| Overall Grade: |
C |
|
| Story: |
C- |
|
|
| Acting: |
B |
|
|
| Direction: |
C |
|
|
| Visuals: |
A- |
|
|
Pretty to look at, but needs more substance.
by Rocky (movies profile)
Sep 26, 2009
Based on that description, if this movie were a girl, I wouldn't date her. Skip to the last run-on sentence for the long short of it.
Plot was okay, but it just didn't jive with me. Maybe it's a cultural thing, maybe it's over my head, or maybe it just wasn't that good. The overall plot is easy to follow, but the subplots get a little confusing. I'll be the first to admit that I may have understood it better if I didn't have such a hard time telling the people apart. I know that's terrible, and I'm not usually afflicted by that kind of weakness, but some of the characters kind of looked the same, and it was hard to keep the separate characters' back stories straight. That led to an over-all ambiguity for the subplots, which is probably mostly what ruined the movie for me. Maybe if they had fewer characters, I could have kept up. Or maybe if I spoke Mandarin. Also, I thought the ending was terrible. "Half baked" is the kindest description I could give it. I kept looking for the meaning, or the moral of the story in this movie, and it was either so subtle that I didn't get it (entirely possible) or it was so subtle that it wasn't actually there.
My girlfriend knows some Mandarin, and she was helping me out at first, but she fell asleep about halfway through. Which leads me to the next point that the movie was a bit too long.
Women tend to play the subservient, irrational, "needs-a-man" kind of characters, of which I'm never fond. I get the whole cultural interpretation thing, I'm just saying it doesn't work for me. Two of them don't fit that mold, so that's something.
The artistic interpretation was odd. There was plenty of Tarantinoesque gore (flying limbs, etc.), which is kind of like bleu cheese to me: good if you're in the mood for it, otherwise it gets old - fast. Also, there was a major goth-punk influence on the antagonist's army. Again, bleu cheese. I didn't find it very fitting for 1600's China (or whatever time period it was supposed to be).
It was visually beautiful, with lovely and varying landscapes, and CT,HD-style (flying) martial arts.
So in the end, 2.5 hours of a goth-punk, 14 main character, faces-blend-together (because I'm trying to catch the sometimes light-speed subtitles with names I can't keep straight) version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with subservient, ridiculous women dispensing Quentin Tarantino-style gore may have been better spent. |
My Public Profile 
