Starring: Chow Yun-fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Liu Ye
Director: Zhang Yimou
Category: IIB (Putonghua)
There is much that's golden but even more to be condemned in this Tang dynasty epic, director Zhang Yimou's greatest celluloid mishap since Operation Cougar almost two decades ago.
The subtlety, humanity and exquisitely visual story-telling in his best works are hopelessly submerged in this melodramatic bombast of heaving bosoms, computer-generated battles, and palace intrigues transpiring within some of the most stunning interiors ever fabricated for Chinese cinema.
The source material is part of the problem. Zhang based his script (co-written with Wu Nan and Bian Zhihong) on Thunderstorm, a classic 1934 stage tragedy by Cao Yu that's been transferred to the screen numerous times with varying degrees of success. The play, an overwrought familial allegory of incestuous class struggle, has not aged well. Zhang shows it's even less so when ripped from its original context, which at least gave it a raison d'etre, and transported back to AD928.
Perhaps in an effort to compensate for its datedness, Zhang turned the literary travails into a semi-action film, with battles involving a virtual cast of thousands. 'Virtual' is the key word, for the CGI is so obvious and Tony Ching Siu-tung's martial arts choreography so overdone it's hard to take the clashes more seriously than one would a Saturday morning cartoon.