Thoughts on 天地英雄( Warriors of Heaven and Earth ) WHE ( The acronyme the article will use, since I'm a lazy bastard :P ) is the latest big budget Chinese movie to hit the Chinese cinema scene since Hero. Like Hero, it's a pseudo historical drama. The similarities between the two films end there. WHE describes the story of a band of retired soldiers in their voyage to protect a caravan across the Gobe desert and to reach the Tang dynasty capital of ChangAn. They later realized however, that the caravvan brings with it an extremely important religious artifact that can tip the balance of power in the outer west rim of China. Of course, a band of bad guys chase after them for the entire duration of the movie. I must confess I liked the movie, but I don't love it. The movie did everything by the book, but the story flow was very mundane, and there weren't many memorable moments. I guess my biggest peeve about the movie is the costumes, I'll go into details about that later. The characterization of the movie is rather 2 dimensional. All the standard characters are here: The good hearted and seasoned veteran, the comical relieve, the girl, the hatable antagonist. The cast are obviously able to breath much more life into the characters, too bad the script didn't allow them to. The dialoges are very natual, and at most places well written. I could really do without Zhao Wei's voice overs though, the situations of the characters should be felt, not told. The connections between the characters never grew strong enough for me to care much about their fate. There are many scenes hinting LaiXi and Lt.Li's bonding, too bad they are mostly trivial and short. Once the characters do start to connect, the movie was over. Zhao Wei's character didn't do much either. She hardly ever spoke, and it was hard to detect her emotional attachment to JiangWen's character to anything beyond a simple crush, as they hardly ever interacted. The historical inaccuracies in the movie was staggering. First, the costume. It's hard to put my finger on what period exactly the costumes are from. They are a mixture of Japanese and European design. They feature helmets and shoulder protectors not found in that historical period. Also, why does JiangWen have short hair? The costumes are made of cheap leather, and looked like they can't block anthing. Is this an attempt of the director to cut budget? With such amazingly historically accurate movies as Hero and The Emperor and Assasin, there's no excuse for Chinese directors to have such sloppy background research. It's inevitable to compare WHE with the Korean movie MUSHA, as a result of their similar locale and theme. Although MUSHA was released first, WHE started shooting before MUSHA. But upon comparison, MUSHA beats WHE in almost every category. The accuracy in costume of that period is amazing, MUSHA simply had the best looking Asian armor in all the movies I've seen. The characters were strongly depicted, especially the general, who grew from his inital arragance and selfishness to finally fighting along side his men as equals. The fighting was much more gritty than that of WHE, and many scenes captured my imagination. ( Rushing down the hill, fighting in the forest... ) Hm...it seems like WHE isn't really that good. I didn't even get a chance to talk about the suprising super-natural element yet ( which made no sense ). the ending was also very sudden, and left much to be desired. Oh, and the final castle siege felt very tacked-on, as if there have to be a castle-siege in this kind of movie or something. If the movie ended with the old guy, I would be happy, as that was the only impressive scene in the movie IMO. The production of the movie feels a little rushed, and the scenes were mostly hurried along. Well, I actually thought the movie is ok, despite what you might think after reading this article. I actually have many more bones to pick, but I should do some research before I make them :P