I walked into 'The Emperor and the Assassin' expecting to see a great film. I love Chinese movies, know a fair bit about Chinese history, and I'd seen the trailer, which looked simply glorious. Yet somehow the film failed to deliver, and I left the cinema feeling that Chen Kaige should be sent back to film school. Allow me to explain why...
First of all, the dialogues are awful. Chinese people have a tendency to answer simple, personal questions with pseudo-philosophical generalizations about the state of the world, and in Chen Kaige's films this habit takes on worrisome proportions. In 'The Emperor and the Assassin' the rhetoric is such that it distracts from the story rather than enrich it. It's as if someone forgot to tell Chen that dialogue is supposed to illustrate things, not to make them more obscure! I had a quick look at my non-Chinese-speaking fellow cinema-goers every now and then, and the look on their faces told me they had no idea what was going on. I, who do speak Chinese, didn't fare much better. To be sure, I could grasp the main plot line (ambitious king allows his wife to help his enemy hire an assassin to murder him, so that he has an excuse to attack the enemy's kingdom, and she falls in love with him), but even so I had the feeling about half of the story was escaping me. Surely that wasn't Chen's intention...
Secondly, Chen should have infused some warmth into the film. I'm not at all into American-style honey-let-me-give-you-a-hug-type characterization, but a bit of that wouldn't have gone amiss in this remarkably cold, sterile film. As it is, one spends nearly three hours hours watching a bunch of psychos who may have redeeming features but for whom one somehow doesn't care. This is NOT the actors' fault. As other reviewers have noted, the acting is top-notch - truly first-rate. Rather, it's the director and the screenwriter's fault. It's hard to root for characters who are given such unintelligible dialogues...
Last but not least, the cuts. A previous reviewer mentioned that the cuts in this film are rather distracting. I would go so far as to say they're the worst cuts I've ever seen. I can see Chen's need to cut his long story short (it really is too long!), but what's the use of hiring a brilliant cinematographer like Zhao Fei if you're going to ruin his work in the cutting room? Better planning/story-boarding would have prevented this, and would have made 'The Emperor and the Assassin' the visual feast the trailer promised it would be.
Mind you, the above is not to say that 'The Emperor and the Assassin' is a bad film. On the contrary, it's a well-acted epic with some amazing set pieces and some even more impressive photography, albeit with nasty cuts. Even at its most pretentious and sterile worst 'The Emperor and the Assassin' is preferable to much of the excrement Hollywood has produced in the past few years. It just could have been so much better, so much more enthralling. Chen Kaige really ought to go back to film school and learn how to tell a story again. Either that, or he should talk to his old partner-in-crime Zhang Yimou, who knows how to tell a story AND how to do justice to Zhao Fei's camera work. I relish the thought of what Zhang would have done with this story...
First of all, the dialogues are awful. Chinese people have a tendency to answer simple, personal questions with pseudo-philosophical generalizations about the state of the world, and in Chen Kaige's films this habit takes on worrisome proportions. In 'The Emperor and the Assassin' the rhetoric is such that it distracts from the story rather than enrich it. It's as if someone forgot to tell Chen that dialogue is supposed to illustrate things, not to make them more obscure! I had a quick look at my non-Chinese-speaking fellow cinema-goers every now and then, and the look on their faces told me they had no idea what was going on. I, who do speak Chinese, didn't fare much better. To be sure, I could grasp the main plot line (ambitious king allows his wife to help his enemy hire an assassin to murder him, so that he has an excuse to attack the enemy's kingdom, and she falls in love with him), but even so I had the feeling about half of the story was escaping me. Surely that wasn't Chen's intention...
Secondly, Chen should have infused some warmth into the film. I'm not at all into American-style honey-let-me-give-you-a-hug-type characterization, but a bit of that wouldn't have gone amiss in this remarkably cold, sterile film. As it is, one spends nearly three hours hours watching a bunch of psychos who may have redeeming features but for whom one somehow doesn't care. This is NOT the actors' fault. As other reviewers have noted, the acting is top-notch - truly first-rate. Rather, it's the director and the screenwriter's fault. It's hard to root for characters who are given such unintelligible dialogues...
Last but not least, the cuts. A previous reviewer mentioned that the cuts in this film are rather distracting. I would go so far as to say they're the worst cuts I've ever seen. I can see Chen's need to cut his long story short (it really is too long!), but what's the use of hiring a brilliant cinematographer like Zhao Fei if you're going to ruin his work in the cutting room? Better planning/story-boarding would have prevented this, and would have made 'The Emperor and the Assassin' the visual feast the trailer promised it would be.
Mind you, the above is not to say that 'The Emperor and the Assassin' is a bad film. On the contrary, it's a well-acted epic with some amazing set pieces and some even more impressive photography, albeit with nasty cuts. Even at its most pretentious and sterile worst 'The Emperor and the Assassin' is preferable to much of the excrement Hollywood has produced in the past few years. It just could have been so much better, so much more enthralling. Chen Kaige really ought to go back to film school and learn how to tell a story again. Either that, or he should talk to his old partner-in-crime Zhang Yimou, who knows how to tell a story AND how to do justice to Zhao Fei's camera work. I relish the thought of what Zhang would have done with this story...
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