Not four films so much as one movie,
ten hours, fractured & spliced until the weakest
offers something important like the jazzy bridge
in an otherwise pounding rock song.
I get to enjoy the longer journey, pause for breaks, resume, &
not feel as though I’ve lost a button on my favorite shirt.
Few minutes of back story (origin), &
it’s full-speed to 2 a.m.—
one insightful action sequence leading to the next,
as if a minute-by-minute weather forecast.
I appreciate the screenwriters’ choices
to use fewer gimmicks than in older films,
relying instead on grit, tension, a grim illusion
of reality—the style of so many post-9/11 films.
Helps me experience the moment as if I’m in it,
although it was years ago & I’m a different man,
the same way 007 is a different man:
less dazzle, bleaker of outlook & method,
honed by experience as he should be
after half a century at war.
–
Ace Boggess is the author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, River Styx, cream city review, and American Literary Review, among others. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.