A princess' father, the king is killed in battle and she takes the throne. Some of the government rulers/warlords are plotting against her and shoot her with a poison dart. A hermit saves her and they fall in love. The princess must restore peace to her kingdom and reunite with the hermit.
A classic example of the new Chinese way of filmmaking. The hour and a half duration seemed right because of dynamic pacing that rose and fell with action. The simplistic premise was difficult to follow in the plot because of language. More on that later. There were basically 3 characters: the princess, the hermit and soldier x infinity. Obviously, the princess and hermit were the most developed main characters. I had issues with dialogue because of subtitles. The only ones that synched with the film were clearly written by an non-English speaker. Sentence structure and word order were the main issues. This made it nearly impossible to follow the plot. The acting all seemed fine though. I really liked the sets. They all looked professional, but my favorite was the hermit's treehouse. Camera-work was all beautifully done as well. There was lots of shot variety, mostly in distances from extreme close up to sprawling landscapes. What I didn't like about video and camera were the giant battle scenes in the flat desert. Boring. There was no flying, but there may have been some undetectable wire-work involved. The audio was all mixed right and the soundtrack was typical of the area and time. Style and flavor seemed like the filmmakers had watched too much Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers. This has a 5.9/10 on IMDB and 38% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. I rate it o.k. because it was very typical of the genre, area and time, but didn't really innovate or get creative and unique with the tools available.
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