Unforgiven (2013)

For better or worse, Lee Sang-il's retelling of Unforgiven accounts for a profound psychological shift, one akin to transformation. At journey's end Ken Watanabe's Jubei finds himself staring down a familiar shithole, drunk and out for blood. Lee's film treats this ferocity as a dead end for the character, rather than an aspect of his personality. In the 1992 original, Clint Eastwood's William Munny placed himself in a desperate, suicidal situation then reacted with supernatural calm to the violence directed at him. This is what allows him to clear a bordello. He doesn't hurry, he doesn't make mistakes. In this telling, Jubei has instead snapped, becoming a kind of demon. Lee's stormy, deteriorating mise en scene suggesting all the great damned Samurai from Ryunosuke Tsukue in The Sword of Doom to Ogami Itto in the Lone Wolf and Cub cycle.

Eastwood and Lee's films differ in how their heroes are communicated to us. After his massacre Munny seems to readjust instantly, compartmentalising his violence. It's easy for us to accept this too - the confrontation was cathartic, happening in response to a friend's murder. It's satisfying. The shift packing you off to bed after your umpteenth viewing on late-night television. Lee's film is the opposite. Jubei's moment almost seems like a fumble. Firearms play a key role - always disappointing in a chanbara - and Watanabe sleepwalks through the encounter. Jubei's violence is slow, a monster demonstrating deliberation in the midst of amateurs. It's messy, more like a scuffle, designed to not quite please. Men aren't cleaved by swords; weapons bite on bone then break. Jubei isn't the same kind of man as Munny either, he can't turn it on or off. Once he's tasted blood he's keyed in, fated to wander - seething - until his batteries run dry.

Inception

Inception is an absurdly expensive flight of fancy. Christopher Nolan's film jumps off from a big-lie idea of there being a whizz-tech powerful enough that it allows people to break into each other's dreams. We are lead slowly through sequences that establish and demonstrate the various mechanical laws that allow interlopers to dabble around in foreign subconscious. Naturally, this wonder science is used, primarily, as a tool for industrial espionage. Machine established, the film then becomes a launch-pad for weaving together a series of clashing action sequences, each one set at a distinct simulation level of the quarry's dreamscape. These action plains intersect and distend, spinning in and out of each other at a frequency close to parody. Inception invents a behavioural rule-set, premised on complete fantasy, then gleefully vandalises it. It's not in love with characters; instead it finds joy in establishing a new idea, then gleefully kicking the chair out from underneath it. Inception is, in this sense, joyous; a piece that may move with the familiar beats of the blockbuster - staffed by mission-focused experts who deal in broad, cool strokes - but isn't constrained by them. It's a heist film where everything goes wrong and these professionals have to think on their feet. Their central task quickly becoming wildly irrelevant when judged against the action of performing these feats. Along the way enough details are left nagging to undermine all of the reality we have witnessed; micro-details and spectral figments take on alarming meaning the deeper we tumble into our players.