The Next Kind of Impossible

A winged figure removes Ronnie from the motorcycle and carries him above the city to a circular rooftop. Pale-robed figures surround him, and an elder raises his hands as blue-white energy converges on the captive body. The danger has changed. Guards could be struck, riders displaced, vehicles commandeered; this group attacks him through a collective supernatural force that cannot be answered with another punch.

The camera moves from Ronnie’s face and the figures around him to views wide enough to show the energy suspended above the skyline. His voice moves with it, alternating guttural attacks and deep clean phrases before climbing toward an explosive release. The final vocal outburst is synchronized to a discharge of red energy that overwhelms the attempted restraint. What appears capable of immobilizing him instead produces something the figures cannot contain.

The burst becomes the beginning of another flight. Red fragments and debris appear to gather into Ronnie’s form, which descends to the street and continues immediately into a run. He is thrown into a sideways rotation by another eruption, lands, and keeps moving. The chase gives the audience a new relationship to his survival: no single collision seems likely to stop him, and even losing the ground beneath his feet has become a temporary inconvenience.

Here the image moves its instability away from the foreground body and into the environment. Ronnie runs toward a retreating camera, remaining readable while the street breaks apart behind him. The running and camera tracking were photographed alongside wire-assisted stunts and localized discharges of dust and debris. Digital destruction extends those physical events far beyond the stage, but the fragments near his body have a tangible presence against which his movement can register. The film needs the street to feel impossible without letting the running cease to feel like running.

A mechanical attacker with red-lit eyes bursts through a building window, seizes Ronnie and carries him upward, eventually taking him through another window into an office. Once inside, the creature loses its grip and Ronnie falls to the floor. A helicopter rises outside the broken glazing. For an instant, the recognizable room might seem like a refuge after the disintegrating street. Instead, the helicopter’s mounted weapon trains upon both the robot and Ronnie.

The attack becomes another of Noen’s music-driven constructions. The gunfire arrives with a heavier kick-drum figure, its muzzle flashes and accompanying screen movement marking the beat. The helicopter destroys the robot while Ronnie evades the barrage and then the rockets that follow, running across desks and ducking through the furniture. A musical event has been given a visible source and a physical consequence. It doesn’t feel like a disconnected montage of destruction because every shot also advances a clear problem: where can this body go next?

Production designer Albina Kim’s office supplies the answer. The enclosed set had rows of desks, chairs, computer screens, practical lamps, windows and a ceiling. Outside the windows, a track-mounted camera apparatus traveled beside the action without occupying the route the performer had to take. Noen’s immense fictional world depends here on a comparatively ordinary fact: there must be room for a person to cross a room while the camera watches.

The helicopter also had a physical existence, though not an actual flight through a city. Its fuselage and cabin supplied surfaces to grip, a doorway to enter, and a cockpit in which another struggle could occur. The aircraft’s movement was achieved on reinforced dollies with lines working beneath it, while cameras approached the stage-built cabin from controlled positions. Ronnie leaps from the building onto a vehicle that was just trying to kill him, replacing his previous attacker with the next available means of escape.

But this time he does not simply take control and ride away. His arrival throws the helicopter into a spin, the gunner is ejected, and the aircraft begins losing altitude. Inside, Ronnie plants his hand on the floor. It becomes clawed, the change travels up his body, and his eyes flare red. The camera follows the developing transformation but withholds its completed form before the aircraft is engulfed in fire.

The interruption is useful because it changes our uncertainty about the protagonist. We have been encouraged to experience him as a prisoner overcoming one captor after another, but the rooftop eruption and now this unfinished transformation suggest that his pursuers may be confronting something extraordinary in him. That does not make their actions justified, nor does the film tell us what they know. It does prevent the conflict from settling into an uncomplicated account of a harmless man escaping evil institutions. As the flames clear, the film makes the question stranger still.