Accepting the job to direct the video for some songs must be nerve-racking. If the song is amazing itself, it needs an amazing video to go with it.
So I can only imagine that director Joseph Kahn must've felt a sense of duty as he took the job to direct the video for "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse. It's a 6 minute epic rock song that needed one of the most ridiculously great music videos of our time. Luckily for everyone, Kahn met the challenge and then ran right through it. Today we're watching it on Music Video Relapse.
The main concept of the video is a loose narrative set in the wild west, where a cowboy (Russ Bain) meets a woman (Cassandra Bell), and then a villain (Richard Brake) captures her, causing him to have to rescue her. It's a fairly standard adventure/western storyline, but it isn't the storyline that is important here, it's the style and the references.
On top of the low-budget, spaghetti western film style, Kahn packs elements of low-budget sci-fi (the guns shoot lasers), and low-budget kung fu movies (most of the fights feature kung fu-ish moves). The operative idea here is low-budget - Kahn has taken the tropes from cheap genre films of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and mashed them together, resulting in an atmosphere where really anything fits.
References and just weird shit are packed into this video. After starting off with a reference to the classic prarie house inside-looking-out image from the 1956 John Ford film The Searchers, we get a reference to the statue of liberty in the sand from The Planet of The Apes. The Muse wiki has a list of films that the video references, which includes Once Upon a Time in China, Blade Runner, and Mad Max.
Probably the reference that I see the most is, oddly enough, the original Star Wars film, which itself was a low budget sci fi film that borrowed elements from spaghetti westerns and kung fu movies. It's also the first thing I think of when I see Muse as a tiny, blue hologram.
Kahn's post about how the video was made under his own Vimeo upload reveals that the film was made in Romania on the set left behind by the production of Cold Mountain. His claim that producer Richard Weager sold his liver and testicles to help fund the production seems a little fishy, but I wouldn't put it out of the question.
References aside, the real triumph of this video is that it manages to somehow match "Knights of Cydonia" in its intensity, style, and - most importantly - its sense of irony. There's a sort of "way too over the top" quality to Muse's track that this video runs with and that perfectly fits in with the spaghetti western meets sci fi feel. A few degrees in another direction and it could feel like this video takes itself too seriously, but Kahn manages to hit the right note.
One of the weirdest moments is when we get an intentional look at the ostensible crew via a mirror, which is revealed to be a bunch of guys full on 1970s/80s clothing. The camera operator is a fat old man, just the kind of grizzled old crew member I'd imagine you could get for cheap in 1981. It's one of the many details that this video has to offer that make it an amazing addition to the mid-2000s music video catalog. And we didn't even talk about the unicorn.
