12/7/2023 0 Comments God of war movie![]() ![]() The Japanese are of course the go-to adversaries of Chinese cinema (a trend which has ample historical explanation, if not justification), but just as he did in Fist of Legend, Gordon Chan doesn’t depict them as villains, per se. There’s also a fairly balanced portrayal of both sides. A general must lobby for funds, placate his supporters, and carefully advertise his victories and his defeats. Troops on both sides are composite, with the Japanese side made up of pirates, brutal Ronins, as well as Samurai and well-equipped soldiers, while on the Chinese sides, there are guest troops alongside the newly-trained peasants-turned-soldiers. While we cannot comment on the historical accuracy of it, the verisimilitude of it all is impressive, and the screenplay juggles all the different aspects very efficiently. Sword-fighters depend on pencil-pushers and bean-counters (a system already depicted in Peter Chan’s The Warlords). The bureaucracy, politics and publicity of war are also interesting details that Gordon Chan adds to his film. Strategy is of course a main focus (as often in Chinese epics) and beautifully illustrated, but training and weaponry are also taken into account.Ī beautiful training sequence on a beach brings back memories of the legendary main titles from Tsui Hark’s Once Upon A Time In China, while the metallurgy of blades and the resilience of shields, as well as the design of various contraptions (the “mud horse” is a favorite and a truly new sight in a film of this kind), are portrayed succinctly but efficiently. Luckily, God of War finds him on top form: it is a lavish, gloriously old-fashioned epic. With its theme of an underdog army taking on a invader, God of War may be considered Red Cliff-lite, but the level of detail it brings to its depiction of war does not pale in comparison to John Woo’s epic, and even bests in some areas. Shot in gorgeous blues and reds by Takuro Ishikzaka (cinematographer of the Rurouni Kenshin trilogy), it achieves in just two hours a remarkably detailed depiction of war. ![]() Gordon Chan, like many of Hong Kong cinema’s creative forces, can be an incredibly hit-and-miss director this is the man who directed Fist of Legend AND King of Fighters. General Qi enlists local peasants and trains them into a new and better-equipped army. Set in the 16th century and based on historical events, it follows the efforts of Ming general Qi Jiguang (Vincent Zhao) and commander Yu Dayou (Sammo Hung) to defeat an army of Japanese pirates and Ronins led by Kumasawa (Yasuaki Kurata), and that has been pillaging the Chinese coastline for the enrichment of a Shogun whose son Yamagawa (Keisuke Koide) is among the pirates but disapproves of their treatment of civilians. It remains to be seen if Gordon Chan’s God of War can re-ignite the Chinese war epic’s popularity (even the success of Daniel Lee’s Dragon Blade in 2015 didn’t manage that), but it is, on its own merits, one of the finest examples of the genre. A genre that dominated the 00’s in China and culminated with the massive success of John Woo’s Red Cliff and Peter Chan’s The Warlords, the war epic has been much scarcer in the 10’s, and much less successful in general, as indicated by the high-profile underperformance of passable examples of the genre like Andrew Lau’s The Guillotines and Ronny Yu’s Saving General Yang, not to mention the downright flop of Frankie Chan’s Legendary Amazons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |