In Praise of Disorder

The army, ceremony, orders and everything related to the imprisoned general: Order is bad in this case.

Hordes, rituals, initiative and everything related to family: Disorder is good in this case.

Originally consisting of seven people—an officer, his soldiers and their prisoner—the small troop of heroes gradually enlarges over the course of its encounters, incorporating every marginality: a little boy, a French journalist, three lovers, an American deserter… And loses almost all of its initial members without abandoning anything of its force of attraction or dispersive powers. The bouncing jeep that transports the troop resembles the raft of the Medusa, but this unlikely community marked by war is more evocative of the structural genius of the Argonaut's ship.

Continuous Barbarity

A voyage through time employing the regressive plastique specific to John Woo's major epic films. Without origin or goal, the heroes encounter many mythological features along the way and penetrate ever deeper into the archaic. Machine guns give way to spears, grenades to torches, rapid gunfire to ancient forms of torture (sew open the enemy's eyelids for solar punishment). A rebel tribe comes out of the swamp the same way that the dragon's teeth, scattered by Cadmos and Jason, turned into warriors. Adults turn into Little Thumblings: The general scatters his decorations, a looter of corpses scatters his treasures. To escape the flames closing in on him, the little boy, Kenny, digs a hole in the ground. Impossible to sink lower or regress further back. Gaia, the earth: As if it were from her that all this evil came, out of her that these bodies ready for combat sprung, ghosts always already guilty of a past murder. Ground of mass graves, poisoned, deeply rooted mud, a universal tomb. There is no mother in the film. In her place, Gaia generates monsters (Titans, Cyclopes, superhuman children) and protects the most combative of them.

War Not Social Horror

Neither before it unfolds nor after it is over does the film consider peace. We are in a perpetual state of war, a war of everyone against everyone, the present against the past and reciprocal vengeance of chthonic forces against modern attacks.