The Raid

Gareth Evans went to Indonesia to make a documentary about pencak silat and found Iko Uwais there, working as a delivery driver for a phone company in Jakarta. His real project was a far larger prison film, Berandal; after 18 months of development the cost would not come down, so he turned to something smaller and simpler, shot in Jakarta for about 1.1 million dollars. Uwais and Yayan Ruhian designed the fights themselves, during pre-production. Evans did not tie everyone in the building to one fighting language: on the official Sony Pictures Classics site he says making every character a silat practitioner would be illogical and boring, and would narrow the techniques on display. The film won the Midnight Madness audience award at the Toronto festival. Which copy you open matters. The Indonesian version carries a score by Aria Prayogi and Fajar Yuskemal; the international one Sony put out as The Raid: Redemption carries a completely different score, written from scratch by Mike Shinoda and Joseph Trapanese. A good fit if you take the squad being pinned on the sixth floor and climbing to the fifteenth, where the boss waits, as the whole structure. Not for you if you want a story built between the characters; the talking scenes are kept as short as possible.