Tsui Hark is here to rightfully steal back the genre he created. Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou - you gave it your best and your films were great - HERO, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS - all were good, but you owe everything that made those films fantastic to one man, and that man is Tsui Hark. We also had films in recent years such as the Korean MUSA THE WARRIOR, and the Chinese HEROES OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, both decent but once again derivative of Hark’s classic films. Yes folks, Hark is back in a big way with SEVEN SWORDS, but if the polluted minds of modern jaded western genre-fans and Chinese audiences have anything to say about it, we true believers will never get a chance to see what could be the greatest wuxia epic series ever created.
SEVEN SWORDS, based upon a massive Chinese wuxia narrative, is the first in a planned seven movie long series, and clocking in at two and a half hours, it is a worthy opening to such an epic. With a whirlwind of brutal action, creative weaponry and dramatic tension, once the end credits began to roll, I only wanted more and could have easily sat through another two hours of the wonderful narrative. Like Peter Jackson’s FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, SEVEN SWORDS ends mid stride with our band of heroes moving on to continue their journey. However, unlike Jackson’s brilliant work, SEVEN SWORDS did not fare to well with critics or at the box office. The reasons why are unapparent to me, as I have studied the negativity espoused by critics and fans alike on web sites such as the IMDB, twitch.com, Ain’t It Cool News and other such outposts for internet fandom and found the negativity unwarranted.
Allow me to expand upon a theory I started working on with my GODZILLA FINAL WARS review. It seams to me that genre-fans have these little genre-shaped boxes in which they hold the ideals of what they consider to be first-rate cinema or genre entertainment. There are superhero-shaped boxes, horror-shaped boxes, thriller-shaped boxes and other such boxes for each genre or sub-genre. The more a film fits within the confines of these boxes the more the fan likes it, and conversely the more a film exists outside the confines of theses boxes the more it challenges a viewer and the greater the chance is for distaste. These boxes are built from the content of previous similar forms of entertainment, nostalgia, expectations, and stereotypes each fan brings to the table.
Tsui Hark does not direct movies to fit within these pre-configured boxes or the convictions a film within a certain genre must subscribe to. He is and always will a genre buster, something we admire around these parts (go figure). Hark creates the molds that others will follow in years to come - he did so with THE BUTTERFLY MURDERS, ZU WARRIORS, A BETTER TOMORROW, THE KILLER, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA, THE BLADE and a host of other important films. With SEVEN SWORDS, Hark was up against a new era of wuxia film with new standards set by HERO and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, as well as new techniques set forth by KUNG FU HUSTLE and THE MATRIX trilogy. Rather than play by these new sets of rules, by adding more and more in terms of aesthetic style and action direction, Hark and his team of talented filmmakers stripped the wuxia films down to its most basic structure.
SEVEN SWORDS is a rather simple film, albeit one with great ambition. If seen to its completion, it will most likely be the grandest epic series of films ever produced akin to the HARRY POTTER books or Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series in that it is striving for loftiness and scale in its storytelling. The basic story of the first installment sets the tone for the overall narrative and begins to define each of the seven main characters and their swords of choice - but it is only the tip of a very large iceberg. What we have here in part one is a self contained narrative that can be enjoyed by itself, but will only be made better when the over all story arc is completely fleshed out. With seven main characters and a host of other details to expand upon, Hark had to chose which characters would be the center of only the one film, while leaving others on the periphery. This has been a major complaint from several critics and fan sources, but one that I think carries no weight. Was FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGS derided for not giving full descriptions of all of its background and characters? Not to my knowledge. So why is SEVEN SWORDS receiving such criticism? I believe it is because this style of continuing narrative in a wuxia film does not fit in the common wuxia-shaped box of critics and fans alike.
Historically, when a director chose to take on the filming of a literary wuxia novel, he or she would select only certain chapters to develop. Take the epic work THE WATER MARGIN a.k.a. HEROS OF THE MARSH. This epic literary masterpiece is thousands of pages long, and many chapters have been used to make quite a few films. A viewer might be able to put together a kind of makeshift collection of these and watch a series of films that closely follows the story of the epic narrative, but no director has ever attempted to film the entire thing. Hark has done just this, albeit with a different epic martial arts narrative, but the point remains - once again Hark is not playing to typical wuxia movie convictions.
The story of SEVEN SWORDS is elegant in its simplicity. At its core, it shares much in common with THE SEVEN SAMURAI, RIO BRAVO, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, and other “siege” films, but it is the characters and their unique weapons and histories that set it apart. A Royal Edict has been issued stating that martial arts is illegal, and anyone found performing an art would be executed on the spot. General Fire-Wind, who leads a bloodthirsty army of almost undead like beastly soldiers travels from village to village not only killing any martial artists, but also wiping out every one including the woman, children and the elderly. Hu, an againg master swordsman who catches word of Fire-Wind and his ruthless band of killers risks his life to gather six other masters each skilled with a magical sword. Once the seven swordsmen are banded together, they protect a struggling village against the onslaught of Fire-Wind and his ruthless army. This is the story in a nutshells, there really is not much more to it. Once again Hark has challenged the convictions of the genre. Most wuxia films, especially those made during the 1990’s, have plots that are highly convoluted with multiple narrative strands overlapping and crisscrossing. With SEVEN SWORDS, Hark boiled down the narrative to the bare essentials.
The mainstay of the wuxia film as a genre is its flying swordsmen and their ballet like swordplay and elegant twirling, flying and leaping, details that are near and dear to Hark’s filmic heart - he was, along with Ching Siu Tung, a ground breaking pioneer in the techniques that would come to define the entire genre. With SEVEN SWORDS Hark left these techniques behind. Ching Siu Tung elevated the art to an almost unreachable level with his brilliant choreography in HERO, and years before Yuen Woo Ping set new standards with his work on the MATRIX TRILOGY. Folks, it has all been done now, I think we have reached a pinnacle in action direction, a detail that Hark and action choreographer extraordinaire Lau Kar-Leung must know as well. Rather than try to mimic the action of previous films, or try to reach the standards and techniques set forth by the above-mentioned films, Hark ad Leung played by a different set of rules. The action in SEVEN SWORDS does not have the same kind of beautiful flow, or fluid movement most commonly associated with wuxia films. Rather than portraying their heroes and villains as deadly ballet dancers, they filmed the action with a sense of chaos and recklessness. The action scenes (of which there are plenty) are fast and furious often-filmed close up or at midrange and lack the precision dance like moves of other wuxia films. This is not to say they are poorly filmed or constructed - quite the contrary. The action set pieces in SEVEN SWORDS are breathtaking and actually feel dangerous. I never got the sense that the warriors were just kind of showing off their “chops” and stances like I do in so many other examples of the genre. Here, each fight looks like it hurt and was fought with the utmost ferocity needed to overcome. Once again Hark has challenged the genre-shaped box of both his own previous films, and of the more modern examples of the genre.
I have a feeling Tsui Hark was very disappointed with the way SEVEN SWORDS was received, both critically and at the box office, but not for the same reasons why other directors might be let down over a poor performance. Hark has always considered himself a champion of Chinese culture and SEVEN SWORDS was a very personal film for him. I believe Hark feels like he was personally let down by the Chinese audiences for not understanding what he accomplished with this film, or what he hopes to accomplish with the entire series. Hark may be fighting a battle he cannot win - the genre-boxes held by today’s fan and critic are growing smaller and smaller and there is less room for innovation or growth. The film is even getting beaten down in the west where at the Toronto International Film Festival it has been called everything from a mess, to a complete failure.
I am here today to tell you these people are all wrong, dead wrong. SEVEN SWORDS is as moving a motion picture as I have ever seen, as epic in ambition as any project ever tackled, and as exciting as any film in the genre. It is long, but moves at a wonderful pace, is full of great characters that we will only find out more about as the series progresses, and it is quite beautiful to behold. The action is brutal and violent, more CONAN THE BARBARIAN, than HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and the excitement escalates throughout the picture culminating in a showdown for the ages. I am here today to tell you to destroy you genre-boxes and forget about any preconceived notions you may have. I have a feeling that time will be more forgiving to SEVEN SWORDS and once all is said and done, it will be hailed as the classic beginning to an epic saga that it is.
