The Best Laid Plans of Bulls and Buns....
My Annual IMDB Hatchet Job for the film of my choice: THE PROMISE!
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Headstone Reads:
Another Fifth Generation Film-Maker Bites the Dust
Chen Kaige's Film Career
1984-1999
R.I.P.
He died from not eating his bun like the Manshen Fairy told him to.
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Capsule Review:
SPOILERS (In more ways than one) AHEAD....
I give this film 2/10. 1 style point for some nice costumes and scenery. Then the plot thickens with a load of bull(s). The bull quotient is maintained throughout, earning another style point for consistency. Hobgoblins of the Little Mind, rejoice!
On second thought, the bulls can go hump! I am giving this film 1/10 points, not 2/10 points. I don't care how consistently bullish this movie is. My thanks to Kevin Thomas of the L.A. Times for recommending this masterpiece of world cinema. Keep up the bad work Kev!
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On To My Review:
This is a fantasy film in an "alternate universe" Ancient China that no one believes in for a moment. Maybe if Mr. Sulu had beamed down from the Enterprise on shoreleave with his samurai sword I would have gone for it. The sad thing is that the basic concept of The Promise is actually solid. Imagine a film that was a cross between a King Arthur film like Excalibur and a wuxia kung fu film. The idea of blending Celtic and Chinese mythology is an intriguing one. If this film wanted to cater to international and Western audiences, why not just admit it and put all the cards on the table and do something “New Age”. It seems as if the movie started out as an attempt to piggyback particularly off of Zhang Yimou's wuxia work, then it seems suddenly a fantasy film in the Lord of the Rings mode was grafted onto it. Regardless of how this film came into being, the conception and execution of the mythic material was totally wrong. Chen Kaige handles this hybrid very poorly, even offensively, if you ask me.
First, what happens in the film:
First up is the Manshen Fairy, she of the Perpetual Cowlick. On deck we have the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona. In the wings proudly stands the CGI digital Lego-land world of the film. Just too much unreality to stomach. CGI and real life need to be blended together much more skillfully than this to really work, or more precisely, there has to be some reality to blend in the first place. The fact that it's a fairy tale is no excuse. George Lucas gets away with it in the Star Wars movies because he has such a precise visual eye and spends inordinate amounts of time and money to make the CGI look real, even though its nearly all digital. I wish more directors understood that carefully placed reality makes the unreality more real and unreal at the same time, which engenders belief on the part of the audience, which is all that matters in the end. I almost get the feeling movies today want to look fake, the better to plug the video games tie-ins for the juvenile audiences they cater to. "Pre-order Nintendo's 'The Great General's Slave Army Versus the Wild Barbarian Bulls' today!"
The first 20 minutes of buns, bulls and bad hairdos fatally ruined the film. The movie begins on a battlefield full of dead bodies. A little girl steals a bun form a dead soldier. For some reason an 8 year-old kid in armor comes and traps her. (He is later turns out to be the Prince, but so what?) She offers to trade him the bun for his helmet. He accepts, but she takes the bun and helmet and runs off. Said 8 year old swears vengeance for life. Stop me if I am going to fast.
The girl loses her bun in a lake. A resident water spirit, the Goddess Manshen (?!) no less, sporting the worst cowlick known to man, retrieves the bun. Not just any bun, but The Bun, the Primal Bun, the Ur-Bun! A bun, a bun, a kingdom for a bun! She offers to return it to the young girl if she is willing to sacrifice true love for the bun. In exchange she will become a Princess. A mythological pixie should be mischievous and elusive like a leprechaun, but not cruel. She should not be the wicked Witch of the North; a creature of this type in mythology should be generally benevolent but sly. What moral is there in a starving little girl agreeing to the Goddess of the Crazy Hair's terms to get a sticky bun in her belly? This is pretty offensive if you ask me. There is a moral in the General's destiny which at least makes mythological sense. He proves by using his armor for selfishness that he is not the worthy heir to the armor. He gets something from the Goddess, but his destiny is not what he thinks because he is predestined to fail. But the origins of the Princess have no real bearing on the story anyway, especially since the Prince's pre-pubescent reasons for hating her are ludicrous in the extreme. They don't make sense. Why not just keep it simple so people can understand it. Since nothing is really made in the story of her coming from lowly origins, what's the point?
She does turn out to be sister of the Slave, like in Star Wars and other myths, but the plot is so confusing I actually forgot the fact until a day later, when I woke up and had a vague recollection: wasn't she his sister or something? I had to scan back and find where that was explained. The movie is so bad that even when it does something right it comes out confusing. After the opening, the next time we see her there's is no explanation of how her character became what she became. Let the beautiful star-crossed Princess and the evil Prince enter the scene when we need them, not before. Joseph Campbell would be turning in his grave! Myths are supposed to be deceptively simply, not confusing. This movie is filled with nonsensical events, character motivations, and actions like this. nonsensical. Script re-write please.
Meanwhile, a General is fighting a tribe of savages that got lost on the way to The Road Warrior set and ended up in China twenty years later, kind of like the killer bees heading to California. The General drafts some slaves, known as "Snow Country" people (who happen to have the power of running 80 miles an hour!) to help fight them. Oh, the Snow Country Folk can travel back and forth in time when they get bored running! The Snow Country people could have gone forward in time to 1863 and been there when Abe Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. They wouldn't be slaves anymore and they'd have the paperwork to prove it. Or to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where they are sure to win a heap of track and field Olympic medals for Mother China, although I don't understand why they wouldn't be more into skiing, being Snow Country folk. How can a race of people that has an escape hatch and can run very fast be enslaved? How is that even possible? You'd think the would be the masters and everyone else slaves, at the very least. That's a load of bull(s)! If they are that stupid (or lazy?) they deserve to be slaves. Or are they conscientious objectors who don’t believe in fighting back?
Anyway, these Snow People are given a suicide mission (Operation Rodeo Clown) to act as a decoy to trap the marauders who heavily outnumber them. The savages unleash a herd of bulls on the slaves. The bulls chase after the slaves, and chase, and chase, and chase. One of the slaves tricks (I guess) the bulls into making a U-ey and they plow over the savages. Our General has all of the slaves save our hero shot with arrows for running away. Charming. Of such stuff are legends born!!!! The General is given credit for Operation Rodeo Clown, though it was the Slave who won the day. The General promotes the Sole Surviving Slave to be his Personal Slave (is there an XXX version of this?). What an awesome responsibility, and he gets to eat every day now! They head back to rescue the king (who is in trouble for some reason). Before they get there, an assassin in a black cloak (a "Snow Country" track and field star himself) injures the General. The General (who wears magical red armor and a gold mask) tells the Slave to go to the palace in his stead in disguise and help the king out of the mystery pickle.
He goes to the palace, where for some reason our heroine is vamping it up on the roof and doing the Dance of the Seven Veils. This will somehow help rescue the king, who is also hanging out on the roof. The Stripper on the Roof turns out to be the Little Lost Bun Girl. Are you following this? Go and take an intermission if need be. Are you back? She suddenly decides that she would rather have the enemy soldiers shoot the roof-bound King with arrows. The strapping and generally pleasant Peasnant/General rides to the rescue but decides he would rather waste the King than save him. Why? Because he's fallen in love with a stripper. Too bad this isn't a Bollywood musical, I think there's a song here, or a rap song anyway. To resume, because the Slave is still wearing the General's mask, the Princess Jezebel assumes it is the General and they immediately fall mutually in love. They are chased to a cliff with a waterfall, and the General (actually the Slave) leaps off a cliff...Of such stuff are legends born!!!!
The General is caught and blamed for the murder of the King that his boneheaded Slave actually committed. He is strung up on a banana tree and left to die, and presumably to be crapped on by monkeys. Everyone's favorite Goddess Manshen comes in for a landing, and the evidently awed Generals barks: "Who are you?" The fact they she and her hair are in flight apparently makes little impression on him. At this point you'd think he'd be a little more happy to be visited by someone other than a monkey looking for a banana. She tells him someone else will wear his armor, and that he is basically screwed...
I could go on but I'm exhausted.
How the story should have gone:
OK, first of all the story should have began with the General as a younger man. He is fighting a battle and is wounded, then is separated from his men in a storm when his horse bolts. He finds himself in a forest glen with a lake. He goes to the lake to dress his wounds and drink. Out of the lake comes the lake spirit, not that stupid Goddess Crazy Hair. Pagan water spirits are universal to all cultures. People grasp it intuitively. The "Old Religion" as the Celtics say. I am sure the Chinese have similar pagan mythology to blend with the Arthurian stuff. This is where Chen and Co. should have cracked open the mythology books to find those juicy Universal Myths We All Share. Call up George Lucas for a few clues. They didn't have any Gaelic stuff translated into Mandarin at the Beijing Public Library, perhaps? Yet they didn't seem much interested in Chinese mythology either. They just made up some bizarre stuff off the top of their heads and tried to pass it off as fantasy. What I wanted to see was a true merging and blending of two cultures to create a alternate world that had elements of Chinese and Western hero myths but was also a believable world unto itself.
Getting back to pixies, what is a Manshen Goddess? Chen shouldn't even have gone there. Is there something we should know about Chinese mythology? Is she like Hera or Aphrodite, part of a pantheon, or a nature spirit of some kind? The Manshen Goddess should not have been able to travel around the countryside on a get-acquainted tour with all the major characters either. She should have been a water spirit whose sole purpose is to deliver the armor to its rightful owner. She should not play any part in the Princess' story at all, and stay in her damn lake like a proper water pixie.
As for the Princess, we don't need to know anything about her except that she is a Princess. Period. The story is about the General and the Slave. The Princess is crucial in the ensuing love-triangle/mistaken identity plot, but the wheels of fate should be set in motion by the General. In other words, he is like Uther Pendragen, father of King Arthur. He only serves the purpose of holding the magic armor until the true hero worthy of it comes along.
Back to my alternate movie script. The water spirit gives the General a magic sword and armor. She gives him a prophecy that he who wears it will become King and marry a Princess, and will be invincible. He assumes she means him, but really the chosen one is a lowborn person, who is really royalty but doesn't know it. Flash forward to some years later. The General is unrivalled as a warrior, but he has character defects: he is ruthless. During a battle, he press-gangs some villagers to act as human shields against some marauders, who are actually working for the evil necromancer Prince who wants to draw the General away so he can kill the King and get the Princess. All of the peasants are killed save one. The General falls off his horse and looses his helmet. The surviving peasant takes the sword and armor and defends his General, killing all the marauders. He has never wielded a sword before but seems to know intuitively how to fight with this sword in his hands (it is meant for him after all). He gives articles back to the General. The General's men catch up, and see the carnage and assume the General has done it all single-handedly. He takes the credit, of course. There never should have been any Snow Country people. The buffalo (Ok actually bull) stampede felt like something out of Native American legend. It was totally wrong for the film, and the CGI was ridiculous anyway. The special effects in this movie could be described in a word: pathetic.
On their way back home, the General and the peasant are separated in a storm from their company. The end up in the very glen where the General first got the sword and armor. The peasant goes to fetch some firewood. The water spirit appears and tells him more of the prophecy, and the General becomes worried about who the Peasant might actually be. She also shows him an image of the Prince trying to take over the palace and the Princess reflected in the water. An assassin sent by the evil Prince wounds the General, but runs off when the peasant comes back from getting the firewood. The General tells the peasant to go back and save the Princess and king. He gives him the mask, armor and sword. He goes off wearing the mask and armor, but is framed by the Prince who has had the King killed. Or perhaps he could kill the king like in the film, but by accident or being tricked by the Prince somehow. In the movie he just ups and kills the King because the guy was trying to defend himself from a half-disrobed psycho-vixen. Character motivations, please? The Prince thinks it is the General and plans to have him executed for regicide. The Peasant in disguise falls in love with the Princess and they make off together. They reach a waterfall and can go no further. The Prince offers to spare the Princess if he jumps to his death. He does so. The Prince and Princess believe it was the General and that he is dead.
The rest of the story is more or less OK from this point on if you eliminate the ridiculous Snow Country sub-plot, the traveling back and forth in time, and the assassin-in-need-of-therapy stuff. In other words, if it was a completely different movie. Instead the necromancer Prince could have summoned an army of the dead and have the General and peasant fight it out with them. Don't kill the hero idiots: The General certainly, but not the hero! Kid's won't like and neither will adults. Either its happily ever after for the whole family, or its a dark fairy tale for adults, make up your minds dummies. Folks, that just Fantasy 101, not the crap that Chen Kaige made. He should have done his Joseph Campbell "Hero With a Thousand Faces" homework and he might have had something worthwhile. But even if the Peasant does die, don't then cop out by having him put on a magic cloak and go back in time. What is this, Star Trek? If your gonna use CGI do something interesting for God's sake! Such as an army of kung fu ghost warriors fighting it out, or something.
One other thing irritated me, concerning a deleted scene in the longer version (I shudder at the thought) of this movie shown overseas. If you have the DVD you will see in the extras a deleted scene where the General and Slave are lost in in the bamboo forest during a lightning storm. The General goes off alone to find the Goddess. She tells him that he will lose his armor and he has won his last battle. This is a Throne of Blood rip-off! Just because Zhang Yimou knows how to subtly borrow from Kurosawa doesn't mean Kaige can outright plagiarize. Apparently, Chan Kaige is so desperate to regain equal footing with his former protégé that he thinks some of Yimou’s luck will rub off on him by using the same talismans like Kurosawa: well, it didn’t. Besides, the prophecy angle is so totally confused by the Goddess' prior involvement with the Princess that it just makes this scene laughable instead of ominous, like in Kurosawa. The constant smirking of the actor playing the General in this scene didn't help matters either. Apparently running into Manshen Goddesses is old hat for him, he never seemed too awed anytime she showed up. I would think his bad-haired benefactor would rate better treatment. At least she did something about her hair in that scene.
This film is a disgrace to the whole Fifth Generation Movement, which actually meant something once. Chen Kaige still has talent, so what is his major malfunction? The Promise was just Retarded Generation. He was incredibly inept in trying to create a different genre. Chen Kaige himself I don't find sad anymore. After The Promise I find him laughable. To me just hearing his name is a punch line. The Promise just made cinema in general look bad. I feel embarrassed for everyone involved. I wanted to see something like that work, and I think there was potential there.
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P.S. Rent The Promise out and watch it on Thanksgiving Day, it's a lot cheaper than buying a real turkey, and you have as many helpings as you like. After puking you can watch it some more.
P.P.S. I keep the collected film criticisms of Mr. Kevin "One of the most beautiful movies imaginable" Thomas of the L.A. Times in bound volumes by my bedside for late night wisdom and instruction. Have to send him a pair of glasses for Christmas.