Of Swords and Parasols

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of my favorite (actual favorite? I gave up on ranking favorites some time back) Chinese movies, and my first Asian media fandom. Meaning that all the anime, manga, manhwa, kdramas and cdramas came after and roughly 80% of the people who follow me can probably blame the movie for that. Whether that's good or bad is up to you.

Naturally, it's sequel was going to be a Big Deal to me.

Was it worth waiting 15 years for? Yes and no.

Here's the thing, I thought that, some quibbles aside, it was a GREAT movie. Good acting, solid characterization, good fight scenes, great cinematography (even if they did get carried away with the saturation at times, especially with the reds) and an interesting and fast placed plot that still took time for character moments. I can't speak at all as to it's faithfulness to the source material (because this series of books never gets adapted into series and there aren't any English translations of the novels that I know of and I wasn't smart enough to get the Andy Seto comic way back when) but it has many of the same beats as the Ang Lee movie: People trying to steal a sword, complicated romance, the younger heroine seeking Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh as the only returning cast member, looking like she's aged about 2 years even though her character is canonically about 20 years older on top of her ACTUALLY being 15 years older) as a mentor, the more practical, repressed, noble, older protagonists contrasted by the younger, more openly fiery and morally ambiguous younger leads, and one of the younger leads having to choose between their mission/master/ambition and a life with the other leads. The fight scenes also include obvious nods to wuxia and kung fu movies, my favorite being Donnie Yen's first unmasked fight scene starting with and homage to one of Michelle Yeoh's fight scenes in Wing Chun. I might have shrieked a tiny bit at that.

It is, however, very, very much a wuxia movie made for an American audience. The tropes are there, the character types are there, the aesthetic is MOSTLY there (they did their best, but there are times it's really obvious it was filmed in New Zealand, not China), but the spirit isn't there. The movie is a solid martial arts movie with plenty of heart, but it lacks the surrealism and dreamy romanticism of the Ang Lee movie, and some of the characters' interactions and reactions are more in tune with modern America than the Qing Dynasty.

So it was really good, but I can't help but feel it could have been more.

Yeah, the picspam I promised a while back.  I babbled a fair bit about it here.   I seem to have reacquired a backlog of these movies, so I think I'll get to whittling that down the next week or so.

I've been working my way through the wuxia movies in the backlog that I've acquired.  I still have a few left...The King and the Clown, The Emperor and the Assassin, and Seven Swords, but I think this is a good stopping point for now.