Every time I watch The Killer, I'm overwhelmed. Words are so inadequate. It's the purest melodrama there ever has been.

A world so intoxicatingly visual, where the ultimate tragedy is the loss of one's eyesight.

A movie so big and bold even the opening credits are huge.

The plotting is denser, with more forward momentum than A Better Tomorrow, while retaining the repetition of flashbacks and theme song. Where Hard-Boiled is all-propulsive, The Killer is caught in-between, forward and back, every moment haunted by past failure and looking ahead only to self-destruction.

The first time I saw this, almost twenty years ago now, I think it was the first Woo I'd seen, though that might have been A Better Tomorrow, there was a point when I had to stop the videotape, rewind and rewatch several times, I was so blown away. It's when Danny Lee is in Chow Yun-fat's apartment after a shootout. He's sitting in Chow's chair, the camera movements the same as ones we saw only moments before, when Chow was sitting there. To emphasize the doubling, Woo cuts between the present and the recent past. When a cop appears in the doorway, Lee slides back in his chair, just as Chow did when an enemy approached, miming shooting. Then Woo repeats the sequence of Chow sliding and actually shooting. Past and present, Chow and Lee, collapsed into one kinetic whole, always moving but never going anywhere.

Woo doesn't critique the wuxia codes of honor that his heroes live by, he laments their disappearance. Everyone from Chang Cheh to Johnnie To found contradictions in them, tensions between duty to one's master and one's friends, but not Woo. The code is a vital necessary thing being abandoned nonetheless by a heedless rush into modernity.

I don't know if that makes Woo a conservative filmmaker though, because it's not like his idealistic vision of honor ever really existed. His heroes just keep trying and failing to remake their worlds. They live and die by a code the rest of us haven't caught up to yet.