They're one of the filmmakers' recurring themes, so what do the white doves mean in John Woo's work? Before his breakthrough with 1986's stylish crime movie A Better Tomorrow, Woo jumped from various genres in his native Hong Kong, including kung fu movies and wacky comedies like Plain Jane to the Rescue. The surprise success of A Better Tomorrow changed his career and established many of his motifs, including slow-motion shootouts, themes of brotherhood and heroes wielding two pistols.
It was also Woo's first collaboration with regular leading man Chow Yun-fat, with the pair making iconic action movies like The Killer or 1992's Hard Boiled. Woo's distinct style and flair for crafting incredible action saw Hollywood come knocking. While he had something of a miserable experience making the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Hard Target, it was still a success that became a future cult classic, while he later scored major hits with Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2.
The frustrations of working within the American studio system and the lukewarm reception to his later American projects like war movie Windtalkers saw Woo return to China to make movies. John Woo is very much an auteur, and he tends to return to the same themes time and again. One of his most famous visual motifs is white doves, who are often seen flying around during intense gunfights in everything from The Killer to Mission: Impossible 2, which even saw a CGI dove flying through a fire in slow motion. In talking with The Film Stage in 2017, Woo expounded on the meaning of doves in his work.
It's a motif that began with The Killer, which features a finale where the heroes fight off an endless wave of assassins. The set features lots of doves flying around, with Woo using a shot of a dove flying in slo-mo combined with Chow Yun-fat's title character being shot to represent his soul. Woo stated, "Also, these guys have done some bad things in their lives but their souls got saved in the end, which I also wanted to express through this image." To Woo, the doves are symbols of peace and purity, representing the spirits of his characters, even if they commit acts of violence.
Doves and pigeons are also, in John Woo's mind, messengers of God. It's worth noting Woo has also used butterflies in a similiar fashion in John Travolta's action buddy comedy Broken Arrow and Windtakkers, where a butterfly floats over the corpse of a dead soldier. Despite the amount of bloodshed in his work, John Woo abhors violence in real life and is deeply religious, so to him the doves ultimately symbolize the soul.