A comic-book motion picture 'masterpiece'.
Black Mask 2 actually happens to be possibly the first stylistic live action film quite intricately turned into the codes of a comic book fairy-tale underminned by the colorful palette of the angles, frames or storyboards based on the animated formats of the picturesque comic book. In fact, the film is using extremely subversive methods challenging the constraints of the movie (or genre) language and also our own reality by creating an artificiality in a futuristic multi-cultural highly advanced purely philosophical dimension that somehow represents the world of our wildest imagination, subconscious desires and illogical dreams, and de-facto reflecting our modern social thinking and time of the globalization... especially of the Asian and American cinema, and this film is wittingly dealing with the mix of American (Californium, Iridium) and Asian (all the victims of this transformation) sensibilities and letting their main characters fighting for their own identity and searching for their own cultural roots. From this perspective the film is a pure philosophy encapsulated in a visual form contemplating the materialistic world we might be coming closer every day by our impulse for escaping from the reality... now be it the materialism in terms of the video games, computers, films or any other fascinations with the unknown that have no basis in the reality...
I put up here one analysis of the film (i wish i wrote myself) to those who would like to learn if this is even a film or just a comic book:
In order to help the audience to put up with the fantasy world of super-heroes, directors of mainstream productions (such as Spiderman or X Men) have adapted the narrative and visual codes of comics to the cinema codes. Their academic mise-en-scene allows then the viewers to enter an unfamiliar genre. Although this approach is effective, it certainly sacrifices the aesthetic originality and the narrative tone of the comic book.
Tsui Hark chose the opposite approach with Black Mask 2. He didn't try to adapt the comic world to the cinema techniques but instead he adapted his cinema to the comic codes. In this respect, the direction is entirely thought accordingly to the visual aspect of such art. The editing is mainly based on ellipsis, i.e. frames are organised like a comic layout.
The movie is therefore full of high and low angle shots, close-ups and bent camera angles. The compositions are here very similar to the comic strips. The audience have to reconstruct the action, as they would do if they were reading a comic book. The film looks like an animated storyboard in the end. Some shots even copy the layout of a comic book to clearly express this aesthetic approach. (see analysis of a scene)
From a visual point of view, the director reproduced a totally artificial universe, which is the very image of the stylised and colourful comics. That's why Tsui Hark uses and abuses of 'supernatural' camera angles. The camera flies around or runs through matter. Camera moves are far too fast! All these types of shots remind the fantasy of the represented world. Special effects have an important part in those compositions as well. They are brightly coloured and thus, they respect the code of colours of comics. Some location are entirely made with CGI (computer-generated imaging work) in order to root perfectly the movie into the fantasy world. In this respect the first shots showing a rough sea and a lighthouse are entirely computer made. It could have been much easier and more realistic to go to the sea front in a bad day and to shot heavy seas.
Right from the beginning, Tsui hark announces clearly his aesthetic choices. In this respect, the cardboard monsters can be seen as a re-actualisation of the pop culture from Japan (the super Sentai) and Hong-Kong (the kitsch hero in tights, the Black Rose for instance). By choosing to depict the Wrestling world, the director heavily insists. The City of Mask is overall the city of the carnival and the grotesque. In this context, the cheapness of the SFX cannot be entirely due to a limited budget but it is also due to aesthetic choices from Tsui Hark.
The script is also based on the way stories are told in comics. The visual aspect is dominant over the plot. There is no pause. The story is built on series of extremely coded situations. There is, therefore, not any psychological subtext. Characters are only stereotyped features evolving within an archetypal scenario. During a fight sequence, Black Mask and Dr Lang are hung up just like puppets thanks to wires. This illustrates the intentional mechanical nature of the film. Colours, graphic designs, frantic mise-en-scene and symbolic language make sense first; well before the characters and their adventures.
As for symbols, as always in Tsui Hark's movies, the movie contains a great deal of sub-texts and metaphors. In Black Mask 2, as in Knock Off or Legend Of Zu, this symbolic language works against the immediate and naive reading of the film. This is probably one of the biggest paradoxes of Tsui Hark's current cinema. The sub-text ends up interfering with the code of the cinema of genre, to the point of putting in jeopardy the mere and direct audience support to this form of entertainment. In this very case the adaptation of the comic book world to the cinematic world is counterbalanced by a harsh criticism of comics. Indeed, Tsui Hark laughs at the mercantile side of such genre and dismantles its codes. It's obvious when, for example, Black Mask explains that wrestling (a metaphor for the super-hero world, see the baby face gallery) is a only game.
Moreover, Tsui Hark has always been strongly reluctant to let his work being recycled by Hollywood. This story about men being genetically altered with iridium and Californium (!) suggests the Hollywood studios interests for the HK cinema. The monsters, products of such alteration, correspond to a bitter point of view (pretty realistic so far) of what can produce a globalisation of the HK cinema.
Tsui Hark distances himself from the movie's subject and refuses to really get involved in order to adopt a much more cynical position. He has finally lost track of the simple and direct spirit of popular cinema. Black Mask 2 misses the entertaining dimension, which was a true force in Tsui Hark's best films. He's been questioning the cinema of genre since The Blade. If it's a courageous move, his situation as a moviemaker is worrying, his career being jeopardised.
In the other hand, the weirdness resulting from Black Mask 2 aesthetic choices and paradoxes makes it a fascinating feature. An endangered value in the current cinema of genre.