This was an opera of motion.

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2004)

I kept thinking this movie was staged like an opera. The Emperor's courtiers all spoke in unison like a chorus. The colors, the sets, the movements. It was dramatic, poetic, vivid.
The movie also kept one guessing through its retelling of the same tale at different layers. There were some parts of the movie telegraphed surely ahead of time. Moments when you knew how it would inexorably resolve. Yet one watched them to see the playing out of tragic demise, just as one might watch Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. It was not that they were to die, but how.
The key to it was the periods of inaction. The pauses before the display of violence, or after. What was shown, and what was not shown.
It should give American directors some reason to reflect how good action movies can also be thoughtful and artistic movies as well.