Long awaited Tsui Hark remake of his early 80s classic that turned into a huge box office flop and has divided opinions among many fans. In fact, I'm actually at a loss as to how to describe it. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. Is it a good movie? Certainly not. On the other hand, the visuals are so stunning, so innovative, so overwhelming that I sat through the whole movie spellbound. This movie is a failure, but a very impressive one.

Why is this a bad movie? Well, there's not much of a story. Basically, it rehashes the plot from the original Zu Warriors, i.e. the world is threatened by an evil monster (this time around, going by the name of "Insomnia" rather than the Blood Monster of the original) that is all powerful and can only be defeated by combining the energy of two mystical swords. However, the movie manages to stuff this bare-thread plot with so much convoluted mysticism about immortals, magic and mysterious forces that I ended up completely bewildered.

Secondly, the script feels as if Tsui Hark looked at the final CGI swordfight in Storm Riders and said to himself: "Let's see if I can top this, and extend it to movie length". Well, he certainly succeeded at that. The movie starts with a bang, and never lets up - there are no pauses, no time to get to know the characters, to develop some atmosphere, it just heaps action upon action upon action. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that in this case the action is all computer-generated. Pretty much every single frame in this movie is a special-effects shot. There's no let up, nothing for the eye to relax even for a second. Instead, we're bombarded with one fantastical image after another, effect after effect, each one more mind-blowing than the previous one. This movie makes something like Storm Riders look like a silent B/W movie.

The actors make a heroic effort to get their characters noticed among this mind-boggling, vertigo-inducing smorgasbord of a visual mindtrip. Alas, to no avail. So they end up mostly floating in midair, throwing their hair back (Ekin Cheng is particularly good at that, but then again, he's had years of practice) and twirling their hands around. This hand-twirling of course directs their magic weapons, and these weapons take care of all the action for them, so the actors can remain motionless, whilst the various magic weapons have a go at each other. The magic weapons are all very impressive, but after a while I got kind of tired of all the various moon orbs, ming fire swords, etc and was just sorta hoping there'd be a real swordfight. And there actually was one for a brief moment (Zhang Ziyi doing the honours) which was so good that it made me really angry, considering how great the movie would have been with a bit more of this and a little less of the hand-twirling and the CGI-generated energy bolts. But I'll better get on with the review.

Tsui Hark succeeds in creating a world unlike anything you've ever seen. At times, it reminded me of the finale of Akira (completely different kind of movie, obviously - the comparison is made solely with respect to the level of visual overload). Which is a shame, because some of the images are stunning. For example, you have a main character's face breaking like an eggshell and the pieces dissolving into petals floating through the sky. Beautiful. Had he slowed down the pace a bit, explored some of these gorgeous images at greater length, the film might have worked better. As it is, it lacks any truly poetic or romantic or even comic moments. It's all dead serious and frenetic. And it feels claustrophobic. I almost let out a sigh of relief in the few scenes where he didn't use CGI and just shot actors in a recognizable real environment.

The original Zu Warriors also created a fantastical world, but it mixed that with true emotions, with slow poetic passages (especially in the ice palace). It had seemingly real people with real feelings. LoZ is just frenetic action with hardly any dialogue. I don't think there's a single moment in this movie where any of the characters just talk to each other (I mean talk like humans do, rather than warbling along about uniting the heaven sword and the thunder sword, finding the power of regeneration within, etc - you get the drift).

All of the above makes it sound like I truly hated this film. Well, I didn't. Actually, I really liked it! The movie takes what is arguably a genre that has been done to death and moves it in a direction never before seen. Much here is extremely innovative. With a better script, better developed characters and with more restraint in the use of CGI, this could have been a truly fantastic movie.

For the reasons mentioned above, I can't say much about the performance of the actors involved. Ekin Cheng and Cecilia Cheung play the leads, with Patrick Tam and Louis Koo in support. Cecilia plays dual roles, one of which making her look startingly like the young Brigitte Lin in the original Zu. Sammo Hung has a major role at the start, but vanishes after the first reel. Zhang Ziyi is hardly in this movie at all. The trailer is totally misleading in that respect. BTW, she's dubbed by a Cantonese voice actress. And Kelly Lam, who I thought was brilliant in Full Time Killer, has the strangest role of all - she plays sort of a demonic Tinkerbells with little screen time (more than Zhang Ziyi, though) and even less dialogue.

I do recommend this movie for the sheer power of the visuals. But for me at least, the emotional resonance to this movie was totally lacking. I am curious to see what other members of this forum think of it. I would think that anybody who enjoyed Storm Riders for the effects will be totally blown away by LoZ...