Cyborg

The rating relates initially to The Renegade Director’s Cut and later to Slinger: Albert Pyun’s Director’s Cut of Cyborg ------------ Albert Pyun, the philosophising auteur of trash cinema, has numerous gems to his credit, but Cyborg ranks among his most ambitious visions. Equal parts simpleton and avantgarde visionary who always longed to shoot films on wide-angle stock, Pyun combines in his work the most decadent genres with the grandest ideas and genre attractions with distinctive concepts and original worlds. Unfortunately, his vision was always confronted with compromises – either as a director under contract he had a relative abundance of funds, in which case he usually did not have the right to decide on the final cut, or he had the freedom of independent production, but then had to deal with the limitations ensuing from a small budget. Cyborg – or more precisely “Slinger” as the film was originally supposed to have been called – was to be his epic project that, thanks to a new, up-and-coming star, would provide the opportunity to combine his creative ambition with box-office potential. However, when Pyun’s cut did not meet with approval from the representatives of either Cannon Films or Van Damme, the director was removed from the project and the film was recut into the form available today in all official releases. At the beginning of 2011, Pyun got access to copies of his final cuts of several works that had been desecrated by producers, including Cyborg. The Renegade Director's Cut, also known as The Unreleased Director’s Edition, released on DVD by those producers is a unique opportunity to see the vision of the trash Icarus degraded only by the quality of the print (the source material comprised two VHS recordings of an uncorrected telecine transfer). From a pure fan perspective, it is apparent that, after Pyun’s removal, the producers reincorporated the sequence involving pirates plundering a seaside village, which the director had not used, into the film. Conversely, Pyun’s version also contains the sequence in which the protagonist is a witness to the massacre of the family of the young boy to whom he returns a ball taken by drunken pirates at the beginning of the film, and the action sequence with Deborah Richter, who, thanks to them, doesn’t have only the role of a female accessory in a man’s world. Above all, the two versions essentially differ in the impression that they make and in their formalistic execution. Pyun not only intended Cyborg to be a messianic story whose framework remains perceptible also in the official cut, but he also wanted to present users with an entirely pessimistic narrative about the confrontation between the will and ideals of an individual and a merciless world filled with suffering. The main protagonist in Pyun’s version is not invulnerable; on the contrary, he is permanently exposed to inner doubt, depressing horrors of the past and current physical pain. These motifs are brought to the fore in the film through the protagonist’s frequent voiceovers, in which he carries on an internal dialogue with himself or, said more precisely, with his doubtful and weak self, and glimpses into the protagonist’s past. The main villain gets much more space and his numerous pronouncements, which were cut from the official version, put him in the role of the Devil terrifying and tempting the protagonist (after all, Pyun made the pirates direct disciples of Satan). However, the essential difference of Pyun’s version consists in its formalistic execution, specifically in the editing, which was probably the main reason that he was removed from the project. The director shows himself to be a purely avantgarde experimenter and, instead of conventional compositions typical of the mainstream, he primarily uses the principles of Russian montage and experimental filmmakers, while the result can be described as the film equivalent of comic-book panes in manga. He does put individual long shots together with the aim of expressing the linear flow of fights, but cuts the shots that are used in full in the official version into short parts depending on the phase of movement, which he intersperses with counter-shots and shots of parallel action. At the same time, he often works with the speed of the shots, thus creating not a chronological and clear image of the action, but rather a cubist analysis of a particular situation. It is definitely no wonder that Van Damme and the producers fired Pyun after seeing this version. At the same time, it is necessary to mention that it is surprising how they retroactively transformed some passages into classically constructed and functional sequences (primarily the action scene with the destruction of a house in the first third of the film). On the other hand, Pyun with his cut comes across as a misunderstood artist and a bit like Ed Wood – not in the sense of being artless, but in the sense that his creative vision and grand ambition cannot be denied, but fulfilling them in a purely trash framework and with the use of laughably exaggerated clichés seems contradictory at the very least. Nevertheless, the truth remains that, among trash dabblers and acclaimed directors who have a distinctive approach to telling genre stories (Seijun Suzuki, Nicolas Winding Refn, Paul Greengrass and others), we will not find anyone who can measure up to Pyun and his idiosyncratic style. [The Renegade Director's Cut] _______________________ Slinger – Albert Pyun’s Director’s Cut of Cyborg was released on DVD and Blu-ray at the beginning of 2014 under the patronage of the German distribution company Digidreams Studios (available on Amazon.de). Slinger is a composite made by combining HD remastered shots from the cinema version and sequences and partial shots from the above mentioned VHS version with Pyun’s working cut. This version is probably the most complete director’s cut or version, which Pyun, afflicted with Lucas’s eternal improvement syndrome, now considers to be ideal. This one differs from the aforementioned working version of his director’s cut primarily in its more moderate editing and in several small details. The most significant of these is the slightly more conventional narrative, as Pyun abandoned the original concept, where the first two-thirds of the film comprised flashbacks framed by the protagonist’s crucifixion. Following Lucas’s example, however, at the time of completing this version Pyun did not allow himself to bind the film to the just completed project Cyborg Nemesis: The Dark Rift, which was intended to be a prequel to Cyborg, or Slinger, though a shot from it is inserted into the end of the director’s cut and introduced with the title “nine months later” – there is the question of whether this time-space anomaly is the result of information noise from the new project, the director’s lack of reason (or the multiple sclerosis that had afflicted him a year prior and prevented him from shooting more films) or if it can simply be explained by watching the referenced film. Though the German release is labelled as “uncut”, the film lacks all of the gory close-ups seen in The Renegade Director’s Cut – thanks to which, for example, it isn’t entirely clear that the final elimination of the villain involved tearing him in half. It also raises the question of whether Pyun merely wanted to have a final cut devoid of explicit violence or if this was a consequence of the German legislation that places limits on violent sequences, which would indicate that this release is not the definitive version. On the other hand, Cyborg is finally widely available as Slinger and everyone can enjoy this original project in every sense, as the crackpot filmmaker got a relatively generous budget and a rising star, but instead of a generic post-Mad Max B-movie, he set out to make an epic post-apocalyptic gospel. In his godless world fallen to the disciples of Satan, the messiah must grow into his role (which culminates in the sequence when, instead of dying on the cross, he kicks himself off of it), but in the end, he is just as powerless against the sinister intentions of people worshipping technology, an even greater evil than Satan. The composite, where the image jumps from the HD remastered part to VHS quality and back in one shot, strikingly shows Pyun’s formalistic ambition manifested in the preference for longer shots and camera approaches with sophisticated character composition. (05/12/2013) (less) (more)