Everyone involved simply became to happy with what they could do, hoping it would cover up the deficiencies in the story.
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The Pang brothers (Oxide and Danny) have a flair for the visual, as evidenced by two-thirds of "Re-Cycle." Writer Tsui Ting-Yin (Angelica Lee) is thrust into the world of the abandoned , bringing her face to face with old toys, her ancestors and discarded stories. This dreamscape is a stunning visual representation similar to that of hell in "What Dreams May Come." Stairways lead to nowhere as Ting-Yin finds herself confronting a decision she made eight years ago.
"Re-Cycle" is classified as a horror movie, but as with the best in any genre, the film and filmmakers twist the definition to redefine the genre. Yes, the film is designed to scare the bejesus out of the audience at times, but it also wants us to think. What exactly happens to the objects we discard? The rocking horses from our childhood or a blender thrown out because a new one took its place, for instance. Unusable characters from stories, dead family members, forgotten loves…they all inhabit the same universe. That is the greater message the Pang´s are trying to bring out.
Indeed, when the action switches from a conventional thriller featuring human shapes slinking behind doors and around the corner, "Re-Cycle" finds its legs. The first third or so is designed to build Ting-Yin and, to be perfectly honest, it´s a bit of a drag. We´ve seen the movie the Pang´s put on screen before, the one where the main character is terrorized or scares herself silly. Simply, it´s not fun. Marginally scary, but not noteworthy.
What had been done here is to make a cursory nod towards traditional horror and twisted the idea on its head. And it works wonderfully, but not for the reasons which immediately spring to mind. What the story does is put us in the position of being thrown away, not needed anymore. It´s a place we don´t think of very often, considering the objects we throw away are inanimate. That place relies very heavily on the melding of computer graphics and existing sets.
In all honesty, the visuals are the reason to spend nearly two hours with "Re-Cycle." It´s a hyper-stylized world filled with levels of abandonment. A run down town, a cemetery, pieces of an amusement park, all with their own color schemes, not to mention hazards. And herein lies a problem. This film is presented in its original Cantonese language. As such, the English subtitles provide an imperfect translation to the limited dialogue in the film. And because of the overreliance on the visual aspect of the film to explain exactly what we´re seeing, much of the "Re-Cycle" is left for the audience to decipher.
We don´t necessarily "get" the subtleties the Pang´s present in the level with ancestor abandonment, for example. There´s an abstract concept at work no one bothers to identify, explain or even talk about. I´m not even entirely sure there´s anything here outside the desire to showcase the translation of the imagination to the screen. There´s a flimsy plot-if it can actually be called a plot-which leaves one crucial piece of information out of an early conversation that would explain the rest of the film. (I´m referring to the dinner scene, in particular.) Ting-Yin doesn´t follow any kind of coherent storyline; she doesn´t begin at any place emotionally with a clear destination in mind.
Even at nearly two hours, "Re-Cycle" isn´t anything more than a chase film, maybe a quest picture depending on how we define it. It´s a story with a definite end point, a "treasure" to keep our eye on. Our main character wants to get home. It´s a false objective, though. She isn´t trying to learn about herself or stuck in the past. At least not in any way we can see. So in the next to final scene, the big emotional payoff, the story melding together doesn´t mean anything to us. It feels like an artificial climax to the film not grounded in anything we´ve seen to this point.
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[release]23732[/release]