A minimalist masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (13 September 1999)

There are two distinct trends in Hollywood movies: self-referencing and reductionism. This film is the most perfect example of the second.
In a never-ending quest for digestibility movies are getting simpler. Character development? Forget it! Drama? Never mind that! Meaningful dialogues? What for? Characters are replaced by posing stars, drama by actions, dialogues by easy to remember catchy one-liners.
I don't think I ever saw anything that was so nothing. No drama, no characters, not even a story. A simply bad movie would have clichés, wholes in the story line and bad acting. But then even clichés have some coherence, holes in the story line imply that there is one and bad acting is still acting. The only thing this movie has is images. Beautiful country, tough men, bloody battles. I had the impression that this movie is a collection of still images. Images where people are posing as they were for the painters of romanticism. The heroic pose, the loving pose, the cunning pose. Nothing in this movie made any sense unless I was willing to look at them as clichés reduced to an absolute minimum where they are still recognizable. Images designed only to evoke from your memory the complex emotions they refer to. Could it be that the film was in pre-release limbo for two years because the producers didn't know how far could they go insulting the viewer's intelligence? Could it be that Mctiernan made this movie into a parody of itself and its genre? Could it be that it was intentional? I would like to think so. Then I could think that it is only trash, not garbage.