Ultimate Dolph

shooby wrote: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

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.

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.