Blinded by Our Ignorance

Rating: 3/10 (16 April 2005)

When I first saw this film back in December of 2000(?), I thought this was a decent, but not superb, film. I was amazed later by the great accolade showered on it by American public and professional critics. It was a decent film with a superb cinematography but with an incredible overuse of wire-assisted flying and cliché plot. If Chinese martial artists could fly like this, why should we need Wright brothers or Bleriot? Even as a fantasy, this movie's flying is overdone. This movie reminded me of late Mary Martin as Peter Pan or Sally Field as the Flying Nun.
The plot was OK but rather cliché and formulaic. So many other Chinese martial arts movie have similar plots.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't think much of this film and did not understand the superlatives used by many to describe this film.
Several weeks ago I was discussing this film with a Chinese-American friend. He is totally bilingual in Mandarin-Chinese and English and carefully studied Chinese culture and literature (both classical and modern popular). According to him and many Chinese IMDb commentators, this film was a total bomb in mainland China. He mentioned several reasons:
1. To a native Mandarin speaker, the lead actors'(Chow Yan-fat's and Michelle Yeoh's) Chinese were HORRIBLE! Chow spoke his Mandarin with such a thick Cantonese accent that some Beijing movie audience roared in laughter whenever he spoke. One IMDb commentator compared his speech to George W. Bush saying, "Hi, I'm from New York." According to my friend, it is worse than that. It is like Jimmy Carter with his thick Georgia accent claiming to be Brooklyn-born and Brooklyn-raised.
Michelle Yeoh's Mandarin was even worse. With her Malaysian accent, it was like a foreigner speaking Chinese. It was like our Californian governor Arnold Schwarznegger saying, "I vas born in Zakramendo, Kalifornia." How can these two clowns pretend to be Ching-dynasty Chinese martial artists working in Beijing area?
2. The plot is rather cliché and uninvolving. This movie was based on the fourth novel of a wushiu pentalogy. By the time of the fourth novel, the two main characters in the movie have gone through so many things together. Also, there are many other important characters in the pentalogy who were never even mentioned in the movie. Because the movie omitted many of the plots in the first three novels, the audience (many of them have never read the pentalogy) could not get fully involved with these two main characters.
Also, the original pentalogy is neither inspiring nor unique. It is a competently written work, but not the best in the wushiu genre. In fact, the writer expressed his regrets about writing this pentalogy. The screenwriters of this movie dumbed up the original novel, which was only an OK novel to begin with, and made a rather mediocre and cliché screenplay in the style of Hollywood.
3. The wushiu in the movie was OK but not superb. There are many, many martial arts movies and many of them have better fight scenes than this movie. This move is definitely not the sine qua non of the genre.
American audience and professional critics, because of their ignorance of Chinese language and culture, did not know any of this. Many of them LOVED this rather mediocre movie. Academy Award voters nominated this movie for Academy Award in many categories. Go ahead. Keep on loving this mediocre movie. Ignorance is bliss, indeed.