This is a disaster. I don’t know what Cui Hark would say in response to my criticism, but I think it’s a tragedy. No, well, whoever's using cocaine is probably a comedy to them. For there is nothing to laugh at (there is no humor there).
In a nutshell, I do not recommend wasting your time. If you chose to watch this before you saw the 1983 film "War of Zu" then watch it and do not come back here.
First:
The film is very raw and unfinished. Rawness is visible in everything - in inharmonious special effects, incomplete characters and very bad post-production in general. Whether he did not have time to finish, or abandoned and did as they could, but something undoubtedly failed.
Secondly:
More details: very rarely this happened, but the musical accompaniment of the film finally destroyed. I do not reprimand the composer, but the people who ordered it. Monotonous in terms of mood music in the style of “Zimmer” (or God knows who from Hollywood), which, in my memory, changed the tone or mood about twice, makes the film at least bad. If you put the question on the edge, it would be better not to be here at all.
With a degree of sarcasm I think that the neighbors more harmoniously and versatile worked on the audio side of the issue.
Third:
The story is badly told. Deprived of competent presentation, the plot leaves more questions than impressions. The character “joy” played by Zhang Ziyi is the most murky of all. The film contained some attempts to show the emotions of the character, but any human curiosity to them to show hard. A dirty girl fell into the frame, cried, chatted and went.
Fourth:
The atmosphere. Compared to the first film, this film completely despised the story. What I loved about the first film was the original atmosphere of bad sleep, which makes the film very close in spirit to human consciousness. What is it? Meager almost two hours of unremarkable special effects and monotonous music. There are beautiful shots and competently staged interiors, but a sluggish pitch does not give space for a sincere impression.
Finally:
Many critics said the film was “purely Chinese.” Objection vigorously! The notorious music and some scenes in the film have rather Westernized the film.
Separately, this fact does not matter and does not affect my assessment. But the answer is that the first part is incomparably more Chinese than this one. The work, in my opinion, is more “Western” in form than the average one from China, since it is not by chance that the director returned from the United States, borrowing a certain experience there literally a year before the release of the film. This played a certain, but not decisive role in the cross-cultural side of this tape, but this mixture of two-way approaches seemed to me, as they say, neither here nor here, the fights know what with the help of special effects in this picture look absurd and ridiculous, unlike the first film “Wars of Zu”. Without taking into account "Wars of Zu", much more impressively, he turned a similar fusion of cross-cultural cinematic approach to work in his early 1980 film "We're going to eat you."
With deep regret I admit that this is a failed picture of the master of film art Cui Hark.
5 out of 10
