Review of Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) by Sylocat — 16 Aug 2008

To say that the visual aesthetic of this film is stunning would be the understatement of the century; this movie is so gorgeous that it almost deserves a viewing on the big screen for that alone, and the battle sequences are among the most epic in the history of wuxia movies.

That said, the story of the film is a stunning exemplification of every problem I have with wuxia movies. The overblown symbolism, the soap-opera plot, and the ending so pointlessly depressing that you could almost picture the writer(s) laying awake in bed at night trying to think up the method to cynically jerk the most tears out of the pretentious art-film audience.

The emperor in this case is so cartoonishly sadistic that I found myself thinking, "Surely they wouldn't go to all this trouble to hammer into us how evil this guy is without planning to dethrone him in the end," but sure enough, they did exactly that, because having the powerful remain in power and the rebellious characters die is an ingrained staple of this genre, and the moment I realized they were in fact going to do that (about a half-hour short of the finish line), I felt like turning it off in disgust.

They raised our hopes at the very end again, only to dash them. Now that's a metaphor for the movie.