film is about Lee Marvin's brutalizing experiences in World War II, which dehumanized him and left him desperately searching for his humanity. Critic David Thomson has written that the character of Walker is actually dead throughout the entire movie and the events of the film are a dream of the accumulating stages of revenge. Others have also considered this concept; Brynn White has questioned whether or not Walker is a mortal or a ghost, "a vaporous embodiment of bitter vengeance barely clinging to Boorman's variegated frames" and Boorman has commented: "He could just as easily be a ghost or a shadow". Some critics consider Point Blank, "a haunted, dream-like film that draws upon the spatial and temporal experiments of modernist European art cinema", especially the "time-fractured" films of French director Alain Resnais. Style Point Blank combines elements of film noir with stylistic touches of the European nouvelle vague. The film features a fractured time-line (similar to the novel's non-linear structure), disconcerting narrative rhythms (long, slow passages contrasted with sudden outbursts of violence) and a carefully calculated use of film space (stylized compositions of concrete riverbeds, sweeping bridges, empty prison cells). Boorman credits Marvin with coming up with a lot of the visual metaphors in the film. Boorman said that as the film progressed, scenes would be filmed monochromatically around one color (the chilly blues and grays of Acker's apartment, Dickinson's butter yellow bathrobe, the startling red wall in Vernon's penthouse) to give the proceedings a "sort of unreality". To establish Walker's mythic stature, Soderbergh noted in the commentary, the film cuts from a shot of Walker swimming from Alcatraz to a shot of him on a ferry overlooking the same island while a woman on the loudspeaker describes the impossibility of leaving the island. Soderbergh said that this contrast of the character's ease of escape with the loudspeaker's monologue makes the Walker character "mythic immediately". Legacy Point Blank is hailed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die as "The perfect thriller in both form and vision." Film historian David Thomson calls the film a masterpiece. Thomson adds, "[...] this is not just a cool, violent pursuit film, it is a wistful dream and one of the great reflections on how movies are fantasies that we are reaching out for all the time—it's singin' in the rain again, the white lie that erases night." Director Steven Soderbergh