Red Eagle (2010) - Thai Film [Archive]

daisho2004

10-10-2010, 05:21 PM

Movie looks off the hook!

The Red Eagle has landed... again
Thailand's favourite superhero has been revived, with director Wisit Sasanatieng pitching him against a topical enemy

* Published: 1/10/2010 at 12:00 AM
* Newspaper section: Realtime

The new Red Eagle is no longer a brawny, Cold War-era crime-fighter who battles Communist-coloured villains. The latest incarnation of Red Eagle, 40 years after the last film of the original franchise, is a handsome wreck on a rumbling motorcycle, a mean vigilante lusting for revenge, a contemporary superhero who battles evil senators and corrupt politicians _ the Siamese Dark Knight, a fantasy that happens to ring with fresh relevance.

Ananda Everingham (above and right) plays the Red Eagle as a superhero tormented by morphine and a dark past.

A Thai superhero movie is a rare offering. But for those who grew up in the 1960s, it was a memory that could hardly be replicated. In 1959 Mitr Chaibancha played the Red Eagle in the adaptation of the eponymous serial novel (Insee Daeng in Thai) penned by Sek Dusit.

Six more films followed, to huge success, as Red Eagle gave Thai children an equivalent to the costumed DC Comics crime-busters. Then October 1970 brought a shocking end and the greatest loss in the history of Thai cinema, when Mitr fell to his death from a helicopter's ladder while filming the last scene of The Golden Eagle, another sequel of the Red Eagle series.

Four decades later, Red Eagle remains alive, at least in the mind of director Wisit Sasanatieng.

''I feel related to him, the superhero of my childhood, and I feel like he's my treasure,'' says Wisit, a maverick of such post-everything spectacles like Fah Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger) and Mah Nakorn (Citizen Dog).

''I wrote the first draft of the script 10 years ago, but then there were rumours of a Red Eagle remake by other directors. So I waited. Three years ago, when I found that the film rights were open, I took up the project to bring Red Eagle back to life myself.''

Wisit's tired eyes light up, as if he's talking about his favourite toys or comic books. ''I've been working under pressure, because this is the character I really love. I'm resurrecting it, though I know I could be burying it forever if I can't pull this off,'' Wisit says.

''This is the most exhausting project in my entire life.''

The re-tooled Red Eagle will come out on Oct 7, one day before the day that Mitr untimely passed away 40 years ago.

Leaner and meaner, in the red-and-black leather costume, swashbuckling his way through demonic assassins and lusty villains, is Ananda Everingham, playing Red Eagle as a superhero tormented by morphine and a dark past.

He doesn't live in a cave but in a run-down chill storage, has no helper or sidekick, and unlike Mitr's version, the superhero doesn't use a playboy persona as a front. When he kills, the savagery of his wrath is much, much more intense than in the original films.

At heart an action-fantasy with a cartoonish dash, the film, however, is likely to spark debates from its clear attempt at social immediacy _ not just the rotten state of the country but the context surrounding it.

In the film, Yarinda Bunnak plays an NGO activist protesting against the construction of a nuclear power plant, while Pornwut Sarasin plays a (good-looking) prime minister who twists his tongue and breaks his own promises as mobs of protestors gather outside parliament.

Wisit stresses several times that Red Eagle is not a political film. He wrote the script 10 years ago, though the draft that resulted in the upcoming movie took shape in 2006, and Thailand has seen many PMs during that span.

''A filmmaker is a citizen,'' says Wisit. ''What confronts me in life goes into the movie. In the past few years, politics has influenced the way we live and think.

''It's natural that the film has that element. I didn't set out to criticise any particular prime minister _ the film was written during the Samak Sudaravej reign. I only want to mock those who began as good guys fighting for the poor, then, like Darth Vader, they become villains once they have the power.

''In the original franchise in the 1960s, Red Eagle fights bad guys who bear resemblances to communists. It was the atmosphere of the period.

''The authority and the cabinet ministers were always good guys in those films. But now it's different, things get murky, and politicians are obviously the bad guys.''

Pundits will have a field day decoding politics in Wisit's pop-cultural opus. But it's not recommended to let those spoil all the fun, for the new Red Eagle is first of all a cinematic exercise, an eye-catching venture that mixes Siamese flavours with slick Hollywood-style policier _ with a breathtaking, 15-minute chase-and-fight sequence between Red Eagle and his nemesis on the rooftops of Bangkok skyscrapers.

On the surface, Red Eagle represents Wisit's departure from his familiar style: this is a suave, visually hypermodern movie from the filmmaker who has made his name internationally from concocting a giddy cocktail of technicoloured dazzle, vintage drama and cinematic anachronism that warps Thailand both into a timeless past and an unidentifiable future.

On its skin, the slick Red Eagle doesn't look like a Wisit Sasanatieng film. In its bones, however, the film still flaunts the kind of old-school sensibility, comic book whimsy, and self-aware cliches of vintage Siamese cinema that characterise all of the director's picture, especially his cultish, cinephilic Tears of the Black Tiger from 2001. Cliches, for Wisit, are not something to be shy about, but to play around and have fun with.

''Cliches, yes, they're good and bad, and I realise that in movies, Thai cliches and Western cliches are similar,'' he says, chuckling.

''Maybe this is all I have the ability to do. With Red Eagle, I set out to make a modern film for the new generation of viewers, though if I could have had it my way, I would have remade Red Eagle the way Red Eagle was 50 years ago. But that's not possible in the moviegoing environment today.

''To me, what's obsolete can be beautiful,'' Wisit adds. ''What's naive can be sincere and simple. The new Red Eagle has sophisticated action sequences with plenty of computer-generated effects, but if you ask me, I still love the old Thai-style raberd phukao pao krathom [bomb the mountain and burn the hut] that's now seen as outdated. So here, I have both the smooth and slick action scenes and a chase scene in a traditional wet market. I just can't help it.''

Wisit cites Watchmen, Wolverine and The Bourne Identity as his models of contemporary comic book/action sagas about lonesome heroes braving the injustice of the world. And he believes his resuscitated hero fits the modern description as well. The original Red Eagle, played by Mitr, was a muscular, 185-centimetre-tall action hero who towered above the baddies and his women.

''But today's action heroes can be smaller, more wiry and more agile, like Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne films,'' Wisit says, explaining how Ananda Everingham can fit the shoes left empty by the legendary Mitr.

''Action films today do not need tall, big fighters; they need realistic fighting scenes. And they need drama, which is what I try to produce in the film.''

Red Eagle is Wisit's fourth feature film. It's billed as one of the biggest, most-anticipated films of the year with a reported 10-million-baht budget (sources say this is an exaggeration). But it's also an energy-sapping enterprise, a scourge of filmmaking whose merit will be decided, as standards go, by how much money it'll make at the ticket booths.

Wisit's previous three films _ Tears of the Black Tiger, Citizen Dog and The Unseeable _ have a combined box-office receipt that's lower than what a current Thai romantic comedy typically makes in two weeks.

''I thought people would like to see Tears of the Black Tiger because it's full of cliches, just like a TV drama,'' he says, with a slight tone of self-mockery.

''But maybe the film is too weird. Over the years, I've grown older and I've got to know the limitations of the business. If I thought about something like Citizen Dog or Tears of the Black Tiger now, I would never have done it. I would know that it would never become a success.

''Making Red Eagle has drained me and I'm tired of making a big studio film with so many conditions imposed on me _ by the market, by financial constraints, by the limitation of technology.

''Maybe this is the last film I will make with a studio. From now on, I'll have to find a new way, perhaps go more independent, since that's the only way to make the kind of movie I really want to make.''