When Hattori Hanzo presents the Bride with a samurai sword in Kill Bill Vol. 1, he notes modestly: "This my finest sword. If in your journey you should encounter God, God will be cut." I would also suggest that if God were to watch the complete four-hour version of Kill Bill, which currently exists only in some Miramax vault and in my own imagination, He would be cut by that, too.

Now that the full shape of Kill Bill is finally visible, it's clear that from the mulch of a thousand grindhouse kung fu movies and spaghetti westerns, Quentin Tarantino has created nothing less than the richest pop-mythological soil that the cinema has offered since the days of the late, and sincerely mourned, George Lucas. Kill Bill has loose ends and ragged edges that were made for fanfic, and more importantly, it creates a comic book universe that is completely believable and completely preposterous. For better or worse, this movie is an engine that will drive trash cinema for the next thirty years.

As one character in Vol. 2 notes, you don't compare a Hattori Hanzo sword with another Hanzo sword. Still, comparisons between the two films are probably inevitable. Like The Return of the King, Kill Bill Vol. 2 is demonstrably richer and more accomplished than its prequel. The fact that both The Return of the King and Vol. 2 were shot simultaneously with their earlier chapters, meaning that the budget, directorial energy, and quality of the acting for each installment were essentially the same, implies that time, the luxury of living with the raw footage of a movie for an additional year or six months, is the only variable that matters.

Somehow, though, I liked Vol. 1 more. Maybe I miss O-Ren Ishii, "half Chinese, half Japaneshee," a ridiculous character who nonetheless lives in my imagination as do few other characters in the movies. Or it could be that I find kung fu films more seductive than spaghetti westerns, although I'll admit that the Texas-style burial in Vol. 2 is the single best sequence in the entire epic. The most important point, however, as I noted in my original review, is that this epic demands total immersion, and that somewhere there exists a perfect four-hour version of Kill Bill that will wound God Himself.