Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny - more martial arts wizardry
15 years after the visual brilliance of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wowed world’s cinema-goers, the balletic aerial battles return in much-anticipated sequel with Yuen Woo-ping at the helm
It’s exactly 15 years since Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon arrived at the Oscars. Nominated for 10 awards, including best picture and best director, it walked away with four, including best foreign language film.
The significance was not lost. Never before had a martial arts film triumphed in Hollywood, where knowledge of the genre seemed to begin and end with the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Rarely had one been delivered with such grace and poetry.
The film introduced global audiences of the day to wuxia fiction and went on to gross US$213 million worldwide. It inspired a slew of other Chinese-language “arthouse” martial arts films – notably Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers.
So it’s something of a surprise to see that it’s taken this long to realise a Crouching Tiger sequel – thanks primarily to the tenacity of film mogul Harvey Weinstein, the driving force behind the project. “Harvey’s been waiting a long time to do this,” says Michelle Yeoh, who reprises her role as the female warrior Yu Shu Lien.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, given Weinstein’s history. In the past, he restored and released Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey at his former company Miramax; more recently, The Weinstein Company announced plans to collaborate with Hong Kong’s Celestial Pictures in remaking two Shaw Brothers Studio classics, King Hu’s Come Drink With Me and Sun Chung’s The Avenging Eagle.
