Beautiful film; some thoughts...
Like so many of Michael Mann's films, but even moreso, this is basically a genuine arthouse flick dressed up in commercial blockbuster clothes; a cinematic trojan horse of sorts. No surprise that audiences hated it and it's still struggling to gain back the praise it truly deserves. I've seen it only once in full and now I'm watching it again in small parts, just absorbing the fleeting beauty and visceral power of certain scenes, shots, gestures, moments. Everything is infused with such a pure sense of the "now," there is no past or future, just total enveloping present crashing upon the viewer like ocean waves. Everything looks totally real yet strangely unreal; the skies are a vivid purple or an unearthly gray or warm orange-brown, always smeared with clouds, like some radical impressionist painting.
Everything looks so vibrant and alive, you can practically smell and taste the atmosphere. I don't like most digitally shot films but Mann understands it and utilizes the format exquisitely. There's no way this could look anywhere as beautiful on 35mm. The digital is important too because of this totally digitized, mechanized, globalized world it portrays, with everyone constantly wired, watching or being watched, talking on cell phones, and so on, and as a result often more alienated from each other (I love that shot of Crockett and Tubbs on the club roof near the beginning, both on separate phone calls but standing right next to each other; it reminds of a shot from early in Antonioni's L'avventura, of all the vacationed couples silently standing adjacent to each other on the bottom of the rocky island, each staring idly in different directions).
Of course the film is already "dated" (as most modernist films are), the technology is squarely 2005/6, but this is irrelevant as we're living in basically the same world, just even more advanced and digitally incorporated. In these respects, I feel this film is one of the few really truthful and important modern works that addresses the inescapable nature of technology in society. Many recent films set in the present try to hide the pervasive culture of techno-fetishism, dishonestly clinging to some image of the pre-digital world, as the artist either doesn't know how or doesn't want to address all the issues inherent to such matters. But Vice tackles them head-on; or doesn't so much tackle as "issues" in any didactic way but simply tells the truth and hides nothing in its depiction of the world.
It's a film that never seems to stands still. The shots are mostly brief and at the beginning, of course, we're quite literally suddenly dropped into this alien world, in the midst of everything -- no overt exposition given, just left to piece things together for ourselves. It's an amazing effect, one of the most brilliant openings to a film I've seen. I don't like the director's cut compared to the theatrical because, among other things, it does away with this jarring intro -- I think Mann was perhaps too disheartened about the negative reactions upon release and tried to cut the film to be a bit more more accessible and ingratiating to the average viewer. Ironically it's a film where the theatrical cut is more elliptical, artier and impenetrable than the lengthier, so-called director's cut.
I love this film already and it feels to me infinitely re-watchable in it's pure sensory density and overall richness. It's a heady mix of the dangerous and the entrancing and the sensual, an appropriately fragmented picture of our late-capitalist surveillance society and the almost total sense of displacement that plagues modern man: man now without a real "home." Man without even an idyllic safe haven to dream of. Those countless seaside paradises that earlier Mann men longed for (Frank in Thief, Will in Manhunter, Max in Collateral, Neil in Heat etc.) are now readily achievable; one can get to them quite quickly by boat. But this newfound freedom and loss of boundaries, all things super-globalized and everything one could want readily available, only leads to further existential pain, sadness and ennui, inevitable loss of connection and relationships. It's a long way from the static shots and the static lives of Frank and Jesse in much of Thief; there is little stasis, emotional or physical, to be found in the world of Miami Vice. In the end, there is no escape from the flux; there is only an endless drifting along its streams.