A knight is not a knight, and the rivers and lakes are not rivers and lakes

Carli 2022-02-07 14:56:45

It is not uncommon to introduce computer special effects in martial arts films. At the end of the last century, Liu Weiqiang's "The Hero of the Wind and Clouds Dominates the World" was the first to take off, carefully magnifying the plot highlights on a gorgeous almost blurred background, and fixing the characters' movements and expressions at the critical point about to be detonated. The gesture of the ear raised the knife and fell, and a kind of audition pleasure that was both real and illusory whistled. Later, domestic large-scale online games flooded with this technique. When the Peng brothers released "Storm 2" after a lapse of ten years, the audience who were tired of aesthetics saw a big floating cloud.
Even so, "Warrior of Yellow Sand" with the same technique still shines on the screen. The film opens with an elegant ink painting of a wild sky and a low tree, with Jiang Qingyue approaching people. The swordsman of Linshui Zhaohuaren is arrogant and quiet, and he threw a dart at his water shadow, and a flooded one in the shadow. Blossoming blood-colored peach blossoms, it turned out that the killer was lurking at the bottom of the water, and then the sword, light, sword and shadow killed in ten steps, the blood was gushing like red clouds, and the wind was chanting. The photographer is using his lens to create an ink painting with an oriental mood.
Such a style is reminiscent of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" full of green bamboo. As an Oriental martial arts film entering Hollywood, "Warrior of Yellow Sand" gives people the expectation of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" at the beginning. Unexpectedly, the expression of the swordsman played by Zhang Dongjian when he escaped from the desert in search of fireworks in the world is like a Western oil painting, just like Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting "Mona Lisa's Smile", with a huge figure standing in front of you. In front of him, the mountains and rivers behind him look beautiful like miniatures. The difference is that Mona Lisa is an eternal smile, Jang Dong Gun is downright expressionless.
That is to say, the Momo Huangsha behind Zhang Dongjian is still an oriental poetry with a long river and a falling yen on the surface, but the spiritual core is replaced by the western desert of the United States where the cowboys are crisscrossed - in a word, living in Taohuawu The famous person plays the Hollywood story, which is "The Warrior of the Yellow Sand". Therefore, this film can be simplified to the following few sentences: a top swordsman hugs the only surviving child of a hostile family and returns to the world to help the beloved woman get revenge and return to the world.
Not to mention, this kind of story design is already outdated. The bad thing is that the unmoved face of the male protagonist Jang Dong Gun, and then he performs stunt fights according to the programmed design. What makes people collapse is that he is facing him. The same swordsman - it's like Plants vs. Zombies, from which we can't see the expressions of the male protagonist facing "Jianghu" at different times. There is no expression, which means that the director did not express his understanding of "Jianghu", and "Jianghu" is a simple soup, from which the audience can't salvage fish. Of course, you don't even want to see American-style one-liners, the film is so clean that even Jackie Chan-style gags are meager.
Undoubtedly, the director's approach is to cater to Hollywood's taste and hunt for the box office. But such a tasteless "Jianghu" is nothing more than a curiosity to Western audiences, and they may not buy it because of the special effects of "Avatar".
You must know that the meaning of Jianghu is: different from the reality that pays attention to rules and order, the Jianghu that pays attention to unusual acquisitions is a landscape of its own, and the knights who walk in it have to face everything in an unusual way, that is the realm of martial arts. On the surface, he seems to be able to control his own destiny to the greatest extent, but in fact he can't help but fall into the vicious circle of life and death.
In the expression of this kind of human nature, the Western oil painting style emphasizes character, so you will see that Mona Lisa chooses to smile, disregarding the impermanence of time and fate, and the rivers and lakes are just a miniature ditch under her feet; In the re-rendering of the oriental ink painting style, the knight is just a duckweed leaf in the rivers and lakes. And "Warrior of the Yellow Sand" makes people feel awkward. In the final analysis, it is the expression of oil painting in the artistic conception of ink painting. The director's mix and match style makes the characters tall like a carved statue, and the rivers and lakes are as small as a stinky ditch. The film is a natural hero. Not a knight, the rivers and lakes are not rivers and lakes, both sides will suffer.

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Extended Reading
  • Guy 2022-03-27 09:01:21

    I thought it was a piece of shit from the first minute

  • Elmore 2022-03-17 09:01:09

    Jang Dong Gun cuts fruit! I cut! I cut! I cut! cut! cut!

The Warrior's Way quotes

  • Ronald: If you truly love something or somebody, laundry man, you get as far away from 'em as possible. Cause we're sand, they're flowers.

  • Lynne: That sure is a pretty scar I gave *you*.