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.
There is a potentially riveting concept wrapped in CGI flashiness at work in "Re-Cycle." Everyone involved simply became to happy with what they could do, hoping it would cover up the deficiencies in the story.
VIDEO:
This is a tough one. The 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer fails to pop off the screen in any manner, no matter the locale or color palette. I´d chalk it up to the layer of very visible grain throughout the film, but I never got the feeling anything we saw was supposed to jump out at us. This is very nearly a color-deficient film, working in shades of brown, gray, yellow and-in one sequence-red. Details are hard to come by, thanks to the distortion. Blacks aren´t allowed to reach their full depth either, coming off as some form of gray instead.
AUDIO:
Now here´s something we don´t normally see from Image Entertainment: a DTS track on a release. Coupled with the Cantonese 5.1 and 2.0 mixes, "Re-Cycle" sounds very good. Obviously, the DTS is the preferred way to go, though there isn´t much difference with the regular 5.1 variation. None of them get much to do until we enter the Abandoned Land, so to speak. Once there, the speakers rumble to life time and again, bringing forward deep bass and every conceivable noise to make us jump in our seats. I can´t criticize the audio performance in any way. English and Spanish subtitles are included.
EXTRAS:
It´s odd. With as many layers the brothers tried to put into "Re-Cycle" and the amount of technical know-how which went into the visuals, the extras are relatively bare. (The extras have a collective "play all" function.) The first thing listed in the Special Features menu is the original theatrical trailer (1:28). Of note is the lack of dialogue and an English voiceover to summarize the film. Then there´s a poorly named "Making Of" (15:44), a collection of film clips and filmmaker interviews with next-to-no useful information about the film itself. Additionally, the clips and soundbites are reused multiple times, along with a generic bumper with the name of the film. I wonder if these were originally used to promote the film on television and were packaged together for the DVD.
A series of deleted scenes (8:46, 5 in total) comes next. One in particular seems to have made it rather far in the editing process: the abandoned love sequence. It has final music, lacks any camera identifiers and looks ready to drop into the finished product. A quick "CG Rendering Comparisions" (1:40) flies by much too quickly, with shots of the incomplete sets with a green screen and then adding the CGI layers on top of it. The last two features-"Cast and Crew Q and A" (8:25) and "Gala Premiere" (16:17)-are useless features designed to hype the movie and it´s accomplishments. Trailers begin when the disc is started: "Then She Found Me" (2:33), "Far North" (1:38), "Taxi to the Darkside" (2:26) and "Crashing" (1:40).
PARTING THOUGHTS:
There is enormous potential within the "Re-Cycle" story, all of which takes a backseat to the admittedly beautiful looking visuals. It´s a waste, pure and simple in the grand scheme of things: a tale of two different movies never coming together to form a coherent whole.