or not. Him, especially, I’m looking forward to working with.

I’ve progressed. I’ve learnt a huge amount in the last three months and whilst none of it’s been easy it’s all been fun, even being kicked in the face. The ground beneath me used to be white but now it’s yellow. Three months back, a fat, frightened man with crappy eyesight is wondering whether or not he’s made the right choice. Now, a less frightened, less fat man (Who still has crappy eyesight) is looking ahead to his next grading, for orange belt, in a couple of months. I have been weighed, I have been measured and I have not been found wanting, not even close. Who knows, maybe they’ll make a knight of me yet.

Britt Reid is a millionaire, the son of the editor of The Daily Sentinel, one of Los Angeles’ last independent papers. For decades The Sentinel has stood for truth and integrity in a difficult and uncertain world, with Britt’s father the unflinching moral compass the paper the steered itself by. Britt Reid is a dreamer, a child who wants to be a hero but every time he tries to help the weak or oppressed finds himself in front of his father, receiving another tongue lashing and losing another toy. Britt Reid is an idiot, channelling decades of resentment into a lifestyle of drink, parties and debauchery until his father dies and he finds himself in charge of the Sentinel, in need of a purpose and with a new best friend, Kato, his father’s mechanic. Kato is a martial arts expert, an engineering genius and a man of endless tact and diplomacy. Britt is a millionaire who wants to be a hero. Both men want something more, both men feel unfulfilled by their lives and both find themselves faced with a choice between the dangerous unknown and the endless, safe, predictable known.

Sometimes the line between idiots and heroes is paper thin.

The Green Hornet is a supremely odd choice for a blockbuster. The character is obscure, straddling the line between radio-based Mysterymen like The Shadow and the four-colour heroes like Batman and Superman and his most notable appearances in the last thirty years have been a short-lived TV series starring Bruce Lee as Kato and as the subject of an unproduced Kevin Smith-scripted reboot that has recently surfaced as a comic. Even the idea is a little off, a little too involved; a millionaire newspaper mogul pretends to be a villain to be given the impunity to act like the hero he and his martial arts expert engineering genius sidekick need to do their job. Even it’s road to the screen has been rocky, with critically acclaimed Chinese director Stephen Chow initially attached to direct, then star as Kato, then depart to be replaced by Michel Gondry. Gondry’s work has a reputation for being dream-like, playful and even a little wistful and that proves a surprisingly good fit for a man who fights crime wearing a green suit and a domino mask.

Gondry makes three supremely clever directing choices which establish the film’s visual identity very quickly. The first is that this is Los Angeles, plain and simple. There’s no over-stylised Gothic architecture, no perpetual night or endless neon. This is the same city that most American movies takes place in, memorably described in Warren Ellis and JH Williams III’ Desolation Jones as a ‘supermodern city’, a collection of towns thinly strung together by roads with no real identity of it’s own. Gondry trakes that idea and runs with it, turning Britt Reid’s Los Angeles into a city we all know, a city that’s recognisable, that we’ve all been to even without travelling there.

His second clever choice is to get out of the characters’ way and place his visual flair at their command instead of vice versa. The film’s most memorable visual is ‘Kato vision’ where we see the world from the intrepid chauffeur’s point of view. Time slows down, environments extend, weapons flash red and he moves with casual, water-like grace around opponents trapped in slow motion. It’s balletic without being flashy and as well as showing off Jay Chou’s skills it’s also beautifully placed within the film as a visual gag. In the climactic fight, Britt uses the same technique, threats flashing green as he moves in slow motion through the shattered office of The Sentinel. Except, where Kato is graceful and subtle, Britt is burly, direct and ultimately, fails. The special effect becomes a means of illuminating character as well as action and that’s surprisingly rare, to say nothing of welcome.

The final choice Gondry makes is to play the action absolutely straight, no mean feat for a film where the main characters drive a car equipped with sleep gas, missile and heavy weaponry. The central idea is ludicrous but that lunacy is presented with no front, no hint of playfulness unless it’s absolutely needed. The final running battle through the streets of LA and into the Sentinel building is visceral, nasty and most impressively, has a genuine air of tension to it. No one feels safe and both Britt and Kato are pushed to, and beyond, their limits. In a lesser film, this would be the defining moment, the turning point beyond which the main character learns an important lesson and their life changes for the better. Here, the scene leads to two moments of genuinely surprising violence and one of absurd humour. Britt and Kato have blood on their hands and whilst Gondry never lets us forget that, he also never lets us forget that some of it is there by accident.

This is the true genius of the film and it lies not only with Gondry but with Seth Rogen, Jay Chou and Evan Goldberg. Rogen and Goldberg wrote the script and it neatly fits with, and subverts, Rogen’s ‘idiot manchild’ persona. Britt Reid is, as the film opens, an idiot with aspirations of heroism. Britt Reid is, as the film closes, an idiot with aspirations of heroism who has taken maybe a step closer to them. Rogen’s endless, puppy-like enthusiasm is a perfect basis for the character and the script neatly shows not only how Britt needs other people to make his ideas work but also to make him whole. Kato is his competence and bravery whilst Lenore, his criminologist secretary is his intelligence and pragmatism. The film follows Reid as he slowly realises that he’s incomplete, that he needs this people but even putting that to one side? He’s still the ideas man, still the richest person in the room and still Britt Reid. It’s a difficult line to walk, and Rogen combines genuine physical presence with comic enthusiasm and timing. He also, to his eternal credit, spends the entire film spotlighting his co star.

Jay Chou is extraordinary, and if there’s any justice at all this will be the film that propels Chou to stardom in the West. He’s the perfect foil for Rogen, small where’s he’s large, calm where he’s maniacal and there’s something inheretly funny about watching the two of them walk into a room together. Chou plays Kato as everything Britt thinks he is but isn’t; sophisticated, suave, charming, heroic but crucially both he and the script give the character more depth than that. Kato is endlessly, ridiculously competent but is perpetually in Britt’s shadow and the tension that causes is nicely played and explored. In a kinder world, Kato would be the hero but a kinder world wouldn’t need the Green Hornet at all. Kato needs people, like Britt, but unlike Britt doesn’t need them to be complete. Instead, Kato needs people because for all his skills, without friends, without Britt, without the Green Hornet and Kato, he’s invisible. It’s a subtle character path for a film like this and Chou plays it beautifully. Rogen and Goldberg’s script plays with it too, culminating in a moment where both men realises the Green Hornet is now much, much larger than them. Even if Kato named him. Which Britt refuses to believe.

That idea; that the Green Hornet as an identity, a concept, is larger than Britt is something the script circles back to again and again. Kato names him, the Sentinel pushes him into the public consciousness on Britt’s orders and Lenore, Britt’s secretary, unknowingly provides his long term strategy. It’s a neat idea that adds a welcome shot of unease to the film and also gives Diaz the best role she’s had in years. Lenore is smart, competent, entirely independent and is far less prepared to put up with the main characters’ nonsense than the normal female lead in movies of this type. She has easy, natural chemistry with both Chou and Rogen and deserves to be given much more to do in any sequel. Likewise, the always impressive Edward James Olmos brings integrity and weight to his scenes as Michal Axford, the Sentinel’s editor and a voice of authority Britt spends most of the film gleefully ignoring. Together, they conspire, some knowingly, some not, to create a villain who’s secretly a hero, a crime lord who has no idea what he’s doing, a hero far less dangerous than his sidekick. But he is a hero, and that’s a start.

Distance lies at the heart of the second Lisbeth Salander story. The wide open spaces, both urban and rural, of Sweden are used as a blank canvas for Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist and a surprisingly large cast of supporting characters to write their stories across, all of which, inevitbly, intersect with blood and violence, death and tragedy.

Lisbeth’s story begins with actual distance. Having travelled the world for a year, she learns her guardian is attempting to have the tattoo she carved into his chest (‘I am a sadistic pig and a rapist’) removed. Time has passed, she’s thousands of miles away and she has the first real opportunity in her life to move on, to change, put the past away and move on. She flies back to Sweden, assaults him and steps back into the shadows and waits. She knows, on som instinctive level, that something is coming and that she can’t turn from it, instead fortifying as best she can, preparing, waiting for the attack.

Lisbeth is the iconic figure of the books, arguably the first genuinely iconic female protagonist of the 21^st century and it’s easy to get taken in by the surface detail; the piercings, the goth biker chic, the attitude. It would be easier still for Lisbeth to be written, and portrayed, as weak, as someone who uses those trappings as armour to keep people at a distance and protect herself from harm. Instead, Played with Fire shows us that Lisbeth does use these things, but as tools rather than weapons. Her appearance is how she manipulates the world, moving around it, controlling the space of her life like a boxer controls the ring. Lisbeth Salander is guarded certainly, cautious definitely but she’s not weak, and it’s here, where she’s off balance, hunted and in terrible danger that that becomes clear. Spending much of the film dressed in a baggy hoodie and baseball cap, Noomi Rapace looks small, even fragile as Lisbeth, but in reality, this is the character at her most unfettered. Off the map and under the radar, Lisbeth is able to act without restraint and clearly enjoys it a little too much at times, especially in her casual destruction of two bikers who finder her at her guardian’s summer home.

The price she pays for that is vast and only becomes apparent as the film moves into it’s second half, with Lisbeth discovering who has set her up and why and, for the frst time, being completely out fought. All her care, all her precision is fruitless because the person she’s facing uses the same techniques and has waited for decades for an opportunity to crush her. Zala, Lisbeth’s father, a defector and diplomatically immune crime lord is one of the two points where the film takes a turn for the gothic. Hideously burnt by Lisbeth after years of abuse of her mother, he’s a quiet old man with a face that’s too smooth who lives in the place beyond anger and rage. His converations with Lisbeth are almost friendly, the two talking with a quiet intimacy and, on some level, recognising each other as equals. The obvious comparison is Holmes and Moriarty but there’s a familial edge to their relationship that gives it both softness and grit. These people are the same, these people are completely different, these people hate each other and the scenes between the two communicate that with both economy and savagery. As the film closes, Zala has shot his daughter three times and her buried her alive, she has responded by digging herself out and driving an axe into his knee. Neither has finished the other and the war is far from over.

A lesser writer would be content to have Lisbeth run straight to Mikael Blomkvist for help, but hre, the idea of distance returns once again. Blomkvist and Lisbeth spend less than five minutes together on screen, Lisbeth instead manipulating the journalist as she realises he’s working the same story as she is, from a different angle. That metatextual idea is fascinating; that Lisbeth and Zala are competing authors in the story of Lisbeth’s apparent crimes, and Blomkvist is used to, again, provided context for her actions. Or, to put it another way, to provide distance.

Where Lisbeth’s story begins with her visiting her guardian, Blomkvist’s begins with him being visited by a young journalist who has a story on human trafficking. The story has consumed the last few years of Dag’s life and that of his fiance, and it’s rock solid. It’s also huge, taking in high ranking former police officers who used prostitutes In short, it’s the perfect story for Millennium and Dag is asked to come aboard.

Then, Dag and his fiance are killed, by a gun owned by Lisbeth’s guardian and with her fingerprints on it. The story is perfect, cut and dried, complete with Blomkvist discovering the bodies. That moment is a beautiful example of distance too, Blomkvist arriving at Dag’s apartment building to find the other residents, in dressing gowns, quietly and rapidly leaving the building. Something awful has happened, but it’s happened at a distance.

Blomkvist too is unfettered by these events. The quiet, cowed man of much of Dragon Tattoo is replaced by a quiet, steely eyed analyst, a journalist who puts the story together using intellect and a curiously academic form of brutality. Like Lisbeth, Blomkvist is a fearsome opponent and the moment where he bulldozes his way into a new lead by calmly pointing out how he could destroy a senior policeman unless he gives him what he wants is a real stand out. He’s polite, relentless, utterly without mercy and, crucially, has the distance from himself to realise what he can’t do as well as what he can. This is arguably the most crucial element of the plot, as Blomkvist’s investigations bring the truth about Zala to light and, inadvertantly saves the life of Miriam Wu, Lisbeth’s occasional girlfriend. Blomkvist talks to Roberto Paolo, Lisbeth’s boxing trainer and, intriguingly, an actual former boxer and chef, and asks him to keep an eye on Miriam. This in turn leads to Paolo witnessing Miriam’s kidnapping and his rescue of her. This is a vital scene, a hinge around which the plot turns, and it, once again, is a scene based entirely on distance

To begin with, Blomkvist is intelligent enough to realise that, as a celebrity, he can’t be seen to get too close to the case and, as a journalist, lacks the physicality to protect Miriam if it’s needed. Crucially it also marks a change in Blomkvist’s attitude from the first story, as he begins using people as assets just as Lisbeth does with him. He’s not a piece on the board anymore, he’s a player and seems to be enjoying it with the quiet fervour of someone who has realised the boot is finally on the other foot.

The scene is also crucial for the highly unusual division of labour. In an English or American thriller, the plot would be powered and solved by Lisbeth and Blomkvist, more than likely working together. Here the two main characters don’t meet until the closing seconds of the film and no less than three other characters, Paolo, Miriam and Bublanski, the police officer investigating Lisbeth’s apparent crimes, are vital to the plot As a result there’s a real sense of complexity, of distance yet again as the five characters all find themselves working the same problem from multiple angles.

Finally, the climactic fight scene between Paolo, Miriam and Niedermann, Miriam’s kidnapper, viscerally embodies the idea of distance yet again. Here, that distance is from the past, where the female characters would be content to simply remain in peril and wait for a man to rescue them. Here, Miriam, a trained kickboxer, not only fights her attacker but assists Paolo when he tries to rescue her. The fight that ensues, yet again, demonstrates the idea of distance as Miriam and Paolo both land countless blows on the monstrous Niedermann to little or no effect. Whilst they end up escaping the fight goes disastrously badly, due to Niedermann’s medical inability to feel pain. He’s unable to feel, he’s the embodiment of distance, and Niedermann’s almost banal, placid violence is the film’s most horrifying element. He’s the embodiment of distance, of absence, a monolithic presence perpetually one step back from the world, one step submerged. He’s the physical embodiment of the horror and violence that the film revolves around; something terrible just outside the light. At a distance. For now.

Tron Legacy makes for a fascinating companion piece to Predators. Both films are delayed sequels to acknowledged cult classics, both films use the bones of their predecessors as a foundation and both films revel in advances in special effects technology. Crucially though, both films are not only very much a product of their time but also comment on and examine the times and ideals that produced their predecessors. Predators focuses on the evolution of the special forces operator from a shadowy hero to a more complex, morally damaged figure whilst Tron Legacy focusses on the Cyberpunk movement, something which came and went in the space between the first and second films. The film’s approach to this evolution not only in computing but in our attitudes towards computers is both surprisingly complex and surprisingly brave, using what amounts to three versions of the same character to examine the changes in society’s attitude to the digitial world that Kevin Flynn is so fascinated by.

Flynn himself is established, both in the original film and flashbacks, as an intellectual maverick, a proto-hacker who never met a problem he didn’t like to out think. In fact, Flynn, along with Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman in WarGames, is one of the first ever ‘geek’ heroes. He’s one step away from the phone phreakers and hackers who in turn were the first stage in the evolutionary proces that would lead to everything from Willow Rosenberg in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to wikipedia, wikileaks, Julian Assange and Anonymous. He’s a brain instead of a pair of fists, a unique hero who is uniquely of his time and who, at the end of the first film, finds himself in the last place he expected and the only place he could genuinely do some good; in charge of EnCom, one of the largest software firms in the world. In the space of two hours, Flynn evolves from being just a program, or programmer, into the top of the food chain, the chairman of the board. He’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined, a visionary with a classic anti-establishment streak, a brain whose body is a multi-national corporation and who is capable of anything.

So instead he does nothing, turning inwards and creating a digital archipelago where, like every great science fiction scientist, he sets out to solve every problem and, like every science fiction scientist, does it far too slowly. Flynn becomes so entranced with the world he, Clu and Tron are building that he doesn’t realise that it’s evolution is out of his hands. He tells Clu he wants a perfect world and never realises that will ultimately lead to him being deposed from his position in the Grid and likewise doesn’t see that he needs a back door out of the Grid to return to his family until it’s far, far too late. Flynn remains entranced by the idea, by the concept rather than the execution and that leads to him becoming everything Sam, and Clu, aren’t; passive, introspective, distanced. By the time he and Sam are reunited, he’s become the old man in the ivory tower, staring out at the world he created and is all but banished from and somehow is content about that. Flynn exists, literally in an intellectual rather than a physical space, so entranced by the power he both had and lost that he’s in a near fugue state for much of the film. When Sam arrives, it forces him to step outside his experience and re engage with the world he helped build and, through the creation of Clu, helped enslave. The proto-cyberpunk is faced with the real consequences of his actions and sacrifices himself to correct his mistakes. The cult of personality that surrounded Flynn is swept aside by Flynn himself in a final, definitive, physical act that mirrors the subsumation of cyberpunk culture into the mainstream. Flynn removes himself from the Grid and from the world, changing the rules and blanking the canvas in a final act of altruistic anarchy.

If Flynn is an intellectual forced to come to terms with the physical consequences of his actions, then Clu is a physical force with little or no concept of intellectual change or evolution. Clu is the film’s, and Flynn’s, greatest technical achievement, taking the program that Flynn created in the original movie and giving it Flynn’s face and voice and ideals. He’s not so much Banquo’s ghost as William Gibson’s, a leftover cyberpunk artifact from a time where no problem in science fiction couldn’t be solved by writing a computer program. There’s a neat subversive element to Clu as well, taking the heroic identity of Flynn from the original movie and curdling it, changing it into something which is eloquent, driven and not remotely human. Clu was told to build the perfect system and has stuck to that programming for years, methodically removing everything that interferes with his plan and installing himself as exactly the sort of Emperor he accuses Flynn of being. The genuinely fascinating thing about Clu is, despite all this, he still clearly views himself as a hero. The system is closer to perfect without a User in charge and closer still with Clu in place as it’s ruler. After all, who else was told they had to create the perfect system? It’s a fascinating, broken world view that neatly marks out Clu as something both more and less than human, a figure who is a towering threat on the Grid but, as Sam points out, can be deleted with a key stroke outside it. He’s also, fundamentally, the physical and direct aspects of Flynn, something the film elegantly demonstrates in one of its final scenes. Clu addresses his army of lobotomised programs on their way to the gateway back to the real world and uses exactly the same language to describe it as Flynn uses to describe the Grid earlier in the film. Clu is Flynn’s youth with none of his willingness to learn, a relentless attack dog gnawing at the world to try and make it into a shape he can never quite reach. If Flynn is trapped by his over intellectualisation, Clu is trapped by the thoughts and thought processes Flynn gave him. He’s a dictator, a monster but in the end, he’s one with limits. When he’s faced with those limits in the closing scenes of the film, it becomes clear he can’t learn, can’t change, can’t do anything but attack just as Flynn himself can do nothing but think. As a result, when the two are forcibly combined, and destroyed, they’re also unified, each giving the other the elements they were missing. Flynn and Clu both die but they’re healed at the same time and, crucially, heal the Grid by being removed from it. The digital Galapagos Flynn created finally gains freedom, at the expense of its creator, and it’s dictator’s, lives.

Kevin Flynn and Clu are both architects and artifacts of early Cyberpunk, figures who are fixated on the computer as nirvana, a digital heaven that we can come and go from as we please. Both have a missionary zeal, both are utterly fixated on the Grid and both are completely out of touch with the real world. In contrast, Sam Flynn is the quintessential post-cyberpunk hero, a trust fund baby who works through his anger at being abandoned by his father by living in a customised set of cargo containers, dropping out of Cal Tech and running an annual prank on EnCom, where he remains a majority shareholder. Sam isn’t remotely interested in big business, and focusses instead on the same thing his father and, ironically, Clu do; that the information wants to be free. When we first meet him he’s breaking into EnCom to release the latest version of their Operating System onto the internet for free on the night of its commercial release. It’s a very interesting moment that gets all but lost in Joseph Kosinski’s night-soaked visuals and it bears closer examination. This is the moment that marks Sam out as something different, the moment where the same ideals that his father lived by evolve and become something very different and far more contemporary. Kevin Flynn wants the information to be free and is prepared to commit a little light fraud and hacking to achieve that. Sam, in contrast, breaks into his own company and uses the internet, a tool Flynn was almost too early for, to wage the sort of war that the entire internet sometimes appears to be spoiling for. He wants the information to be free but, unlike his father, is prepared to do whatever is necessary to achieve those aims. Kevin Flynn likes the puzzle but Sam Flynn likes the solution, and is far more prepared to get his hands dirty than his father ever was.

These two men, and one simulation, fight and die over a fascinating evolutionary annex. Flynn creates a closed system and sets it running, the world gradually evolving under the watchful eye of Flynn, Clu and Tron, the one survivor Flynn brought over from the original Grid. The religious overtones of this trinity are self-evident, as are those of the Kevin/Sam/Clu triangle but the film sensibly never belabours this point. Instead, it explores a world which has taken on a life of its own, literally in the case of the Isomorphic Algorithms or ISOs. These are the film’s most fascinating concept, spontaneously generating artificial life, and whilst we get frustratingly little information on them, what the film presents us with is both fascinating and indicative of the evolution of the action movie. The one surviving ISO, Quorra, played by Olivia Wilde, is both a far cry from the passive Lora Baines of the original movie and a very modern action heroine. Quorra is light hearted, cheerful and far more competent than either of the Flynn men, rescuing them far more than they rescue her. It’s a neat reversal that not only marks the film out as a modern piece of fiction but also plays up the fact that Quorra is at home on the Grid in a way the Flynns can never be. Even more impressive, the film doesn’t use this to limit or restrict her, but rather to explore a very different view of the Grid to any of the male leads. For Clu and Kevin, the Grid is everything, for Sam the Grid is the answer he’s looking for but for Quorra the Grid is merely a starting point. She wants more, she wants the real world and wants it on her terms. There’s none of the fascist tendencies of Clu, none of the obsession of the Flynn men, just a young woman who happens to be artificial wanting more from her life. It’s a fascinating, nuanced role which is orders of magnitude above the normal female lead and Wilde brings intelligence and focus to the role.

A father, a son, a ghost and a miracle. These four characters are the beating heart of Tron Legacy and each one represents not just an approach to the Grid but an approach to science fiction itself. None of them are perfect, none of them are right but the conflict between them, ideological and physical, is a far smarter, sleeker narrative engine than the film initially appears to have. This is a story about information and how we interact with it, what we do with it and how that’s changed. The Grid has changed, the approach to it has changed but, in the end the information stays the same, as does the single, huge question that lies at the heart of both films and much modern science fiction:

What do you do once you have the information?

For Sam and Quorra, the answer is simple; nothing, until you need to. After all, there are no sunrises on the Grid and life is much, much more than zeroes and ones.