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…

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