October 10, 2005

New Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (review)

Taking a break from anime, I decided to delve into some of my Asia-import dvds for a bit. A while back, I stumbled upon a reference on a dvd purchase site to a version of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (CTHD) that I had never seen. It was labelled "New Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon", but it was not a version of the movie, rather it was billed as a miniseries shown in 2001 that was suppossedly closer to the original book upon which CTHD was based. I had wholely enjoyed CTHD, as it had introduced me fully to the wuxia genre*.

I did a quick bit of review via google, and found... nothing. Intrigued, I tried to place an order, but unfortuntely, the site in question didn't have the dvd in stock, and it took quite a bit of searching to find a copy via DDD. I placed an order, and a month later, I had it in my hands.

This should tell you something: if you have to research it and search so hard to find a copy, it's probably either really good or *really* bad. In this case, I'd have to say its more of the latter.

It's important to note that this *isn't* a blockbuster movie with a big name cast. It was not directed by Ang Lee. In essence, it's a miniseries, and it has many of the limitations and problems of a TV miniseries. The story is similar to the movie: Yuk Jiao Lung is being brought up to marry a noble, but her teacher Kao has been teaching her to fight behind her parents' back. Meanwhile, a bandit lord is fighting against the legitimate government, and he happens to meet up with the young student. At the same time, Yu Shu Lien's family, a group of escorts, is killed by assassins. She is escorting a package to her relatives. During this time, she'll meet up with a young warrior from Wudan named Li Mu Bai, and the aforementioned Kao. Together, they'll have to deal with the theft of the Green Destiny, as well as books on secret Wudan techniques. The bandit Jade Fox is close at hand, but the greatest threat has yet to be seen... who needs Green Destiny, and why?

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

First things first - the special effects in this are not very good. You'll see this first hand when you watch the opening scene and see the special effects for the lightning bolt in the storm. I couldn't stop laughing at that one. I've seen better special effects in SciFi Channel's Snake-Movie-Of-The-Week. During fight scenes, you'll have sound effect "wooshes" and "zowies", the kinds of things you'd hear out of the 60s Batman TV Series. Which leads me to the fight scenes - It's obvious that much of the cast wasn't up to doing complex kung-fu scenes or battles, so the director chose to hide this using lots of camera movement and blurring. It's not as glaring as the special effects, but it can be annoying at times.

The story is a bit different from the movie. I cannot personally vouch for the claim that it is closer to the novel, but I had a hard time believing some aspects. For one, Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien are younger than in the movie - they're only a few years older than the other two protagonists (as you can see below). As such, the dynamic of the story changes: instead of the older swordsman and his delayed love in contrast to the young love just starting out in the movie, we're giving two young groupings. Despite what the DVD cover says though, I don't see as much of the romance angle for Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien. It's hinted at that Li Mu Bai is falling for her, but never to the point of the movie. The story of Yuk Jiao Lung and the Bandit Lord (names changed somewhat from the movie) follows much of the same path as in the movie, but because of the aforementioned issue, it isn't the same contrast. For that, I think the story in the miniseries suffers. I never felt the same about the characters.

I had no major issue with most of the characters - my only real problem was that the actor playing Li Mu Bai didn't have the gravity onscreen that Chow Yun Fat had, but that's to be expected from something on a smaller scale. No one in the production did an overly bad job considering the budget constraints they were obviously working under, but no one also stood out.

The sights and scenery are, at times, a main reason to watch this series. Much of the time, the backgrounds were colorful and full of life, but there were times when they obviously suffered from the budget (One example I can think of had a noble's house filled with items I could have bought from an Old Time Pottery store here in Orlando... it was glaringly bad). The show roughly failed in the prop department as well. Green Destiny ends up looking like a short sword of limited power, and it's one of the BETTER props. I'd swear I saw a few swordsmen using paper mache swords and knifes, or weapons wrapped in aluminum foil. Costumes were pretty good. Overall, I'd have to give the supplies a minus, although they did make the bad props colorful at times to fit with the scenery.

I'd have to say, when I first started watching, I thought the miniseries would be horrible. Once you got past the shortcomings of a miniseries though, it wasn't TOO bad... until you got to the ending. Let me just say, the ending reminded me of "Warriors of Heaven and Earth", which started out as a gritty battle movie, but in the middle, suddenly threw in a supernatural element that came out of nowhere. I have no problem with supernatural elements, but I don't like it when they seem tacked on. New CTHD had an ending that seemed rushed and tacked on. In the end, the story is resolved, but not without seemingly pointless plot decisions and story changes that made no sense. It was in this area that New Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon failed me: for all the faults of the story from the movie, the story in the miniseries failed to maintain cohesion. I guess that's somewhat to be expected, being as its almost four hours long, but they clearly made some bad story choices IMO.

That said, there are worse ways to spend your money (namely, watching one of the Snake-Movies-Of-The-Week on SciFi), but I wouldn't bother.
I've seen bad wuxia before, but at least with big budget features, you usually get good scenery and a lukewarm plot. Here you get a weak plot and the scenery can't make up for it. I won't burn the DVD in effigy, but it'll be a while before I watch it again.

Posted by Drylnn at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)