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This chapter covers A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU (an acronym for Police Tactical Unit) and Breaking News which carry Johnnie To's name as the solo director. A Hero Never Dies marks the phase in the Milkyway company where the credit “Directed by Johnnie To” re-appears after a brief period in which To functioned as the chief executive overseeing the production of Milkyway's films rather than merely directing the films. Running out of Time and The Mission were both released in 1999 in the wake of the HKIFF tribute, and both films had the effect of confirming To's newly found status as a stand-alone auteur. PTU and Breaking News, released in 2003 and 2004 respectively, are mature examples of To's work in the genre and they show a tendency towards formalism — a sign that To was taking his status as auteur more seriously. To is considered a craftsman auteur, one able to craft superb sequences and integrate them seamlessly into the narratives.

As Michael Komanecky reveals in Chapter 12, Serra’s notoriety was embodied and spread through a proliferation of largely laudatory images. Public representations of Serra and Spanish culture abounded after the late 19^th century with the most notable examples being Bierstadt’s monumental landscape of the Spanish landing in Monterey that now hangs in the grand stairwell of the East Front of the Capital, McGroarty’s “Mission Play” that played before millions in San Gabriel, and the monumental statue of Serra placed in the U.S. Statuary Hall in 1931.

This chapter discusses a number of feature film projects that James Cameron developed as a writer and producer. While writing the screenplay for Aliens (1986), Cameron had also been commissioned to write what became the original draft of the sequel to First Blood (1982), entitled Rambo: The Mission (1985). In the early 1990s, Cameron was attached to write and direct a new film adaptation of Stan Lee's Marvel Comics character, Spider-Man. He also wrote the screenplays of Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995), and created the television series Dark Angel in 2000, starring Jessica Alba. He later produced Solaris (2001), Sanctum (2011), and a film presentation of a live Cirque du Soleil show in 2011.

In the mainstream American bunker imaginary, the communal shelter repels by its very nature. Indeed, for all its ideological basis in the defense of freedom from the forces of communism, the communal shelter works primarily to express ambivalence towards the bunker fantasy and the shelter society per se. Consequently, it is the space within the bunker fantasy that most readily affords critical articulations of the cost and dangers of nuclearity. That critical affordance comes nearly always at the price of negativity: in the American nuclear imaginary no one is safe when sheltering outside of his own home. Critical public-shelter texts argued that the only way to imagine a resolution to the crisis faced by the world of the early 1960s was through the form of the bunker fantasy.