Hacker Cinema
The Raid
Serbuan Maut
2012 · Film · 101 min
Part of The Raid Collection
Directed by Gareth Evans
Deep in the heart of Jakarta's slums lies an impenetrable safe house for the world's most dangerous killers and gangsters. Until now, the run-down apartment block has been considered untouchable to even the bravest of police. Cloaked under the cover of pre-dawn darkness and silence, an elite swat team is tasked with raiding the safe house in order to take down the notorious drug lord that runs it. But when a chance encounter with a spotter blows their cover and news of their assault reaches the drug lord, the building's lights are cut and all the exits blocked. Stranded on the sixth floor with no way out, the unit must fight their way through the city's worst to survive their mission. Starring Indonesian martial arts sensation Iko Uwais.
6 positive6 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
For anyone else who enjoyed The Raid, the sub-genre of graphic and brutally violent Indonesian action movies is a gem.
The Raid 2; The Night Comes For Us; The Shadow Strays....those should get anyone started going down the rabbit hole.
They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.
They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
Feels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.
> This is actually how disruption works
They are not disrupting shit, in practice or in theory with current ai
Sora 2 is nothing but a meme machine. Stephen Hawking as a battlebot is funny, nothing about it is realistic vs movies.
How would special effects or lower costs make their movies disruptively more popular? [1]
If you want 'real' disruption, Indonesians should be working out how to dub their films using AI. This is cash and a soft power.
[1] Indonesian top rated, The Raid, made by the Welsh Gareth Evans. - https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?num_votes=5000,&country_of_origin=ID&sort=user_rating,desc
Most non-American movies are slop, melodramatic vaudeville, or tear-jerking gut-punches. Most American movies are slop too, but America can afford to swing at more pitches and consequently get more hits.
Have you ever tried to watch Korean movies from the last 20 years? It's all melodramatic romance-crime-poverty slop, with the rare Kim Ki-duk or Bong Joon Ho in there to balance it out. And that's a country with a wonderful reputation for quality film-making.
I mean you get zombies on a train and that's a fun popcorn flick, but it's forgettable. It's no Tremors, Twister, or Independence Day.
In Indonesia for every The Raid there's 999 poorly acted, poorly shot melodramas with a thin well-trodden story.
And don't get me started on "let's yell at each other for 120 minutes" Russian cinema.
American movies are by far the most watchable, especially when you don't feel like going on a heart-wrenching journey of despair, which is all international cinema excels at.
I think those movies are praised because no story is better than a bad story. Many recent "action" movies tries to have a story, which most of the time isn't great and just dilutes the action. John Wick doesn't waste time with that and gives you just what you want: action.
A sibling comment compared it to "The Raid", which I think is a fair comparaison. Both series are very action oriented, both have action scenes that are better than other action movies.
You can see it as a rejection of the idea that you need a bit of everything to create a good movie. Those movies are not balanced at all, but by focusing on their strengths instead of their weaknesses, they end up being good.
That's kind of the point. The movies were directed by two stunt men who had worked with Keanu Reeves on The Matrix. To me it feels like an American version of a movie like "The Raid"[1], though not quite as grounded.
I think it's praised because the kind of "down to earth" action movies like the first John Wick are pretty rare these days. Superhero movie fights are generally about the spectacle of superhumans shooting various lasers at each other. They are also often entirely CG. This makes John Wick fee more much more "real" by comparison. More Die Hard and less Man of Steel.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raid_(2011_film)
Marvel films have cheap, lazy cinematography, for the most part, so they leave a lot on the table in the name of (I assume) saving money. Every Frame a Painting mentions this in a few videos, especially their poor use of music and failure to do anything with mood-of-setting and, relatedly, camera work and editing (match it to the mood of the scene, contrast it to mood of the scene—little of that kind of thing at all, it's just very flat).
> (I realise TG: Maverick isn't going to be everybody's taste but it's the best film I've seen at the cinema in a long time, and the first time I've walked out of a movie feeling absolutely wowed since, perhaps, The Matrix came out in 1999.)
- Everything Everywhere All at Once
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- Blade Runner 2049
- RRR if pure, audacious, crazy popcorn-munching spectacle and a movie that's constantly saying "yes, and..." does it for you.
- Dune (the new one). Watch it on the biggest screen and best sound system you can get access to. Actually, that kinda goes for all of these.
A big step down from those in quality and they're not going to give you that "wow" effect, but still action films that are better than nearly all Marvel movies:
- Any Mission Impossible movie except maybe 2.
- The John Wick movies.
- Dredd.
- The Raid 1 & 2 (which Dredd rips off pretty blatantly, but it's decent, too)
I've heard very good things about the later Planet of the Apes (remake series) movies but have only seen the first one, personally.
Painful to limit myself to action movies. There are so many good films.
Is the celebration of impunity embodied in American action movies not popular around the world?
Lots of movies made outside the US seem to have similar themes (But I guess I haven't watched that many; a recent one is The Raid).
As probably one of the bigger wrestling fans on HN, I feel obliged to point out that WWE is doing very poorly even though it's just about the only live sport-like product left on TV: https://www.f4wonline.com/wwe-news/wwe-smackdown-falls-below-two-million-viewers-overnight-ratings-310111
WWE's TV deals are in danger, which is why they are terrified and trying to be the first thing back up and running, to grab as much marketshare as possible while they can. Doesn't seem like anyone's biting, though.
(the shows are also pretty unwatchable these days, but that was a problem long before coronavirus. that said, I agree with the other commentator that some of the pretape stuff they've been experimenting with has been working okay, and I'm kind of cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Money in the Bank PPV, which sounds like the film "The Raid" but with pro wrestling)
Is this the film (The Raid: Redemption) you're referring to?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1899353/
Yeah, to be honest the rare action movie that really made me invested into the action lately was The Raid (2011), which was shot in a way that made the action sequences look significantly more realistic and you didn't get the feeling that anyone has plot armor in it.
(It also got a huge amount of awards for it.)