Wonderful Fiction

Rating: 9/10 (10 August 2003)

This is a marvelous movie; very stylish, complex and beautiful. It moves with polish and grace, which is remarkable for a movie with as much invested in fighting scenes. It is everything that illuminates why Gladiator was a boring, predictable, ponderous, uninspired tome, and why Crouching Tiger was a masterpiece.
The staging was huge and detailed. The costumes and backdrops are stunning. The settings for several of the scenes are in some of China's/the world's most exotic locales like the River Li near Guilin, Jiuzhaigou (the lake in the fighting scene) and the Gobi of XinJiang Province, and more.
Many others have made the inevitable comparison to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so I will as well. Some of the effects and visualization in this movie surpass Crouching Tiger, as well they should since they are using the technology of that movie plus updated systems. I did not find the depth of the story to be quite as good. One of Crouching Tiger's best aspects was the way it wove 3 stories (the two love stories and the story about duty and honor) together into one cohesive movie. But it was still good!!!
Also, this movie kind of had the "Disney Effect". One of the great things about many of the finer Chinese movies is their faithfulness to trying to accurately tell true stories. Examples of such are Farewell, My Concubine, The King Of Masks and the movie/story that this movie used, The Emperor and the Assassin (which is a far more historically accurate rendition of this story).
If you are a fan of good movies and are not scared off by subtitles. This is a movie that could easily amaze you and find its way onto your all-time best foreign movies list.
Within its genre 9/10