UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION (John Hyams, 2009)

[Jox]

Making of

[shooby]

We can see the movie in french tv "NT1" this evening :

http://www.nt1.tv/grille-des-programmes/
http://www.nt1.tv/cinema/universal-sold ... 3-846.html

[Jox]

We can see the movie in french tv "NT1" this evening :

http://www.nt1.tv/grille-des-programmes/
http://www.nt1.tv/cinema/universal-sold ... 3-846.html

759 000 viewers
2.9% share

[Nikolai Cherenco]

Here is a German review:

http://www.bereitsgetestet.de/index.php ... &Itemid=59

[Jox]

[Jox]

Where do you find all the factories and warehouses where these climactic confrontations take place?[Laughs] Well, in Regeneration, the refinery was kind of the reason for the story. In both Universal Soldier: Regeneration and Dragon Eyes, both of those were movies that were essentially created around a location. Regeneration was this amazing abandoned steel plant in Bulgaria called Kremikovtzi. That was literally the aesthetic of that movie was just it was supposed to be a nuclear power plant but really just a kind of gritty grey and black and blue industrial wasteland aesthetic.

http://www.craveonline.com/film/intervi ... ragon-eyes

[Jox]

A really good fan-made trailer
http://vimeo.com/44831657

[Jox]

Dutch re-issue

[Jox]

530,000 viewers on NT1 French cable channel yesterday: 2 % market share.

[Jox]

RETRO ACTIVE: Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)
by Nick Schager
http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008336.html

[bomaz]

When I was least expecting it, a "nod"to UniSol 3 happened.
I was watching "War Witch", a canadian movie about a warrior teen girl in Africa. Full drama, and then, in the middle of nowhere, JCVD show up in a dark room ... and there's a quick scene of unisol showing up, kids (warrior kids) watching it.
But not in a mocking way. It was quite interesting of the director to put it here.

[Jox]

So not like Kevin Costner's POSTMAN used clips of Dolph in UNISOL 1? I haven't heard of this film but it sounds interesting...

[bomaz]

The unisol clip fits correctly when we think about it. We see two young soldiers wrestling for fun, immitating martial arts, and then VanDamme telling something like "let's go back to war" (the editing makes it feel like it's a part of the story). Then we see the kids enjoying the movie, watching a war on a screen, like they didn't have enough of their real war.

[Jox]

Today’s best action directors aren’t working in Hollywood, but in direct-to-video
http://www.avclub.com/articles/todays-b ... ll,104394/

His comparatively high-brow background might help explain why his two most accomplished films—Universal Soldier: Regeneration and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning—are also the headiest and most ambitious movies to come out of the direct-to-video action renaissance.

Hyams’ Universal Soldier films are death-haunted meditations on identity and memory. Though both are canonical sequels to Roland Emmerich’s original Universal Soldier (1992), there’s no trace of Emmerich’s influence in either; Regeneration takes its visual cues from Andrei Tarkovsky and David Fincher, while Day Of Reckoning’s David Lynch vibe (think Lost Highway or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) is mixed with over-tonal references to Videodrome, Enter The Void, Funny Games, and The Shining. Both films feature Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren reprising their roles from the original film, though they function as thematic poles rather than leads; this is especially true in the case of Day Of Reckoning, where—yet again—Scott Adkins serves as the protagonist.

Both movies demonstrate how much an action movie can accomplish without ever attempting to subvert the genre. Regeneration and Day Of Reckoning are, first and foremost, expertly crafted action movies, marked by intensely choreographed, brutal violence that expands on the themes instead of negating them. They do what the best classic action movies did: turn the struggle and endurance at the center of the genre into a portrayal of something bigger.

At their core, action movies are about bodies—bulging veins, swelling muscles, chests and foreheads drenched with sweat—and what those bodies are capable of. When there’s a sense of unity between what the body is doing and what the camera is doing, the result can be sublime. A body framed a certain way becomes figurative art and takes on a meaning that goes beyond the context of narrative or character. Space becomes sculptural, and movement becomes musical. That’s the essence of what made action movies a vital, exciting genre to begin with. Hollywood seems to have lost that sensibility, but in the direct-to-video world, it remains as striking as ever.

[Jox]