It seems that a successful Hollywood script is one that seems to do something new by recycling trusted parts of bankable film ideas. This one — to judge from the tickets sold — picked good enough bits. Father stuff; coming of age stuff; techno; Karate Kid; Iron Giant.

But a viewer demographic must be a vexing thing to these factory filmmakers, because some viewers will see the cobbled together being and see parts that were missing, parts that would have made the being stronger. Such was the case with me because I saw this foremost as a boxing movie and I looked for the cinematic thrills that could have been there.

After all, the boxing movie is one of the primary paths where we evolve our notion of the camera. Scorcese of course, but many others brought us novel ways to think about who we are in the choreography of how a closed bit of the world dances.

And that wasn’t here even though our combatants are computer generated and our greatest advances in camera choreography have been in cameras whose placement and movement are not restricted by physical bounds.

Nope. None of that here. We may as well have just been watching muscle cars in a demolition derby.

Boxing, some might say, is the only true sport. One man against another and the first one that cannot continue loses. Sport — at least this notion — is about losing; the dream is about winning. It is a strange thing, the notion of contest. It is between two men, but if it were truly pure, they would go off and conduct the contest in private, as many do with say the contest of chess.

But this seems to have been designed more for spectators. Rules having to do with space. With gloves and rests designed to make it last long enough to be worth traveling to gather in large numbers. Commentary and statistics that one can carry from contest to contest. A personality industry so we believe we have some choice in who we prefer.

These are exploited here, well enough I must admit. But there is no dance.

My notion of noir is simple: it is a form of narrative that recognizes that there is a viewer, and that the presence of the viewer reshapes the world to make an interesting story. That is, various unlikely circumstances occur; portholes to visibility by us as ghosts are opened; knowledge by the characters of what is going on are gated by what we know in a too and fro of dominance.

It is, in other words, a world where the very presence of a viewer controls various aspects. A central character (usually one, usually a random man) struggles with how he is buffeted; comes perhaps to understand it and in the normal form achieves points in the game that puts him at the same level as the viewer.

We are a sophisticated people, and this has been around for a long time — and in cinema and cinematically influenced art as well. So we have some clever adaptations and twists. One common form is the massive, all-controlling conspiracy. Another is the modern detective story where the discovery is about the detective’s self as much as grokking the murder. Yet another is the con story where we follow the controller’s actions but only at the end discover the means of manipulation.

Here we have another variant, which is essentially a detective story to discover who is the control over the world that is manipulating our random guy, aptly named Smiley. It shares elements of the three examples above, but allows for a deeper texture because it recalls worlds that have dynamics we understand. So a talented filmmaker can reference these.

And boy do we have a talented filmmaker!

One world is simply the world of men with power and how they perform small ballets in their relationships one to another to be top dog, using deniable, even unconscious tactics. This becomes the foremost world in this film, and gives our main actors something to use. All of them are first rate; all respond with insights from the craft. Kathy Bates is perfectly placed as a displaced analyst with enough vision to value ‘her boys’ for their sexual attractiveness at the top of the heap we see.

Another world is the cold war. It was hot when the book appeared, but the book already was treating it as a sort of fantasy world that came with prefabricated rules. In some ways, it has taken until now for this perspective to fully mature so that this film in this time can be far deeper than the original novel was in its time. Frankly, in its time it was trash for airport reading, of the Grisham variety.

Yet another world is that of Britain in the early seventies. This was a bleak country, still not recovered from the war while its adversaries were soaring. It clung to the US instead of the continent. There is a wistful desire to please the master here that hits home for this US viewer, knowing what I know about the relationships of the intel communities.

And we have the inner, personal world of loves, companions, friends, trust and sex. These are always where the bones of a story rest, and are broken.

All of these are noir worlds, all manipulated by various controls (Controls, as a proper noun).

All of these are masterfully called, merged and presented with us unsure of what we control.

Already, I have this as a candidate for one of my two rare selections of the most important films of 2012 (my ‘Fours’).

See it. See it in a theater.

I was directed to this because I am interested in cinematic choreography. From a practical perspective, that usually means martial arts.

Further, it means Asian films. But gee they sure get tedious after the first few unless there really is a master behind the camera. So I was sent to this. The idea was to skip the original because this one is directed by the performer himself.

I am struck by a truth discovered by other means: actors do acting, not filmmaking. They are instruments. A few understand how to act in a way that truly supports the intentions of the filmmaker, but the reality is that they are in different businesses. Often, the last person to understand the dynamics at work are the actors. An example is Harrison Ford in “Blade Runner.” It probably is his best work as an actor, and he still today has no idea how he was as manipulated as much as his replicant character.

So when you put an actor in charge, you sometimes get interesting stuff, but rarely good films. And this guy is an acrobat, not an actor. What we end up with what you might expect if a brickmason decided he was an architect and made everything including the furniture out of bricks.

I was briefly part of a startup which would have been able to extract things like the movements of the Thai martial arts in this film and compare them to the few Hong Kong- produced fight moves. But it all just seemed the same smacking around to me.

I am not a fan of Woo, and the reason becomes more stark when you compare this to Zhang’s work.

Zhang creates a world of grace in which people move, affected by the laws of that world. They can act, based on the values in their souls, but those values can be pure or perverted as they are drawn from the world. When that world is conflated with the ‘the land’ of China, well then the battles matter. We can pull great cinematic strokes from this.

Woo in contrast, creates a world we can only call bulky. It is stuffed with things, things in great numbers. Some of those exist only as units in the sea of similar objects and most humans are treated this way. Above that are some legendary characters. This ‘two kinds of human’ concept messes with Woo’s delivering the battles.

Battle photography, in order to work, needs make choices. You can focus on the tactics, and how the seas of soldiers basically outwit each other. You can focus on the immediate chaos and the brutality on a human level with the massive horror it brings on individuals. Or you can go for the sweep of the world, as if it were yet another weather pattern. (This is what Kurosawa brought us.) Or, if you are from Hong Kong, you can just use the masses as background through which our heros move with superhuman agility, killing hundreds just because.

Woo has decided to have it all, all four of these in the same grand battles. It is unnerving if you are a serious viewer of film. As soon as you have settled into a contract with the filmmaker to enter the world he creates, he swaps it out opportunistically. This is a cinematic gluttony that one can see in modern Shanghai. There is no sense, so when things are made large the nonsense becomes overwhelming.

There is a minifilm in here, possibly 15 minutes or so, that you can cobble together of the parts that focus on the beauty Chiling Lin in her first role. She plays the wife of the main hero, the desire for whom by the Prime Minister may have been the reason for the war. Woo in these segments moves into even territory of Korean Kim Ki-Duk. Her body moves as calligraphy, she speaks timeless phrases. Her grace in the tea ceremony is hypnotizing.

There are only three ways to turn on your mind. The third is too dangerous to even sketch.

The most common is to allow it to do what it wants, tracing known pathways and presenting known patterns. All imagination comes home to rest.

But then there is art, which in my book is able to coax the imagination out of the familiar. Sometimes this immediately extends what you know, making your house bigger. Sometimes it centers on that oldest of organizational keys: space. Sometimes it is cinematic. That’s what we have here, sometimes.

Oh, there is the story-stuff, inherited from a Belgian comic. That is discardable. And there is the cloying story-boarding of Spielberg who I believe is living with the growing fear that he will die never having made something essential.

But behind all that is the WETA parts of this film. Spielberg does his spiel in telling the story. And he gets the lion’s share of the money and credit because he owns the property. But he turned all the spatial management over to Peter Jackson and his special effects house, WETA. And we are far better off for it.

Elsewhere, I have celebrated what WETA digital fx has done, which is to take the concepts pioneered by Pixar and extend them in deliberate, engineered excess. The Pixar idea was to reinvent the personality of the camera. Since it is a virtual perspective, it can use space and movement beyond what we accept at the range of a physical camera. Much of Pixar’s success, I believe, is in how they reframe who the viewer is in the story by reinventing how our eye discovers.

The Pixar ideal is to do this in ways that are imperceptible. The WETA philosophy is to always be a bit beyond the comfort level, always overloading our mental abilities to sort things out spatially. This both gives an exhilarating film experience and on each viewing an extension of how the mind sees. It literally expands our ability to perform spatial reasoning — which for most of us is most of our reasoning.

We saw this in the Lord of the Rings projects, which despite cumbersome story and distracting heroics were visually aggressive. I believe that ‘King Kong’ was made solely to perfect some insights, which I presume come from founder Jamie Selkirk.

(The weta is a species of insect unique to New Zealand which comes in a broad variety, filling the role that in the rest of the world is taken by mammals. (New Zealand has none.). A common characteristic, the one every kiwi child knows, is the ability to jump aggressively. They have been essentially unchanged for 500 billion times longer than the average film, yet every jump of the bush weta is unique. Without wings, they have the ability to perturb their path. You can see the analogy in the movements of the camera in earlier projects, like ‘King Kong.’)

There are three scenes here where it is obvious that Spielberg turned over complete control. The first is a seabattle between two ships. This is pretty darn masterful, because the Pixar/WETA camera philosophy has been used in an ironic, comic way in the later ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ episodes. You can see the anti-irony here where the battle is truly between the inventors and masters of the treasured technique, and the Disney (and now Pixar itself) thieves. I was ecstatic.

The second is a chase scene through a Morrocan village which was a pure advance over anything that has come before. Here there is no irony, though movie buffs will find a great many references to other chase scenes as reimagined by better camera perspectives. Two I will tell you to look for are the reference to the Geena Davis stagecoach chase in ‘Cutthroat Island’ and the little girl parkour chase in the recent ‘Columbiana.’

See this in 3D.