The Lost Epic of John Woo: Reevaluating Nicolas Cage’s ‘Windtalkers’ and the Cost of Hollywood Homogenization

Film and Animation

The trajectory of John Woo’s Hollywood career remains one of the most fascinating "what-if" narratives in modern cinema. A maestro of the Hong Kong "heroic bloodshed" genre, Woo arrived in the United States in the early 1990s with a reputation for redefining action through a lens of operatic violence, liturgical symbolism, and a