An utterly bewildering film. I can't recall being so confused at a screening. Yes, I'm sure Hong Kong audiences and devotees of Hong Kong cinema understood it well enough. This is partly because the version they saw was a quarter-hour or so longer than the version I saw. (I can picture the foreign distributor saying: "All this scene does is make sense of the other scenes. Get rid of it!") Partly, though, it's just slapdash film-making, which the long-suffering people of Hong Kong are no doubt well used to by now. This is a big budget production with first-rate sets and costumes, some decent acting talent and some amazing fighting and choreographing talent; so why is it lit, photographed and edited so clumsily? The uncertain fish-eye lenswork just doesn't work on so wide a screen if it would have worked on any screen and the idiotic juxtaposition of ill-chosen camera angles makes my head swim. (I don't mean to imply that all Hong Kong films are this poorly made; those I've seen with Jackie Chan in them, for example, aren't poorly made at all. Maybe, in Hong Kong, decent production values simply weren't for sale.)
The fight scenes which, rightfully, tend towards non-violent wherever the story permits are indeed well crafted, and about half the time, well enough caught on film. When I say "half the time" I don't mean that half the fight scenes have been filmed well. I mean that every single fight scene is half-and-half, combining instances where the camera has caught whatever it is that makes the display of martial arts breathtaking (the leaping about on the balancing ladders being especially so), with instances where it all too painfully hasn't.
It's not all the camera's fault. A film that navigates its way from one fight to the next would have been better served by a simpler story with less complicated heroes and villains As it is, breaking the story like clockwork every so often for an unmotivated display of leg-swinging (each display all too much like the last) is like inserting Irving Berlin musical numbers into "The Manchurian Candidate". If the story MUST be complicated to the point of incomprehensibility, though, it could stand being more interesting in its own right.
But to defend the film (which isn't really as bad as all that), it's not the exercise in fatuous self-reference that an earlier writer says it is. Read on and you'll find his comments: they're a hoot. He writes: "The story is framed in the context of the imposition of Western technology into a mature civilization. Movies are a part of that intrusion, in fact arguably the most intrusive." (I suppose this is "arguable" in the sense that anything is.) "So we already have a self-referential conundrum."
I could run similarly tenuous arguments all day if I wasn't held back by intellectual honesty. "Doctor Zhivago" is set during the Russian revolution (the long process spanning decades, not the coup of 1918). But wait: movies were a part of that revolution! For that matter, "War and Peace" is about Russia, and movies are a part of Russia.
If there's any point to the setting of "Once Upon a Time in China" at all, and I think there is, it's that the country is being taken over by ARMED FORCE, which threatens to make old style martial arts fighting pointless; Western ways are not sneaking in through cinemas (of which there may not yet be any in the country), but are being marched in at the point of a gun. Bear this in mind while watching the film and you may not understand exactly what's going on, but at least you might avoid utter misunderstanding.
The fight scenes which, rightfully, tend towards non-violent wherever the story permits are indeed well crafted, and about half the time, well enough caught on film. When I say "half the time" I don't mean that half the fight scenes have been filmed well. I mean that every single fight scene is half-and-half, combining instances where the camera has caught whatever it is that makes the display of martial arts breathtaking (the leaping about on the balancing ladders being especially so), with instances where it all too painfully hasn't.
It's not all the camera's fault. A film that navigates its way from one fight to the next would have been better served by a simpler story with less complicated heroes and villains As it is, breaking the story like clockwork every so often for an unmotivated display of leg-swinging (each display all too much like the last) is like inserting Irving Berlin musical numbers into "The Manchurian Candidate". If the story MUST be complicated to the point of incomprehensibility, though, it could stand being more interesting in its own right.
But to defend the film (which isn't really as bad as all that), it's not the exercise in fatuous self-reference that an earlier writer says it is. Read on and you'll find his comments: they're a hoot. He writes: "The story is framed in the context of the imposition of Western technology into a mature civilization. Movies are a part of that intrusion, in fact arguably the most intrusive." (I suppose this is "arguable" in the sense that anything is.) "So we already have a self-referential conundrum."
I could run similarly tenuous arguments all day if I wasn't held back by intellectual honesty. "Doctor Zhivago" is set during the Russian revolution (the long process spanning decades, not the coup of 1918). But wait: movies were a part of that revolution! For that matter, "War and Peace" is about Russia, and movies are a part of Russia.
If there's any point to the setting of "Once Upon a Time in China" at all, and I think there is, it's that the country is being taken over by ARMED FORCE, which threatens to make old style martial arts fighting pointless; Western ways are not sneaking in through cinemas (of which there may not yet be any in the country), but are being marched in at the point of a gun. Bear this in mind while watching the film and you may not understand exactly what's going on, but at least you might avoid utter misunderstanding.