Great film, bad dialogue and subtitles.

Rating: Null/10 (11 July 2000)

Being in Asia, we get exposed to way too many Chinese swordfighting drama. It's a genre that perhaps we are too familiar with, but with CTHD it introduces a different sense of interest and beauty into this genre. All in all, I think most will agree that it is a very good film for the genre.
_But_ this film has its flaws, mainly in the poor Mandarin (I was watching the Mandarin edition, which is probably supposed to be more authentic) spoken by Chow Yun Fatt and specifically Michelle Yeoh. It is incongruous with the Mandarin spoken by the rest of the characters (perfect Mainland Chinese Mandarin) and it really sounded bad in spite of how the rest of the film elements were so properly intertwined together.
The other was the issue of subtitles, now, they are really quite bad. Given that it is never going to be perfect, but as a seasoned English subtitle reader, it can be further improved. There were some spelling mistakes in the subtitles as well. Certain words like "Giang Hu" are spelt wrongly (is there actually a correct spelling for this?) and it may not be immediately clear to someone who has never watched a Chinese swashblucker before.
Apart from these little technical details, I think that the show is really good. I watched it twice in a week, so it must be REALLY good.