Starring: Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, Tony Leung Chiu-wai
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Category: IIB (Cantonese and Putonghua)
The images are more pristine, the colour more staggering, the music more powerful - but Wong Kar-wai's 'definitive version' (as he called it in the production notes) of his 1994 wuxia romance is hardly going to bring in converts.
Far from a complete overhaul of a film now famed for its idiosyncratic storytelling - the film was inspired by Louis Cha's populist martial arts novel The Eagle Shooting Heroes, a fact only evident in that it shares the book's characters - Ashes of Time Redux is more a technical exercise than a re-edit intended to widen the movie's appeal beyond the filmmaker's usual fan base.
Wong has previously explained that his main reason for reworking Ashes of Time was his despair in learning how the quality of many of the copies in circulation around the world are sub-par, the film's lavish imagery marred by scratched, deteriorating prints. Wong and his team have done a wonderful job rectifying this.