Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – Blu-Ray Review
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon marked a new era in cinema, paving the way for a string of foreign, martial-arts epics.
With Crouching Tiger, Ang Lee ushered in a style in which Western audiences were not familiar and paved the way for other directors such as Zhang Yimou, whose Hero and House of Flying Daggers were among a stream of films that filled their screen time with as much lush cinematography as they did dazzling martial-arts.
The plot is incomprehensible most of the time but feature enough familiarity to not alienate audiences. Crouching Tiger revolves around Michelle Yeoh’s Yu Schu-lien escorting the precious sword (The Sword of Destiny) to a friend of Chow Yun-fat’s Li Mu-bai. Along the way the sword is stolen and the two go on a quest to find it and chase after a masked woman, played by Zhang Ziyi.
The themes running throughout the film are hardly subtle, but subtlety has never been a huge concern to the genre. Characters leaping twenty feet in the air, running through tree-tops and other assorted impossible stunts are to be expected when watching this film.
What Crouching Tiger does so well is in the approach to telling the story. It re-introduces the notion of ancient myths and presents them as a tale being told about ancestors long ago and, like any great tale, it comes with some level of fantasy and wonder.
Lee manages to turn this film – full of wondrous locations, acting and some of the best martial-arts choreography of the decade – from what could have been just known as another martial-arts film into an actual work of art and that is an amazing achievement.
On Blu-ray the film looks fantastic; all of the textures and environments look as eye-catching in HD as you would expect and the sound is fantastic in surround sound, with also the option of a dubbed English version or the original audio with subtitles.
If you don’t already own this then Blu-ray is the perfect excuse to pick up a copy. Rich with history, culture and emotion you’ll be hard pressed to find something to dislike about this seminal epic.
Extras:
The extras are pretty standard, with a decent commentary and a few behind-the-scenes features including one entitled ‘Unleashing The Dragon’ which isn’t half as exciting as it sounds…
This isn’t a particularly good review unfortunately.
The plot of Crouching Tiger isn’t especially difficult to follow; the only time it’s confusing is when it jumps to the desert scenes, as it’s not made clear that these are flashbacks to Zhang Ziyi’s past.
The sword is called the Green Destiny, not the Sword of Destiny, and it isn’t stolen on the way to anywhere. It is stolen once it arrives in Beijing. Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat don’t go on a quest to find it, they ascertain who has got it without really going anywhere. The plot is more about their attempt to help Zhang Ziyi follow the right path, and at the same time escape from an arranged marriage and her criminal mistress (Jade Fox). It’s also about their own love for one another and the difficulty they face in being together.
The notion of near-flight and exceptional agility is common in similar wuxia films, and features equally in ‘House of Flying Daggers’ and ‘Hero’.
This is an excellent and beautiful film, as the review rightly concludes, it’s just a shame that some of these details are a bit off.
I tried watching it, it was complete balls. Never figured out why this was such a big deal.