"It's possible, but it isn't interesting," says Erik Lonnrot (Peter Boyle) early in "Death and the Compass", "Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but a hypothesis may not." That line, taken straight from the Jorge Luis Borges story upon which this film is based, proves to be the ultimate undoing of Lonnrot, a Holmesian detective investigating a series of murders in an unnamed city in the future. Muddying the films' waters considerably is "Death and the Compass'" origins as a fifty-minute short that has since been extended to feature length. Much of the added footage is almost nonsensical, seeking to expand upon the idea that this future world is ruled by a fascist, bureaucratically-obsessed poseur monarchy. The end result is a film that plays like the child of "Brazil," "Robocop," and every first year film student's end-of-semester experimental short subject. Typical of Alex Cox's style, you begin to get the feeling that perhaps the screenplay, direction, casting, costumes, score, and art design were all handled by crew members with radically differing conceptions of what the film was about and who belligerently refused to share their thoughts on the matter with the other departments. It can make for intriguing viewing if you're in the right mindset, but you can't help but feel that it's a missed opportunity. Oh, and a warning: the description of the plot given on this page contains a major spoiler for the film -- the true nature of Christopher Eccleston's character is not revealed until the production's final moments. Viewers hoping for a more accurate version of the Borges story might find something to appreciate in "The Spiderweb," a 1974 short film adaptation featuring Nigel Hawthorne in the Lonnrot role, included as a bonus feature on this disc. It bears the twin virtues of being both more accurate to the original narrative, and much shorter than the Alex Cox version.