It begins with an overture. The studio credits, the top-billed talent, and the title, simple white text vibrating like a tense engine. Elliot Goldenthal’s score, with atmospheric strings from the Kronos Quartet, sings over the opening shots of Los Angeles waking up. A Metro Rail train glides through the darkness before our bank-robbing antihero Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) disembarks and walks through a busy hospital. The gears are turning on a story with an inevitable conclusion, even before we’ve met Neil’s double, the only person in the city (world?) who gets how and why he operates, and is therefore fated to destroy him: LAPD lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). This is Michael Mann’s Heat, now available on Netflix, and it’s the closest a Hollywood action film has gotten to an opera.
