pwsa could have made the cobbler or jason bourne after this and just this one movie would have still made him one of the best action filmmakers of all time, it's hard to describe just how tailor made everything about this movie is to me, and he went on to top it like 4 different times, what even are you paul. russell's a beast, exchanging his typical immense charm from extremely rough stoicism and it works, he sells the fragmentation of identity after crisis and post traumatic stress disorder without vocally expressing anything or even changing the fact that he's been trained since birth to fight. by the climax, he's the same person he was at the beginning, but fighting for another cause, torn from the oppressive boundaries of capitalist institutions and allowed to try and start becoming a man in his own right. what's impressive to me, beyond everything else, is the dedication to psychology in terms of the action sequences. the whole film is based around this, he can't win the fight against the super soldier at the start because the man's been designed to be tougher, so despite his strength and combat abilities he's required to use psychological mind games, time his hits, cause distractions and eventually brawl in a different way, using his impressive strength and physiological knowledge as well as his intelligence and quick thinking to overpower someone much stronger than him, and all of this is done without words and is barely even the main focus of the film's sequencing. he's not obsolete because he's tougher and smarter than the opposition, but also because he's still got that human element of compassion and motivation within him that even psychological battering can't remove. plus the filmmaking is untouchable levels of greatness, anderson's response to someone giving him a good budget is to use everything to its maximum, the sets are completely exploited to their furthest potential, the colours are incredibly vibrant and striking, the images have flair and power and the action sequences are filled with extravaganza with lots of explosions, brilliant use of lighting and atmosphere and flying a spaceship away while a nuclear bomb's going off. anderson's expressionistic eye adds so much to the presentation, a lot of this could easily have looked drab and cheap if it wasn't for him, and the editing gives him substantial help in this. not only are the basic cuts tailored in such a way to make the film immediately compelling, tense and structured to bear perfection, the way it uses abrasive compositions and contrasts to sustain an insight into russell's mind and give a palpable brutality to the action that surpasses the punches themselves is immeasurable. consider the shot of russell standing in the dining room with the colonists and the screen becomes briefly overwhelmed by this shrieking roar of a flashback, momentarily disorientating the viewer and russell himself, or the sequence with the punching bag where every impassioned hit from russell snaps and brings him and us back to the hellfire, the simmering traumas that have finally risen to the surface control and mutate him and send him into a rage. the film is not perfect and i imagine if anderson made this today it would essentially break my mind, but this movie just fucking owns so much guys, it's so good