One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
A mesmeric effect is created by Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012) when characters repeatedly look straight into the camera as if trying to hypnotize the audience. Enhanced by strobing light effects and a droning ambient score, these moments are joined by pulverizing action scenes that kinesthetically seize the viewer, attuning them to the powerful physicality of onscreen fighters. Though viscerally engaging, director John Hyams’ watershed work of direct-to-video action is also about visceral engagement itself—the means and the ideological ends to which we’re made to, in one character’s words, “feel so intensely.”
This theme is expressed in the very opening shot: a long take, filmed from a first-person perspective, in which the protagonist, John (Scott Adkins), witnesses the murder of his wife and daughter in a brutal home invasion. In seeming to occupy his literal, physical body—a corporeal embodiment further underscored by visual fluttering to simulate his blinking and a rhythmic thudding evoking his heartbeat—the extended point-of-view shot emphasizes the way this traumatic experience penetrates deep into his body, awakening a compulsion for vengeance. Moreover, the first-person camera invites viewers to project themselves into John and consider their bodies as being in some ways analogous to his. After John’s memory of the killing is revealed to be fake and implanted to push him to commit a political assassination, this early alignment between camera, character, and viewer becomes even more troubling in retrospect, reinforcing the unsettling idea that the viewer’s own body might be similarly susceptible to manipulation.
But uneasiness was also right there from the beginning. Point-of-view shots manifest a contradiction: they hyper-identify us with a character’s body and perspective but, in doing so, simultaneously underscore our inability to occupy it. This tension between alignment and alienation results in the process of identification itself becoming foregrounded. Instead of being totally “in” the film, viewers are more prone to notice the pulling-in itself, the mechanisms by which their bodies are lured. And yet they continue to be lured. Hyams has cited Gaspar Noé as a key influence on his film, which feels right in terms of not only shared stylistic tics but kindred philosophical orientation. Noé’s early films concern bodies that are titillated and compelled despite themselves, an amoral play of sensation and desire in which viewers themselves are implicated. Provocatively redirecting this exploration toward action cinema’s rhetoric of violent empowerment, Day of Reckoning, from its very opening, thematizes the forces that grip and galvanize the body, setting it into destructive motion.