Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Director: Ang Lee
Country: Taiwan / China / Hong Kong / United States
Length: 120 minutes
Type: Martial-Arts, Fantasy, Romance, Drama
I watched the hell out of
'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' back in the early 2000s, including seeing it twice at the cinema but it feels like I've not re-watched it in ages. Happily it's at least twice as good as I remembered. Everything about it is beautiful, the landscapes, the period costumes, the cinematography, the dance like fight choreography and
Tan Dun and
Yo-Yo Ma's evocative cello score. The way
Chow Yun-fat and
Michelle Yeoh play their unrequited romance is devastating. The more reserved and unspoken they are, the more powerful it becomes. That reservation is carried through into the fight choreography. At one point Li Mu Bai (Chow) takes on an opponent without needing to draw his blade. Each fight scene tops the previous one, they're all awesome but it's the clarity of the movement and strong underpinning by character and story that makes them so effective. The last and greatest encounter is between Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh) and Jen Yu (
Zhang Ziyi) in the courtyard. You can see Shu Lien is the superior fighter but Jen Yu is armed with the indestructible 'Green Destiny' sword, so we are taken on a journey through different weapons and techniques as Shu Lien seeks to find a weakness. Finally using the Green Destiny's very invulnerability to defeat Jen Yu. Some of the wire work looks like what it is but more often than not it looks graceful and perfectly executed. None more so than in the tavern scene where Zhang Ziyi rapidly spirals upwards into the air and executes a precise landing on the second floor. IIRC, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' was one of the early blu-rays so I wondered what the transfer would be like. It's a bit soft perhaps but it's clearly an "unremastered" 35mm print source which looks great, detail, texture and colour wise.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)
Having revisited the superior
'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' I thought why not give the belated Netflix sequel (which nobody asked for) a whirl. It's as pale an imitation as all the negative reviews had suggested, not outright terrible but a failure to live up to it's predecessor on every artistic and technical level. The first problem you encounter is that it's in English, not Mandarin. I first tried watching with the Mandarin dub to make it feel more like the first movie but since it's not dubbed by the actual actors (including the recognisable voices of
Michelle Yeoh and
Donnie Yen) that felt even weirder. The second thing that becomes apparent is that it's mostly shot on green screen, or has been heavily CGI enhanced, which is more or less the exact opposite aesthetic of
Ang Lee's film. Everything looks much cheaper, even though the budget is about 30% higher. The FX shots reminded me of video game cut scenes. There is a harsh, unpleasant digital grade look which often renders the 'Green Destiny' sword of the title blue, again in opposition to the first movie which revelled in the colours of nature. The sound FX were distracting and overdone, constantly using this "bone crunching" sound that doesn't match the actions and adding crass swooshing sounds to the camera moves. The script misses the point of the sword being far less important than the skills of the person who wields it and makes it's power central to the plot. I did think they'd found a couple of quite clever ways to continue the story but the execution falls flat. Another plus point is the well done fight scenes but they lack the meaning that motivated the action in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. I wasn't aware that one of the new younger cast
Natasha Liu Bordizzo was Australian until her accent started to creep in. Then I surmised correctly that it was shot in New Zealand, which might be why it looks like
'The Hobbit' (in a bad way). The disappointment is underlined by the final shot of Wudang Mountain seen from afar, to hide the fact that it's a poor matte painting and not a breathtaking real location in China like in the first movie. Since this was one of the last movies where
Harvey Weinstein acted as Producer, let's blame him for everything wrong with
'Sword of Destiny'.