On the whole Tony Scott’s movies led in directions I don’t particularly want cinema to go; but he was first out of the gate in the game of the millennium, the race to change the mainstream into something kinetic and caricatured and fixated on dopamine and neurochemistry as much as drama and narrative. The results have left us standing in a certain amount of rubble. But Scott ran that gauntlet first and with dignity intact, bolstered by an ad-man’s eye for which way the winds were blowing, by being the absolute right man at the right time — never an achievement to dismiss out of hand. Plus the differences between his fizzing caffeinated un-CGI instincts and the bloodless cartoon scowling going on in films supposedly aping the Tony Scott approach became unquestionable, even to those of us who wished the question would stop coming up.
Hence Domino, one of the most singular films of the last decade: a film which boils over like an overheated stew while also being abstract and unreal enough to hang as an art installation; a film that comments upon your opinion about it before the credits have even got going; a film which it turns out no one but Tony Scott and Richard Kelly could or should have made.