Member laagi Posted February 9, 2021 Member Share Posted February 9, 2021 If you're looking for a fantasy action adventure this might be right up your alley. Featuring some great CGI, beautiful costumes & weapons, nice score and good overall performance by the cast. The only downside is the runtime which clocks in at 132 minutes. Especially the finale is too long with one too many interruptions with unnecessary subplots. Which could have easily been used in advance. Also the main villain doesn't really convince a 100%. Nevertheless it's a fun watch and really goes to show chinese cinema has come a long way. No need to hide from big hollywood! Streaming on Netflix now. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member DarthKato Posted February 9, 2021 Member Share Posted February 9, 2021 Looks awesome! Giving me Nioh 2 vibes a little, which I have been hooked on lately. Will defiantly check this one out. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member laagi Posted February 11, 2021 Author Member Share Posted February 11, 2021 On 2/10/2021 at 12:21 AM, DarthKato said: Looks awesome! Giving me Nioh 2 vibes a little, which I have been hooked on lately. Will defiantly check this one out. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it Enjoy! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member DarthKato Posted February 11, 2021 Member Share Posted February 11, 2021 5 hours ago, laagi said: I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it Enjoy! I'll have to wait for a DVD release, but as soon as I get it, I'll tell you what I think of it. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator thekfc Posted February 12, 2021 Moderator Share Posted February 12, 2021 I gave it a watch last week. I am at work & viewing the forum on mobile and that damn auto-fill words when typing is giving me a headache. I will give my thoughts when I am at home & on desktop. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator thekfc Posted February 14, 2021 Moderator Share Posted February 14, 2021 Ok where do I start. The story is about an evil serpent demon that is resting in a host & waiting to come out. The time is about right so 4 different sect send their top student to the imperial city to prevent the disaster. The movie makes no attempt to hide who is the host and bad guys - you can tell from the beginning. CGI is decent but relies too much on it. There have been 2 cases of plagiarism charges against the director with the last one being claims that he "copied" scenes from Doctor Strange. The movie is dubbed in English and I think it would have been better served with the original language. There are few things that are left unexplained, maybe scenes were cut to shorten the run time. The movie is 2 hours & 12 minutes and is still fells like 30 minutes too long. For the ending/last act my wife reactions was "I am not content" & so too will many viewers. The demon trying to conquer/destroy the world Spoiler turns into a love story. The movie is worth at least a watch but not a re-watch (for me it is not worth the re-watch). 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Drunken Monk Posted July 25, 2021 Member Share Posted July 25, 2021 While not a flat out martial arts movie The Yinyang Master does feature some wuxia styled swordplay. I decided to give this a go on Netflix today. Man, was I surprised! Imagine if China decided to make their own version of Doctor Strange but with added CGI monsters. The film looks stunning (aside from a few dodgy effects here and there), the story is solid and the action is fantastical enough to be impressive but not too over the top as to be obnoxious. The movie borrows HEAVILY from the MCU, in my opinion. Thor, the aforementioned Doctor Strange, Avengers: Infinity War, even Guardians of the Galaxy… They’re all here. This is by no means a slight; just something I noticed. If you’re looking for a big, magic filled fantasy film, you could do much, MUCH worse than this one. Looking forward to watching the sequel. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member DrNgor Posted November 20, 2021 Member Share Posted November 20, 2021 (edited) I had a Yin Yang Master double-header today. This seems to be based on the same source material as the other movie, but made by different studios and with a different cast and crew. Qing Ming (this time played by Young Detective Dee's Mark Chao) is a Yin-Yang Master in training. His master is killed during a battle with the Evil Serpent, a giant kaiju snake that's the embodiment of all of mankind's negative emotions. The Evil Serpent's soul is currently "locked" inside the body of someone residing at the Imperial Palace. Knowing that it's time is at hand, four demon hunters (including Qing Ming) are dispatched to the palace to collect demon spirits and and "feed" them to the Four Guardians (Dragon, Tiger, Vermillion and Turtle) so as to awaken them so that they may battle the Evil Serpent when it awakens. But things do not go as planned. After the action-packed beginning, the film becomes something of a court-based murder mystery, The court high priest is murdered and soon the demon hunters--Boya (Allen Deng); Longyue (Chun Xia, aka Jessie Li); and Shouyue (Duo Wang)--being to suspect each other of being involved in foul play. NOTE: Boya also appeared in other adaptation, albeit with a different backstory and characterization. Here, Boya and Qing Ming have a strong bromance thing going on. Things come to a head at about the 90-minute mark, after which the film becomes a warped love story. That quickly leads into an overlong climax involving a rampaging kaiju snake and angel-like Spirit Guardians battling with it. It feels like an extended cut scene from a very realistic-looking RPG game. Dream of Eternity is a more mature production than its equally big-budget counterpart. The violence is harsher, but the story is also deeper and far more nuanced. The bad guys are just bad guys for evil's sake. They have complex motives driven by nuanced emotions and backstories. They main problem is that a lot of this we learn in the last act while we're supposed to be enjoying the climatic carnage. That would be one of the pitfalls of playing the movie like a mystery and then like a epic fantasy with a World-Ending Event: we spent the first 70% of the movie in the dark, and then the action and exposition keep on tripping over each other. For the most part, the CGI is really good for this sort of film. The snake looks awesome, a far cry from the crap we got in films like Python and Boa and the later Anaconda sequels. The costumes are also very good. The film has great production values all around. There is some limited wuxia action courtesy of Nuo Sun, who also worked on Legend of Ravaging Dynasties. Nothing great, but not bad. Fans of wuxia and fantasy should get something out of it. Glancing at the film's entry on Douban, it didn't seem to be very popular with the local audiences. The film had good ticket pre-sales but bad word of mouth, and Shock Wave 2 overtook it at the box office. One female reviewer said that she'd break up with her boyfriend for taking her to watch it(!). Another reviewer said that its alternate titles should be: "Doctor Strange's God Baby" and "Chen Lingzhi, please call me by your name". I'm sure the last one refers to the homosexual undertones that the friendship between Qing Ming and Boya have. Edited November 21, 2021 by DrNgor 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator One Armed Boxer Posted November 21, 2021 Moderator Share Posted November 21, 2021 7 hours ago, DrNgor said: The film had good ticket pre-sales but bad word of mouth, and Bomb Disposal Expert 2 overtook it at the box office. Unrelated to 'The Yin-Yang Master', but just an FYI that 'Bomb Disposal Expert 2' was released in the west as 'Shock Wave 2', which coincidentally only received a release stateside at the beginning of this month. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member JackieRome Posted January 2, 2022 Member Share Posted January 2, 2022 I can't stand Chinese fantasy with a lot of CGI, I don't think I remember almost any of them that I liked. This finally has a very curated, incredibly detailed style. cgi used very well. they obviously spent a lot of money on it and from such a "particular" talent as /Guo Jingming I would not have expected it at all. 7/10 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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