Best Sci-Fi
The Days of Knight
A highly trained operative, belonging to a clandestine ancient group of expert mercenaries, is given a mission to recover a valuable item for one of the 13 most influential families on Earth. As war breaks out and alliances formed centuries ago crumble, survival becomes the top priority for everyone involved.
John P Martinez
Director
Born and raised in Upstate New York. John loved going to the movies at an early age. After seeing movies such as "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Return of the Jedi", and "Back to the Future", he knew filmmaking and storytelling was in his future. After college, John joined the federal government and served in a law enforcement capacity for 25 years. The passion to tell stories and make films has never left him.
Rarely has an artist not attempted to work with deformation as a primary or side tool. Filmmakers, of course, are no exception. If you open any filmography of a big director, rewind the track record back to the beginning, there they are - early short works. Experimental, avant-garde and, at times, frankly marginal techniques needed by authors to probe cinematography, its poetics, its structure and the limits of what is allowed. At the same time, the older and “bigger” a director becomes, the less often he resorts to the instrument of deformation in its pure form. There are many reasons for this, from ethical to aesthetic, but the simplest ones are probably genre-based. Consider, for example, “Blue Velvet,” which only accelerates into a deformational frame by the middle of the movie, even though it seems to.
“The Days of Knight” defies the discourse of arguing between genre canons and radical methods. A movie whose beginning is set up in the vein of “Mission Impossible” suddenly goes over the edge, treading into David Lynch territory. The experiment is bold, and more importantly, the movie directed by John P Martinez is something of a precedent in the realm of visual experience.
The movie begins with shots exposing a huge airport from the air, and ends with a cramped room and a black failure in the chest. The author himself tackles an impossible mission, working with such serious dramaturgical scales within the confines of a short meter. In other words, John P Martinez formulates quite the genre action movie through the dramaturgy of the protagonist's ascending transcendent experience. It is worth noting that even for a “fantasy” movie, the author chose an extremely non-trivial way of narration, and it does not cease to amaze even on the third viewing of The Days of Knight.
From the point of view of technique, the main difficulty of the picture lies not even in the stylistic integration of the deformation image into the fabric of the action movie, but in the montage, in the juxtaposition of two opposite types of existence. The narrative and dramaturgical montage logic of the film does not contain any particular violations, but the construction of the movie should have been strengthened - there is little motivation for the inclusion of those very distortions. And even though the director uses excessive stylization even for the first shots, for some reason it is not enough, not enough revolve.
However, these are details that, as it seems, the director will develop in his future films. It is important that the author works quite cleanly with editing, storyboarding and unity of space, despite the pathological nature of the initial tasks. It is interesting that John P Martinez reaches critical temperatures - the embodiment of pure physiology and genre hatchetness argues with abstract images. The line is very thin, but the author manages to establish a balance and quite equal stylistic ratio of two heavyweight pictorial categories.
It is a rare case when the material is so eclectic but organic in itself. The acting, dreamlike imagery, specificity of space, musical accompaniment, and iconic inclusions are all explained from within the movie. Let's hope that John P Martinez will not abandon his experiments.
“The Days of Knight” defies the discourse of arguing between genre canons and radical methods. A movie whose beginning is set up in the vein of “Mission Impossible” suddenly goes over the edge, treading into David Lynch territory. The experiment is bold, and more importantly, the movie directed by John P Martinez is something of a precedent in the realm of visual experience.
The movie begins with shots exposing a huge airport from the air, and ends with a cramped room and a black failure in the chest. The author himself tackles an impossible mission, working with such serious dramaturgical scales within the confines of a short meter. In other words, John P Martinez formulates quite the genre action movie through the dramaturgy of the protagonist's ascending transcendent experience. It is worth noting that even for a “fantasy” movie, the author chose an extremely non-trivial way of narration, and it does not cease to amaze even on the third viewing of The Days of Knight.
From the point of view of technique, the main difficulty of the picture lies not even in the stylistic integration of the deformation image into the fabric of the action movie, but in the montage, in the juxtaposition of two opposite types of existence. The narrative and dramaturgical montage logic of the film does not contain any particular violations, but the construction of the movie should have been strengthened - there is little motivation for the inclusion of those very distortions. And even though the director uses excessive stylization even for the first shots, for some reason it is not enough, not enough revolve.
However, these are details that, as it seems, the director will develop in his future films. It is important that the author works quite cleanly with editing, storyboarding and unity of space, despite the pathological nature of the initial tasks. It is interesting that John P Martinez reaches critical temperatures - the embodiment of pure physiology and genre hatchetness argues with abstract images. The line is very thin, but the author manages to establish a balance and quite equal stylistic ratio of two heavyweight pictorial categories.
It is a rare case when the material is so eclectic but organic in itself. The acting, dreamlike imagery, specificity of space, musical accompaniment, and iconic inclusions are all explained from within the movie. Let's hope that John P Martinez will not abandon his experiments.