User reviews

This film is shot entirely in Taipei, Taiwan, which in every film I've seen where it is a "co-star" is an interesting city. This film shows Taipei as gritty, dirty, ugly, poor and indifferent. The film was released in 1986 and it follows the police and ordinary citizens in situations which mirror everyday life, including shootouts and chaos. The first scene is a police siren and soon you see a dead man lying on the street. Scenes here are interwoven amongst the characters, who at first seem like they don't inhabit the same world. This makes the film kind of fascinating, that you're a fly on the wall in these people's lives. The use of stark imagery, shadows and light is very effective. The film, despite its title, is not about terrorism or the violence of a particular person. There are lies told in this film which cause some of the problems faced by the main characters. If you do not like moody, introspective films, I don't recommend this. However, director Edward Yang (whom we lost in 2007) has a very impressive body of work (you have to see "Yi Yi") and this is an impressive film.

Edward Yang is one of the few filmmakers who can made the present-day seem like a dystopia. He is often compared to Antonioni: this is his 'Blow-up' - an ascetically formal, fragmented murder mystery stumbled on by a photographer. In his use of dream narrative and a character who writes a mystery novel, Yang goes beyond the Italian in narrative obscurity. 'The Terroriser' shares many themes with his more accessible masterpieces 'A Brighter Summer Day' and 'Yi-Yi' - the alienation of capitalist, urban life; the alienation of relationships and aimlessness of youth; the mind-numbing compromises and betrayals in the workplace - but in a framework that coldly precludes identification.

It is unlikely that Edward Yang would quarrel with those who described him as the Antonioni of the East. But this kind of comparison is perhaps more damaging than helpful since it only engenders perceptions that have little or nothing to do with the filmmaker. If we are to understand Yang at all, we must allow his works to speak for themselves--they must succeed or fail on their own terms. "The Terrorizer" is one of Edward Yang's most accomplished works. In style, concerns, and methodology it differs significantly from the masterworks of Antonioni. Whereas Antonioni prefers to work with a narrower canvas, choosing to develop his characters until they achieve self-awareness, Yang seems to eschew such conventions, offering instead a logic akin to the dream world. "The Terrorizer" is indeed constructed very much like Chuang-Tzu's tale about a man who is unsure if he was dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was a man.

It would be a disservice to think that the ending of The Terrorizer is anything like O. Henry. It is perhaps more accurate to describe the ending as a faux denouement. The use of not a single but a double dream suggests that Yang is fully aware of his Chinese roots even when he is consciously quoting an outsider like Antonioni. It also indicates that he is less interested in the psychology of social behavior than in the actions taken by individuals and the effects they have on one another throughout the social network, regardless of their relations to each other. It is to this end that several couples in an unnamed metropolis of Taiwan are examined: a photographer and his girlfriend living off the wealth of their family; a teenage hustler and her pimp on a downward spiral of crime; an unhappily married novelist who embarks on an affair with a past lover. These three couples, in turn, are connected in some way, tangibly or peripherally, to a policeman, a law enforcer who is powerless to hold the city together, to keep it from coming apart. It is little wonder that everyone is constantly forging new relationships or alliances in a city where obsolescence is the rule.

Just as Antonioni uses dislocation as a means of conveying alienation, Yang chooses to use absentation--the absence of things--as a thematic device. Throughout the narrative one is reminded of the absence of fathers--both socially and politically. It is the absence of leadership. Elsewhere, absentation is employed when the photographer decides to turn an apartment into one huge darkroom which denies him the reality of time while permitting him to create a world of his own. At one point, a teenage girl whom he temporarily harbors asked him if it is day or night. When the camera finally peeps outside the apartment Yang gives us neither day nor night but that brief moment in time when light gives way to darkness or darkness breaks into light. It is here that Yang best captures the logic of that dream world: his protagonists are merely phantoms suspended in time. It is the absence of time. Throughout the narrative one is sometimes puzzled by the seemingly lack of explanations: the initial breakup of the photographer and his girlfriend (witnessed over the soundtrack of "Smoke Gets in Your Eye"); the return of the photographer's stolen cameras; the breakup of the married couple; the status of the policeman with no emotional or physical ties. It is the absence of elucidation. Unlike the works of Antonioni where there is always a central character whose viewpoint mirrors our own, functioning as a filter of reality, Yang denies us of such privilege. The impossibility of identifying with any character may be disorientating but it also serves as a metaphor of a city that has lost its moral compass. It is the absence of a central viewpoint. Absentation is clearly an effective tool in exploring the void that lies at the heart of modern culture--it is the black hole of the human condition.

When the film finally concludes it matters little what portion of it is real or a dream. Or for that matter who the dreamer really is. Fiction is perhaps no more than merely dreams, perfectly realized, and cinema the greatest dream machine ever built.

Edward Yang is not the romantic type. In fact, The Terrorizers shows us romance as a crime. To use your partner for your own gain and thus robbing them of themselves. A man consumed by his identity as a cog in the capitalist machine has no chance of finding himself after he's used, been used and consequently drenched without him even knowing it. He no longer exists.

This movie is so philosophically sound, and its beauty lies in its loyalty to its message. The theme of terrorizing romance overlaps in every single frame of the movie. A wife leaving her oblivious, ignorant husband is the same as a hooker robbing her customer.

I think what we learn from this movie is that for a relationship not to be a crime, a collective direction is needed. The young girl knows this. Don't steal things from each other, steal together, from others.

This film is a masterpiece, a telling of the loneliness of the modern world with perfect resonance. It is swift, vital, and brilliant. Along with Taipei Story, Yang has shown in The Terrorizers the pressures of urban life, love, and the ceaselessness of time more artfully than can be expressed in words. Youth and its joys and pains in a modern world have perhaps never been exhibited more skillfully than Yang has done in these two films. I have only found the Taiwanese new wave directors a month ago, but I will highly recommend Edward Yang to anyone who has ever truly felt loneliness or love. Yang is a beautiful director, and this is a beautiful film.

There's an interesting visual grammar at work in The Terrorizers, consisting of its approach to framing, movement, and pacing. The film is one of the better demonstrations of how images can serve as the basis of a conceptually rich experience. People and objects, because of how they're framed, because of the moment at which we encounter them and because of the light in which they're cast, evoke an atmosphere. In The Terrorizers, even a normally prosaic, and ignored, thing like, say, a staircase or foyer, is imbued with aching suggestiveness.

When the protagonist's outburst was seen as natural, the cruelty of director Edward Yang was clear at a glance. It is a classic practice to use accidental events to stimulate daily conflicts, and the effect of this film is very effective. The convergent but the wonderful performance from actors matches the realist style of the story. For most of the time the film is in a state of extreme restraint, so the brief empathize in the ending was magnified. As a result, some of the slightly tardy parts of the film can actually be forgiven.

The Terrorizers is not on par with Yang's two most famous films - but it's pretty damn close. Melancholic throughout, all of the loosely connected characters are stricken by Antonioni-like ennui in a modernized, concrete Taipei, reflecting on lives that are heading in unwelcome directions. The ending(s) feel abrupt given the careful build-up, but the style and beauty of Yang's later gems are also displayed here.

The opening film of this retrospective a few days ago, The Terrorizers was presented in a gorgeous restored digital transfer that is beautiful to gawk at every frame, and in essence what would have probably been seen during its first ever debut back in 1986. It's not cheap nor easy to have a film remastered and restored to get rid of pops, cackles and dirt, or to readjust its colour grading, as seen during the promotional clip on its restoration before the film proper, and it's really an excellent job done given the tremendous amount of effort behind the scene.

Edward Yang's third feature film, co-written with Hsiao Yeh, may have given the audience an ultimate red herring with an action oriented introduction complete with cops and robbers and a shootout, only for that to serve as just about the only real action sequence in this film that's steeped in what would be a relatively violent outcome by the time the end credits rolled. The Terrorizers tells a myriad of inter-weaving story lines involving a myriad of characters, such as Wang An's delinquent Eurasian girl who runs a call girl scam where she robs her clientele in hotel rooms and a photographer's obsession with her when he snaps her escape from the cops.

But the storyline that just begged for attention, is something similar like his first two films that dealt with the breakdown in relationships against the backdrop of modernity, and how modern life and its expectations chip at passion and romance, where couples rarely emerge unscathed from failure to communicate their true intentions. I suppose it is akin to the filmmaker's way of constant warning, given a trilogy now focused on this aspect, that to have emotions kept within oneself would only pave way for a massive blowout when the last straw is reached, and this offers no chance whatsoever for reconciliation, only destruction, and the humiliation that comes along with it.

We see it all coming from the first time the couple of Yue Fen (Cora Miao) and her husband Li Zhong (Lee Li Chun) got introduced, where the former's writer's block complaint becomes an avenue to be chided by her husband, who deemed her issue rather unimportant given that it is a work of fiction, and not life and death. Clearly this lack of sensitivity was the seed sowed, before a random cataclysmic event evolves this into her wanting to leave the matrimonial home for a place where she can get some escape and seek out inspiration, which turned out to be nothing more than seeking out an ex-lover to carry out an affair with.

While you may want to sympathize with the husband, wait. Edward Yang and Hsiao Yeh for some reasons crafted a number of characters here who are mostly lacking in morals. Li Zhong, eyeing a promotion which he thinks is a given with the death of his boss, goes to the extent of framing a fellow co-worker so that he can eliminate the competition for that move upwards, which makes him quite the bastard who gets his karmic just desserts through the infidelity of his wife, which ultimately humiliates the man who has to wear a green hat, and is without a defining career which he so highly prizes it as sort of a beacon in social stature.

One can imagine just who the real terrorizers are in the film - it's easy to point the fingers at criminals as depicted in the beginning of the film, or whoever is holding that gun to exact some form of revenge against pride, but clearly in this instance, it's really the female of the species who continue to torment emotionally especially when the silent treatment gets exacted, which I feel is possibly the cruelest form of torture to a loved one. The ending is much talked about, and in my opinion seemed to stem either as material from the fictional book that Yue Fen finally churned out, or an alternative reality which points to a consistently bleak outcome of that modern day grind in life.

After ho-hum reactions to YI YI and BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, this is the first Yang movie that I liked. The interwoven plot threads slowly reveal themselves in pieces, culminating in a finale that pulls everything together and yet opens up new mysteries. There is some fine cinematography, and the themes of alienation and disconnectedness give you something to chew on. However, I really can only appreciate this on an intellectual level. For me to really love a movie, I have to have some kind of emotional reaction to it. It has to be touching, or amusing, or exciting, or frightening. Like a lot of Antonioni (whose name repeatedly pops up in the reviews of this film), it only left me cold. Only one scene (when the writer weeps in her confused husband's embrace) had any kind of emotional resonance with me. I don't mind a film that makes you think, but there has to be something else to hook me in and encourage me to give it thought. For those who love cinema on a more intellectual level, however, I imagine this would be more rewarding.

I tried. I really, really tried to think of something that would merit rating this higher than a two. It's not that I don't "get it" -- I'm a big fan of Asian cinema. The truth is, the movie is infantile in construction, long-winded, and painfully disjointed.

I suppose that if you are of Alfred Hitchcock's school of thought "Don't tell them, show them," then you could try to appreciate this movie, but you would still be hard pressed.

First of all, The Terrorizers tries stream-of-consciousness in the style of Jean-Luc Godard and fails in this. Edward Yang seems to understand the basics of the technique, but he's very unskilled at it. (Perhaps he gets better with age; I don't know as I haven't yet attempted other Yang films.) The point is, he uses a dearth of "show, don't tell" that really only serves to interrupt the procession of the story. Sure, he gets in some visually arresting images, but they don't draw the story together, and they don't help to make it any better.

Additionally, the major concept behind stream-of-consciousness and "show, don't tell" is that with the right images, the right drama, repetition, and tight correlation, the viewer will be able to make his or her own inferences; not to say that these will be the correct inferences, but those can be amended as the story progresses, and every director should strive for some of this type of audience interaction. In this, Edward Yang sorely disappoints. The viewer is constantly on the periphery. There is no reason to be drawn in, no reason to consider the characters or their motives, no reason to get emotionally involved, and really, no reason to stay alert.

Finally, Yang gets lost in the story that he wants to tell, not the story that the movie itself is telling. His art moves in one direction, but like a large dog he can't control, he's constantly yanking the lead, trying to get it back onto the course he wants, not the one that it is naturally following. The most egregious example of this is the ending. The ending really should have occurred at the moment of the husband's revelation. The ending of the book that the movie is focusing on, (and by extension, a possible ending for the movie) has already been told to us. If Yang had chosen to end at that point, he would have had a much more powerful piece, leaving the watcher in suspense -- does the story play out as the book says, or does Yang's "real world" play out differently? Asking the viewer to think about this is the sort of viewer interaction that Yang painfully needs. Instead, he continues to tell the story he wants to tell, straining the natural conclusion for the sake of what? For the sheer sake of lingering on a main character -- we didn't' need to know more about her superficially, and Yang wouldn't feel the need to tell us if he hadn't made her into a veneer instead of bothering to make her a more engaging and deep character to begin with.

Why else does Yang prolong and torture his movie? To get in some more of those "visually arresting images." The movie truly suffers for it. It wants to end, it has a conclusion that feels natural and leaves the viewer unsettled, but instead, Yang pushes on. Instead, Yang constructs a complex ending that leads the viewer on, causing him or her to constantly ask "so what?" The first ending, the one that Yang ignored, that was good. The second ending, well, my thought was"so what, who cares?", because it's not as if it is introducing something that hasn't been put forth in the storyline already... but the last ending? That really was a waste of time. Not only did the "real" ending leave me disengaged, but I also felt it was an affront to what the story could have been. Yang sacrificed a potentially good story for the bubblegum-melancholy-noir-tinged conclusion that he had insisted upon all along.

My last problem with the movie has nothing to do with the movie itself, but rather its post-production. The subbing (if you see it subbed) is horrible. Long sentences stay up for a second or two, while short ones stay up far too long. Also, as Yang quickly changes images, the subtitles are removed from the screen. This is one of those rare instances that subtitles should be able to stay on the screen even as the image has changed, because there's not much dialog going on anyway.

Not very attention-grabbing, but I love the film's moody atmosphere created by its direction, cinematography, and especially its excellent sound design.

This is my first foray into the world of Edward Yang and though I cannot claim to have followed all of the plot in this complex drama, it is still an oddly compelling watch. Oddly? Well that's because though the characters appear real enough in a plausible sense, the storyline develops itself and them in a none-too-predictable, not always coherent, fashion. We start with a scene that I suspect would have had the local tourist board in conniptions. A shoot-out between a drug-dealing gang and the police that leaves a body lying in the street. Even trying to move that proves perilous. That peril continues to run throughout the story as we meet a dysfunctionally married couple. He, "Li" (Li-Chun Lee) is a writer who's suffering from a fairly terminal block. She "Zhou" (Cora Miao) is an aspiring clinician who cannot quite reconcile the significance of his failure with her own need for satisfaction (professionally and emotionally). This relationship continues to serve as a conduit for a rather broad-brush look at urban life in Taiwan that includes just about every aspect of human behaviour including the scene-stealing efforts of brothel-keeper "Shu An" (Wang An) who fleeces her clients whilst they are in flagrante delicto and who is, herself, the object of the desire of a photographer who proves to be of some interest to the police. What's curious about this film is that you start off assuming it's all a sort of gangster flick with the locals under the yoke. What it gradually turns into is a story about "terror" in it's multiple guises - and the most potent illustrations of that are not necessarily located where we think they ought to be. I reckon this needs a couple of viewings to get the best from it as there's plenty to get your teeth into as these characters develop quite distinctly into people - love them or hate them!