“Daddy? There’s monsters in the house.”
Eyes bleary and blinking, your world flickers into view. Your wife lies beside you in bed, caught in the same weary daze between the world of sleep and life. For a moment something seems foreboding and unreal, perhaps the lingering grasp of a half-remembered dream. Then you remember your daughter, and you are awake.
Rising from the sheets, you stumble over to her, offering words of comfort and security. The stock words of a father.
“There’s no monsters in the house, sweetie.”
To give her complete peace of mind, you offer to check for the monsters. It’s all an act of course, but you go through the motions without a second thought because that is your role, your purpose.
You check the bathroom. No monsters here except those lines beginning to creep their way across your face in the mirror.
Ambling into the kitchen, you flick the lights on and your body freezes.
Men dressed all in black fill the kitchen, their faces covered by balaclavas, their gritted teeth glinting in the warm white glow of the electric light. The stench of sweat and bourbon stings your nostrils. Panic sets in as you process the reality.
There’s monsters in the house.
Thus begins John Hyams’ Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, the sixth entry in the UniSol series and a benchmark of not just the direct-to-video action genre, but of the action genre as a whole. Equal parts brutal action-revenge movie, dark psychological horror, and an arthouse sci-fi spin on Apocalypse Now, Day of Reckoning takes the standard plot of a man seeking revenge for the murder of his family and twists it into a nightmarish, Lynchian fever-dream threaded with the poignant existentialism of Blade Runner.
When Hyams entered the franchise with 2009’s Universal Soldier: Regeneration he was uninterested in aping or recapturing the feeling of the previous entries. The original Universal Soldier is a big 90s action blockbuster centring on a government program that biomechanically resurrects the bodies of Vietnam veterans to serve as an elite squad of super-soldiers, and the fallout that occurs when they go rogue after the memories of their old lives resurface. The film was notable for bringing together two big action stars in Jean-Claude Van Damme as the heroic but troubled Luc Deveraux and Dolph Lundgren as his sociopathic nemesis Andrew Scott. The story lightly touches upon the dehumanising nature of the military industrial complex and the role of memory as an essential part of humanity but its ultimate focus on spectacle is a little too broad to examine these themes in detail.
In Regeneration, Hyams took the opportunity to give weight to these faintly sketched themes. Remoulding Deveraux and Scott as tragic figures, Regeneration does away with the cheesy fun of the original and replaces it with a brooding, brutalist story of two men whose minds have been practically disintegrated by combat, thrown at each other once more by controlling organisations to wage a battle that has been fought over and over again innumerable times, all set against the industrial wasteland of the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant, a perfect symbol of the cruel negligence of the state.
For his return to the series in 2012 with Day of Reckoning, Hyams challenged himself yet again to make something unlike what came before. Following its amnesiac protagonist, John, the film is at its heart an exploration of a mind simultaneously formed and fractured by masculinity and the military.
The film very deliberately starts us inside the head of its protagonist, John (in a powerful performance by DTV action superstar, Scott Adkins), with the home invasion sequence described above shot in a long, unbroken POV sequence. It is a brutal opener, Hyams forcing us to witness the murder of John’s wife and daughter in the same way the posse force John to watch. In a way, the film never really leaves John’s head. Even when it does switch to third person angles and different characters, we never really know much more than John does at any given moment. We remain bonded to John’s perspective as he searches for his family’s killers: a separatist band of cloned UniSols led by the franchise’s former hero, Luc Deveraux, who has been transformed by his experiences into an intense Colonel Kurtz-like figure on a quest to liberate his cyber comrades from the shackles of their programming and stoke them into violent rebellion against the government who created them. Why John was targeted by Deveraux is unknown to the family man, who can only remember snatches of his life before the UniSols’ heinous attack.
Travelling with John, we begin to unravel, as he does, the mysteries behind his family’s murder and John's connection to Deveraux, but like the synaptic pathways of the brain, each answer branches off in five different directions, leading to ever more questions that seem undoubtedly part of an interconnected whole. Like a doleful, muscled up gumshoe with brain fog, John stalks and stumbles his way through a shady underworld of strobe-lit strip clubs and blood-spattered apartments, trying to make sense of a life that was quite literally erased by violence.
However, the world he returns to is an unfamiliar one, grown darker and more dangerous. During the home invasion that sent him into the hospital, there is a moment where John looks into the broken shards of a mirror lying on the floor, his beaten and bloody face staring hopelessly back at him. It now seems like the world itself has become that broken mirror, and around every corner, John finds the violence and brutality of his trauma reflected back at him. The first lead John gets in his search takes him to an unexpected murder scene, finding the man he was supposed to meet, Isaac, dead on the floor of his bedroom, the rest of the apartment trashed in a struggle reminiscent of John’s own home invasion experience. Wherever he goes, John is unable to escape the savagery of what he experienced.
At this point you’re probably thinking, “Well, it’s an action movie! Isn’t all this violence just par for the course?” And while yes, in any other action flick, these events would hardly be remarkable, the particular way in which Hyams frames violence in Day of Reckoning is anything but standard. In fact, for most of the film’s runtime violence and bloodshed are not portrayed with the stylised, dynamic glory more common to the action genre, instead borrowing from the conventions of horror to convey violence in a more chilling and repulsive light. The murder of John’s family is a scene that is heavily influenced by the ‘home invasion’ horror subgenre, right down to the ubiquitous masked intruders that populate those films. When John is attacked by Magnus, one of Deveraux’s brainwashed UniSol assassins, the camera captures Magnus in an expressionistic canted angle as the UniSol busts in the door wielding an axe, a shot that could have been lifted straight from a slasher film.
In the same scene, John is sent flying by Magnus into a mirror that’s hanging in the kitchen, the repeated image of the broken mirror connecting this violence to the original trauma of the murder of John’s family. Violence is a horrific thing, the film seems to be saying, and for John it is both an inescapable prison and a prism, refracting separate images of brutality into each other, blending them together like some nightmarish kaleidoscope, until it seems like John’s very identity has become inseparable from the violence that surrounds him.
Could he be a part of the violence?
Could the violence be a part of him?
The period in which Day of Reckoning was released, namely between the years of 2012-2013, saw a strangely coincidental slew of movies exploring the dark side of the male psyche and how that darkness can flower in any man, a subgenre that might be termed ‘Dark Macho’. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives examined Julian, a man caught up in an endless cycle of violence and revenge, and how his inability to disentangle himself from that cycle ultimately destroys him. Denis Villeneuve had a double whammy of Dark Macho movies in 2013 with both Prisoners and Enemy exploring stories of men confronting the evil within themselves in different ways. In Prisoners, Keller Dover kidnaps the suspected (and later proved innocent) abductor of his missing daughter, torturing him for information in successively more and more brutal sessions, participating in the same evil he believes he is crusading against. Enemy applies a more surreal angle to this theme, with Jake Gyllenhaal’s pair of doppelganger characters coveting and trying to sleep with each other’s female partners, a representation, as Villeneuve and Gyllenhaal have both claimed, of the subconscious and conscious personas of one man considering adultery. These films all examine the dark side of masculinity as a metaphysical prison of horrors, and in doing so, necessarily borrow from the horror genre itself to convey the chasm of brutality and impulse that all men might find within them. In Days of Reckoning, John is forced to confront this same chasm within himself.
The glimpses John receives of his past run counter to his memories of a loving, domestic life with his family. He encounters a cast of characters from a life he has no memory of, from Sarah, a stripper who claims to have shared a relationship with John, to Castello, a spiteful cargo smuggle whose severe disfigurement John is supposedly responsible for. John stumbles through these exchanges like a blackout drunk sifting through the mess of a particularly savage party the morning after, wracking their brain to remember just what the hell happened last night. Castello shows John footage of John murdering Isaac, the man whose body he discovered earlier. The trail of violence that John has been following is, in part at least, his own. The dark chasm he feared to be within him may have already swallowed him up long ago.
John’s quest for vengeance quickly spirals into an existential crisis, forcing him to question everything he has ever held faith in, even his own memories. Memories, it is gradually revealed, that are no more real than John himself is. In reality, John is a UniSol, created by the government for the single purpose of eliminating the threat of the rebel leader, Luc Deveraux. His memories were implanted to give him motivation for revenge, his wife and child were never murdered at the hands of Deveraux and his men, for his wife and child never existed to begin with. On top of this, he is not even the first John to exist, but is just one in a series of government clones, the first of whom, the John that everyone else seems to remember, was the John truly responsible for the trail of violence he has been following.
These revelations show a key point of difference Day of Reckoning has over other films in the Dark Macho subgenre. Whereas those movies tend to operate from the perspective that the darkness of masculinity is inherent in men, with outside events triggering the violence or evil within otherwise good (or at least morally ambivalent) men, Day of Reckoning marks itself out by pointing to other, more external origins of this dark influence.
John is a weaponised tool of the state, “merely arms and legs moving to the directive of another mind”, as Lundgren’s Andrew Scott might tell him. His emotions and principles have been manipulated by the military and the government for the purpose of combat, and while this idea is portrayed through a fantastical, sci-fi setup, it is a familiar situation to many who are used up and discarded by the real-world military industrial complex. However, such manipulation is not confined to the state, as Day of Reckoning reminds us. Parallels can be drawn between Deveraux’s separatist militia and any number of similar real-world militias whose recruitment processes rely on the radicalisation of (predominately) young men. The religious/cult overtones we see in the militia, with Deveraux as its godhead and Scott his high priest, further comments on the role religion can play as one of these manipulative forces. Day of Reckoning posits that perhaps more blame should be laid at these institutions’ feet for the dark influence they implant in the minds of men to carry out their own, selfish purposes. As Scott’s favoured slogan goes, “Your mind is not your own.”
However, Day of Reckoning is still a Dark Macho film, and it doesn’t give John such an easy moral escape. John is a newborn, less awakened from a coma than he was brought online for the first time. Like The Matrix, if John were to ask why his legs won’t carry him without the aid of a crutch he would be answered, “because you’ve never used them before.” But unlike Neo, John is unable to simply unplug himself from his fabricated reality because the programming of the military is hard coded into John’s being, both his body and his mind. The darkness is a part of him, regardless of who put it there, and he must contend with that.
Throughout the series, it is never made clear just how much the UniSols are flesh and blood and how much machine, but we do understand that they have a biology, and after John is awakened/switched on, both his physiology and his psychology are put into overdrive, his mind racing and tripping over itself to create order out of the chaos of its biological and technological programming. To further complicate matters, John is injected by Magnus, the UniSol assassin, with a counter-programming serum that fills John’s mind with visions of Luc Deveraux delivering a propagandistic screed urging John to join his rebellion. The dividing line between what John’s reality is and what he is merely seeing in his mind becomes intangible. In one scene, John looks into a mirror only to find his reflection replaced by Deveraux, who launches through the frame and struggles with John, trying to pull him in. John is operating on a psychological battlefield, dodging the influences of external parties like falling mortar shells. As an audience, we are filtering the story through John’s psyche, the mind of a soldier bred only to fight and serve, struggling to preserve the only humanity that remains to him, the memories of his family and his identification as a husband and father.
His mind is at war, and there must be a reckoning.
Carl Jung spoke of dreams as showing “the unvarnished truth” and that they reflect these truths back at us “when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.” John, the definition of a being whose consciousness has (not by his choice) strayed from its foundations, is dreaming in the waking world, his subconscious trying to reveal to him the unvarnished truths of his nature while his conscious mind tries to piece together his fractured identity. As such, the characters and events of Day of Reckoning often become veiled in the mythic, Jungian symbolism of dreams.
John’s feelings towards Deveraux and his UniSols, his fury and repulsion, can be viewed as both the intentional pre-conditioning of John’s military programming as well as the subconscious fear/truth that John is a UniSol himself, and that he is more like those he is chasing than he wants to believe. The UniSols are portrayed as all the things John fears himself to be: brain-washed, bloodthirsty machines listening only to their own base impulses and the orders of their fascistic overlords. They dwell in subterranean tunnels (the underworld a common Jungian symbol of the unconscious), where they guzzle bottles of bourbon and brawl with each other at the slightest provocation. They share more in common with the orcs of Middle Earth than to any human and perhaps this is not a coincidence, as in Tolkien’s work the orcs symbolised the corrupted footmen of unbridled militarism and industrialisation. The UniSols play out as the dark reflection of John, another reason why mirrors and mirror images are often present in scenes where John encounters them. These men are John’s Shadow, the manifestation of dark truths repressed by an individual.
John encounters his Shadow in a few forms throughout the course of the film, first in the assassin Magnus, then in his antecedent clone self, then once more in his final encounter with Luc Deveraux. Each of these encounters marks a progression in John’s conversion of his unconscious fears into conscious truths. Magnus, who starts out as a government sleeper agent and later becomes brainwashed by Deveraux’s serum, represents John’s as yet unfounded fear that he is the weaponised tool of others, no different to the UniSol rebels themselves. Fittingly Magnus comes into John’s world as a speechless, violent foot-soldier, carrying out the bidding of whichever master happens to be in control, first the military and then Deveraux.
John next meets his previous clone, but only after he has realised his fears and accepted that he is in fact a UniSol. Other John is more reasonable than Magnus and makes for quite a pitiable character, representing John’s conscious rationalisation of and sadness at his situation. Other John lives in a ramshackle cabin in the swamplands, surrounded by all too empty bourbon bottles and walls full of unsettling self-painted murals of Sarah, the woman whose love freed him from Deveraux’s hold, a desperate effort on Other John’s part to keep from forgetting her face. He serves as a mournful reflection of our John, who has been keeping himself in an unconscious stasis of dishonesty in an attempt to hold onto the images of the women who give his life meaning.
When John finally reaches Deveraux himself, it is after John refuses to have the implant that holds the memories of his family removed, a confirmation of these memories as essential to his sense of self. As they inevitably fight, Deveraux tells John “You’re only killing your own father”, and indeed with Deveraux’s shaven head covered in black and white war-paint (perhaps representing truth emerging from the unconscious shadows), it feels more like John is fighting a concept than a man. Deveraux stands symbolically as the last barrier between John’s total acceptance of the truth of himself as well as his own agency in the world, an agency he had both unconsciously and consciously feared was beyond him. Once John at last overcomes him, Deveraux surrenders himself to John willingly, deeming him worthy of achieving his self-actualisation.
It is important to note that each of John’s encounters with these shadow selves ends with John violently murdering his shadowy counterpart, as John’s relationship with violence mirrors his journey from unconscious fear to conscious understanding of himself, from helplessness to control. John’s initial aversion to violence is in part due to its association with the trauma of his family’s murder but also due to his unconscious unwillingness to acknowledge his programmed military purpose. Acknowledging this truth means confronting the fact that his family never existed. However, as John is gradually forced to accept his true nature, these feelings of fear and helplessness around violence loosen their grip, giving him more agency to wield the violence he was built for to his own purposes.
This is the most boldly captured in the scene where John unlocks his superhuman strength during his rematch with Magnus. Taking place in a sporting goods store, John progresses from the scrambling, defensive moves we saw him using in their previous skirmish to the offensive, acrobatic attacks more befitting of a super-soldier. If John’s first fight with Magnus was shot like a horror movie, this fight is shot like an out-and-out action movie, in particular, a Scott Adkins action movie, with the martial artist whipping out the stylish kicks and graceful brutality that made him the darling of the DTV action scene. Magnus, the pawn of both the government and Deveraux, serves as a symbol of the power structures that would seek to control John, and just as symbolically, John knocks the ever-loving fuck out of Magnus’ head with a baseball bat, a poetic assertion of his own agency in the face of these power structures and a great moment of catharsis for the audience as we get to see this action movie embraces its own action movie-ness.
But the agency that comes with violence also carries a heavy price for John. In order to achieve his autonomy, he has to become the very thing that he fears might be his true nature: another killer, just like the rest of the UniSols. “I’m different than you,” John tells his clone early on in their encounter, but John is soon forced to shoot his mirror self, prompting Other John to retort with his final breath, “You’re just like me.” When John finally slays Deveraux, Luc tells his symbolic son, “There is no end…always another John.” In this world of violent cycles and mirror selves that John finds himself in, how can he truly differentiate himself?
The answer lies in John’s memories of his wife and daughter. These memories are the only thing remind John that he is not just a killing machine, nor just a soldier, but that he is a human, a husband, a father. In one scene, Andrew Scott laments to a congregation of UniSol rebels, “They gave us nothing…nothing inside but the void in our soul”, and while the memories of John’s family are merely the fabrications of military programming, the enduring mix of pain and love that these memories give to John are the very thing that allow him to keep him from falling into the void and instead to face existence with a full soul.
Having killed his father, John steps into Deveraux’s role, becoming the new leader of the UniSol rebels. John has conquered the demons that once caused him terror. He has become a fully self-actualised being.
Of course, there is still a danger that John will lose himself to shadow, that the vengeance, which he now turns on the military industrial complex which created him, might consume him, that his men might turn on him on the whim of their impulsive natures, or that another John might come for him as Deveraux prophesied.
There’s always monsters in the house, with no way to completely eradicate the darkness that lives within us or that surrounds us in the world. There is only the understanding of it, the careful balancing of the self atop these unruly waves of shadow, and the remembrance of those that fill our souls.