This is the second worst film of 2011 following Treasure Inn or Cai Shen Ke Zhan. Under no circumstances should you pay to see this unless you find humour in the embarrassingly awful.
http://opionator.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/legendary-amazons-or-yang-me n-nv-jiang-zhi-jun-ling-ru-shan-2011/
http://opionator.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/treasure-inn-or-cai-shen-ke- zhan/
To be honest, I read so many reviews calling this movie a piece of crap and not worth anybody's time that I was expecting the worst. But at least it was wall-to-wall action.
Yeah, a lot of the action wasn't that great but it had its entertaining moments. I kind of prefer something silly and over-the-top like this after seeing so many dry, stuffy Chinese historical pictures like White Vengeance/A Battle of Wits AKA Battle of the Warriors/The Warlords/Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon.
Once again, it's good to find someone else who found it reasonably enjoyable. On this particular content, I actually preferred the television series.
shareOne thing that bugged me about the movie. Is it just me or did the actor playing Cecilia Cheung's '18 year-old' son only look about 10 years younger than Cecilia herself? I'm not sure how old Cecilia is. I'm guessing she's about 35.
The whole movie had this weird thing going on where all the grandmas and mothers looked young and beautiful, and only the great grandmas had gray hair/looked old.
Cecilia Cheung was born in May 1980 and she's one of the "wives", i.e. the film is not showing the generations of the Yang family. This is the wives of the dead heroes carrying on the family tradition of defending the Song Dynasty from Western Xia under the leadership of a single old matriarch. So you would expect the wives to fall into a fairly narrow age range.
shareYes the movie has many flaws but it is action packed (we've seen much better choreography I know) with non-stop action. The pace of the movie is unbelievable, going from one scene to another, from one fight to another, to past and back all in record time. And exactely for that I love it! I love fast-paced movies which don't spend much time on unnecessary quiet or pseudo-story elements.
shareWe all look for different things. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
shareThe age thing is actually because of many asian actors and actresses barely aging.
Cecilia is 34 or 35. Having an 18 year old son at that age is quite standard in the ancient world. In some places and in some times the average life expectancy was only mid 30s. It would be even more urgent for a military family to get heirs quickly since this family is always sent to die in the story, hence the end shows a last heir and their desire for him to give up the military tradition to carry on the family line.
The 5th Aunt is Kathy Chow who is pushing 50 in real life. She is the one that dies in the final castle battle in the first wave and dies kneeling with her blade. She looks mid 30s. She still sometimes plays 20s somethings as do other actresses that look young but are in their 40s.
In large families like that it is not uncommon for your aunt or uncle to actually be around the same age as you and for 4 generations to live under the same roof.