English subtitles.
It's a short fantasy wuxia movie. Technically it's xianxia, but that distinction is splitting hairs, unlike separating dudes running on air or treetops and slowly flying with swords from the general action or martial arts movies. And it has lower-budget CGI and noticeably imperfect sound mixing of the ADR.
The film looks mostly cool, especially costumes and sets, but it's brought down a peg by the sub-par cinematography. There are too many cuts during the action scenes, and wuxia is already pretty slow. The film obviously avoids placing CGI monsters and the real actors in the same shot, which looks awkward. The flashbacks are always unnecessary. And there's some amount of slow-motion scenes (thankfully used for drama, not combat) without high-speed cameras.
But poorly cut wuxia is still better than poorly cut post-action film. And while the cuts are excessive, they are not as oppressive as in other movies.
So, i saw one comment calling it a Kung Fu Panda and despite not remembering what that was about, i couldn't unsee it. The first half is really similar.
The story and the characters work just fine. The cast has strange ages though. The "kid" is, like, older than anyone and his mom looks the same age at best. There is a little bit of modern zhonghua obnoxious clowning in the beginning which is supposed to be humour. And the last minutes are overly indulging in drama, followed by a flat ending.
But it's a fine movie overall. If it had better cinematography it could be notable even with these budget constraints.
It's a short fantasy wuxia movie. Technically it's xianxia, but that distinction is splitting hairs, unlike separating dudes running on air or treetops and slowly flying with swords from the general action or martial arts movies. And it has lower-budget CGI and noticeably imperfect sound mixing of the ADR.
The film looks mostly cool, especially costumes and sets, but it's brought down a peg by the sub-par cinematography. There are too many cuts during the action scenes, and wuxia is already pretty slow. The film obviously avoids placing CGI monsters and the real actors in the same shot, which looks awkward. The flashbacks are always unnecessary. And there's some amount of slow-motion scenes (thankfully used for drama, not combat) without high-speed cameras.
But poorly cut wuxia is still better than poorly cut post-action film. And while the cuts are excessive, they are not as oppressive as in other movies.
So, i saw one comment calling it a Kung Fu Panda and despite not remembering what that was about, i couldn't unsee it. The first half is really similar.
The story and the characters work just fine. The cast has strange ages though. The "kid" is, like, older than anyone and his mom looks the same age at best. There is a little bit of modern zhonghua obnoxious clowning in the beginning which is supposed to be humour. And the last minutes are overly indulging in drama, followed by a flat ending.
But it's a fine movie overall. If it had better cinematography it could be notable even with these budget constraints.
