Review of God of War (2017) by Edward L — 05 Aug 2018

A solid four stars from me. Good action scenes, some frustrating tropes though. Such as the young hothead and the young scrappy kid who's unaware of the dangers of war. However, we don't see many epic war films from China on Netflix and it was a real delight seeing one with English subtitles.

Unlike most films that come out of communist China, the Chinese here are not invincible and the Japanese are not evil caricatures. The fight scenes are well choreographed and the battle sequences are large and fantastic.

However, some small immersion breaking issues are the bad CG, but luckily these are few and far between, with the large majority of action using practical effects and massive numbers of extras. Finally, the actual ending makes no sense.

It simply is a still shot of the wife walking out of the doorway, why? In fact, why was she even a character? The film works great as a rivalry between Qi, and the village leader against the Silver Fox and the young lord.

The wife just gets in the way and acts like a spoilt child. She contributes nothing to the plot and is just a nuisance. Yes, I understand that she's supposed to be annoying, however, there's nothing redeeming about her.

She doesn't drive the plot at all, she doesn't grow, she's from what I can see at least, which granted can be rather limited, a completely useless individual who just annoys us. We could've used the screen time spent on her instead on dialogue between other characters, maybe hear more about the world, such as the history of the era, why they were raiding, maybe even more about the soldier's daily lives, or perhaps build on the relationship between the Ronin leader and the young lord, or the village leader with HIS wife, who actually has a personality beyond constantly offended or incredibly immature.

However, in conclusion, if you just skip the scenes involving General Qi's wife (which on second thought serves to... uh make him look like a good person because he DIDN'T decide to "subjugate" her? I mean yes, progressive for 500 years ago, but that's a bit of a low bar and it doesn't really show growth, besides he could've easily had a small scene giving out supplies to refugees or even just rescuing the captives.

Point stands, she's terrible) it is a fun and epic romp through Ming China with lots of Samurai thrown in with an admirable amount of restraint coming from the Chinese government.