I was an engineering major in college. This may explain why I had no idea there was a defined sub-genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama known as a revenge play. Hamlet is the best-known revenge play, with its theme of the son seeking vengeance for his father's death and eventually leading to the death of most of the characters directly and peripherally involved in the plot. But it turns out that Shakespeare was just an old softie when compared with the dramatists who concentrated on this form of tragedy in the early 1600's.
One of the big names in the field was Thomas Middleton. Many scholars now think that Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare on some plays, helping to write some scenes and revising others to get to the forms in which we now know them. But one of Middleton's juiciest works may be a play entitled The Revenger's Tragedy. It was published anonymously when it came out in 1606 and later was attributed to Cyril Tourneur. The people who study these things say the style is unmistakably Middleton's and he now tends to get the credit.
The Wikipedia listing for the play states that the work "was ignored for many years and viewed by some critics as the product of a diseased mind." Fast forward a few hundred years and Alex Cox enters the picture. Cox wrote and directed cult favorites such as Repo Man and Sid And Nancy. Supposedly he tripped across the text of the Middleton play and decided it was his kind of story. But of course, he would want to update the play with his punk sensibility and defiance of conventional genre categorization.
The 2004 DVD release of the 2002 film contains a commentary track, a "making of" documentary, and four extended interviews with people involved with the film (including a professor of English Literature at Oxford). These let me figure out that Cox has taken some serious liberties with the original work. He has introduced new characters, tacked on an ending not found in the play, and had a writer create a completely new script. The screenplay mixes Middleton's tongue-twisting 1600's language with modern slang and profanities. Since I'm not familiar with the original, it's easy for me to review the film as its own entity, rather than having to make a mental comparison with the source material.
Cox has set the story in the near future of Liverpool, England (He made the film on location in the city and employed all local labor for the crew. Most of the actors have an association with the city as well.) An establishing shot opens with a satellite orbiting a strangely altered Earth. We see the UK decimated and missing large chunks of land, while France seems to be gone completely. We move down to a rubble-filled, rundown street. A city bus comes around a corner and slowly crashes into a derelict car in the middle of the street. The camera enters the bus and we see that everybody on board, including the driver, is dead. Flies buzz over the bloody corpses. Then a single survivor raises his head, gets his bearings, and jumps off the bus. Thus the dramatic entrance of the main avenging character, Vindici (All Middleton's character names are Latin/Italian references to their characters.)
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