Yin-Yang Master I

I was inspired to watch this because "Yin Yang Master" (also 2021) was entertaining. This one was different. It was a feast for the yes in terms of CGI, very realistically rendered. But the plot was convoluted, and the reasoning for the plot seemed so very arbitrary that I simply didn't care.

This movie was a mashup of old chinese kung-fu movies of medieval times, TLR, End Game, Dr. Strange, E. T. (at least the glowing fingers), and probably others. Like ye olde chinese medieval movies, the characters take themselves way too seriously, and every sentence is uttered as if a gem of wisdom to be savoured. Tiresome.

The fight scenes in the beginning was as ballet as can be. At the end, however, it got more realistic. Thanks or that saving grace.

The scenery was awesome, as was the music. Set design, etc., all great. The story? Meh.

Great cg, complete story telling, all the actors and actresses perform their best in this movie. and of course the background music, the sound track is perfect. Even though I think the director should cut some scene out, but this doesn't affect me from liking this film. I don't see a reason why this movie is rated so low. Wondering if those people spamming here ever watched this film.

The language and cultural differences are still a huge barrier for people from English or other foreign language speaking countries to truly understand this movie. The fighting scenes and the special effects are simply not the focus of the movie. The theme of this film is love. For people who can truly resonate with this movie, it's really hard not to cry.

Audience from Asian countries definitely can better resonate with the love story between the Princess and Zhongxing (Qingming's master). Some people say the love in this movie is too philosophical or even cliche. One reason is they simply cannot appreciate Oriental style of love. Another reason is because the English script is too bad. Honestly, both the English dubbing and the scripts are bad. For English audience, I don't know if it will be better to listen to the Chinese audio and read the English script.

There are just so many things lost in the translation. The music is first class!!! I am a Chinese, so I can almost fully understand what this movie is talking about. The first time I watched it, I simply cannot stop crying mutiple times.

This is a film that is over two hours long. Most of it is people emoting with their faces without doing anything, moving slowly, talking slowly. The rest is a bit of Wire-fu and CGI and a lot of knowledge lost in translation. That doesn't make it a bad film, because the production values and acting were good, while the story is a combination of murder mystery, detective story, love drama and monster flick. Yeah, it goes all over the place. It's just slow.

Moreover, a lot of other reviewers took the story to be about the love between the master and the empress, but to me it felt like it was more between Qing Ming and Bo Ya. Certainly they had the more romantically long face emoting moments. And that ending!

Anyway, there is a lot of stuff lost in translation for a Westerner. Even if we don't need to understand the mechanics of the magic, or the spirit servants, or the giant snake, we can get the overall idea for the story. But as many other people said, what you see translated in the English subtitles is also not enough to understand what the people are talking about, certainly not the finer metaphorical and cultural aspects of the dialogue.

Bottom line: I watched this on the TV app, which doesn't have a speed setting. Netflix! Make the speed setting available everywhere!! Did I mention the film feels really slow?

The movie was great thanks to engaging fighting scenes and great acting from the actors. The CGI used in the film are also top notch and the storyline itself was great. The beginning of the movie was a bit hard to understand but over time the story began to reveal itself slowly and with a great amount of suspense. The plot itself was not predictable which made the film better as it kept you guessing. Kudos to the costume designers as all the outfits all suited the characters perfectly and looked great. Probably the only complaint I have about this movie is that there were a few unnecessary characters in the film that were only probably used to thicken the plot but other than that this film was thrilling to watch and is a great Chinese movie and is worth your time. (It kind of reminded me of detective dee)