i watched
Sorcerer (1977) -
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076740/reference/
William Friedkin's version of The Wages Of Fear.
The story is about a group of 4 men who, for diverse reasons, find themselves in a tiny town somewhere in South America. Broke and with little hope, they accept to drive a convoy of trucks carrying extremely unstable dynamite.
The film has a fairly bizarre introduction, with 4 sequences that are meant to explain how these 4 individuals came to be in the town, and how little they have to live for. Bizarre because they are of very uneven lengths (there's a character that has a 1 minute scene, another has a 5 minute scene, then a 10 minute scene, etc and frankly it's confusion to try to understand why we are being shown these disjointed scenes - one in Mexico, one in Jerusalem, another in the US, etc.
Also, in these scenes, there's other characters as well; they are shown with prominence by the camera, have dialogue, have conflict with the "protagonist", so by the 15 minute mark you're already trying to keep in mind 10+ faces to determine how relevant they are to the plot.
From IMDb's "Alternate Versions" page:
The European version of the film was re-edited and shortened by CIC, the European distributor, without director William Friedkin's permission. The prologue sequences set in New York, Paris, Vera Cruz and Israel that show what happened to the main characters and why they had to flee to South America, were changed to flashbacks running throughout the film.
.. which is probably a sound decision. The point of the story is that these 4 guys are in this town *now*, how they got there is secondary to the story.
Anyway, these 4 criminals are now in a desperate, poor mining town in rural south america. There's a fire at an oil well, and the only way to cap it is with an explosion. The mining company owns some crates of old dynamite, but they have been stored poorly and the nitroglycerin has seeped out, making the transport of said crates extremely dangerous - this is a suicide mission.
Given that the characters are already on the brink of suicide, they accept.
First off, the film has some *spectacular* photography. There's a very great number of scenes that are filmed absolutely spectacularly, now, if you've been watching film in the last 20 years, with better film stock and maybe some good enhancements or tasty CGI, you probably have equally good films that you can easily compare to this, but in 1977 this would have been a spectacle.
Also, there's a number of absolutely stunning explosions. And i'm not talking about Michael Bay shit here, actual pyrotechnics with stuff that really goes boom. I thought Deepwater Horizon was great as a disaster film, but Sorcerer has some fucking incredible kabooms. Shame that a very plot-relevant explosion towards the end is instead very badly done, because by that time we were expecting is as the kaboom climax.
Also Friedkin went with some interesting choices of color in a few scenes, that add to the whole visual experience. It's not perfect, it's certainly not Space Odyssey, but it's a great film on its own merit.
Would happily recommend;
7.5/10 - has some failings, but it's worth it for what it does do well.