The Learning Experience (Nikita (DVD))

Member Name: grandmasterflash

Product:	Nikita (DVD)
Date:	01/07/03 (63 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent direction, wonderful script and characterisation, Powerful message

Disadvantages: A few silly scenes, Quite depressing

Nitika is a truly magnetic and electric film experience. a film about a murderous heroin junkie's punishment and rehabilitation.

As a junkie she cares nothing for herself or her life, and nothing for anyone elses- she just cares about her next hit and about stimulating her mind with nihilistic violence and killing and what we get in this film is an excellent character study.Nikita is an excellent character. She is a junkie and a live wire. She spews hatred and rage at everyone around her. She seems to care nothing for her self-esteem, for fulfilling her life, except to await her next hit. And when she's high, she is volatile and thinks nothing of blowing a smiling stranger's head off. And so she finds herself charged with first-degree-murder, forced to exchange brutal physical blows with brutal policemen, and finally sentenced to death. But then she awakes after her official "execution" to find out that the goverment wants to use her for unofficial work. If she refuses, she will be executed and it will be the real thing this time.

She undergoes a three year long intensive and totally confined training course in assasination and stealth, becomes cleaned up, made up, taught to be versatile in style, manners and grace, and yet antithetically she is also taught how to kill in cold blood. She is sent to to assassinate the government's political enemies. She has been given a new life, taught to care about herself and develop a sense of pride, but her life is owned by corporate murderers who are above the law and can force her to do the government's dirty work for them.

The film works best as an emotional character piece about learning to care about self and the fragility of life through being forced to participate in violence and cruel acts. We are plunged into her emotional turmoil of being punished for the murder she committed (to which she felt nothing) by being forced to relive the kill she committed again and
again till it makes her sic
k of killing and desperate for escape.

But as an action film and a melodrama romance it is also a masterwork. Luc Besson crafts excellent contemplative direction untypical of action movies- the ability to build up a perfect silence and then shatter it with a gunshot to the temple- which results in wonderfully tense shootout scenes which remain with the viewer long after the film, it's static and all encompassing, yet deeply intimate and immediate when it needs to be, laced with subversive and ominous moody music creating a truly electric cinema experience of sex, violence, danger and the vulnerable humanity surrounding it all, bleeding. Juxtaposing happiness and joy with the threatening intrusion of murderous intentions and cruel exploitation.

It's message is powerful, about the potential of former junkies and murderers to learn the value of human life, through knowledge and pride of self, and fight against the future they are headed for.

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