Tsui Hark has returned to his martial arts movie throne

When a style grasp returns after years away from the sphere, you concentrate. Wuxia veteran Tsui Hark, one of many main figures from Hong Kong cinema’s golden age, has returned with the historic fantasy Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants. Whereas he’s labored in many alternative genres, Condor Heroes marks the sixth consecutive decade wherein the legend has directed a wuxia movie. And whereas it doesn’t attain the stellar heights of a few of his masterpieces (the As soon as Upon a Time in China sequence, Peking Opera Blues), it’s an entertaining, trendy new big-budget addition to his lengthy roster of winners.

Based mostly on a portion of Jin Yong’s oft-adapted novel The Legends of the Condor Heroes, the film follows the heartfelt romance between Guo Jing (Xiao Zhan), a boyish martial arts grasp raised by Mongols, and Huang Rong (Zhuang Dafei), a younger girl who can be finding out martial arts. The 2 lovers’ paths diverge after a tragedy, and in opposition to the backdrop of a bloody battle between the Mongols and the Jin dynasty in Twelfth-century China, they attempt to discover one another amid the war-torn panorama.

Guo Jing has mastered a brand new martial artwork known as the Novem Drive, which has drawn the eye of different jealous martial arts masters who wish to steal his secrets and techniques. The Novem Drive grants some airbending talents, like many wuxia martial arts varieties. (Wuxia was a serious affect on Avatar: The Final Airbender and a few of its combating kinds.) Particularly, the martial artwork permits Guo Jing to intention the pressure of blows round objects: He can strike at a tree, however the pressure of the blow goes round it to hit a rock behind it.

That units up some incredible combat sequences between Guo Jing and different martial artists with distinctive approaches. There’s an opponent with a pointy throwing disc and the flexibility to generate poison clouds, and Guo Jing has to search out inventive methods to counter these weapons with wind. It’s one in all fairly just a few intricate fights within the film with satisfying payoffs, together with one in opposition to an enemy (Tony Leung Ka-fai) who makes use of the always-entertaining Toad model, and loads of large army battles that exhibit Mongolian horse archer techniques.

The film culminates in a blistering remaining showdown, the place the totally different highly effective martial arts varieties sq. off in the course of a siege. Hark is a grasp at understanding the connection between the digicam, the our bodies in movement, and the house round them, creating dynamic sequences which are energetic despite the sometimes-dodgy CGI. (Though it’s value noting that the wind and smoke powers look superb.)

As a director, Hark has all the time been identified for his aptitude and sense of favor, and Legends of the Condor Heroes definitely delivers on this entrance. The usage of mild and shadow particularly is evocative, drawing consideration to moments in battle or obscuring faces and our bodies. Guo Jing’s martial arts masters, the Seven Odds, are filmed virtually just like the Ringwraiths in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, seemingly consisting solely of lengthy cloaks and shadow, which provides a way of thriller and hazard to their presence.

In a later scene, when our hero discovers the corpses of individuals he cares about, Hark frames the our bodies on the backside of the display screen, holding Guo Jing’s shadow on a wall as the middle of the body as he drops to his knees in grief. It’s a stark second, strengthened by Hark’s restraint in not reducing to Guo Jing’s face.

Hark additionally deploys inventive digicam motion with surprising lengthy zooms, trendy transitions between scenes, a large sense of scale, and selective use of smashing photographs collectively to create attention-grabbing collages. Whereas the narrative of Legends of the Condor Heroes is usually plodding — particularly in the course of its 146-minute run time — it by no means fails to be trendy or participating. It’s a satisfying return for one of many nice administrators of his period.

Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants is now taking part in in restricted theatrical launch.