This post refers to a Japanese wuxia film released last year that was adapted from a manga and not the better known South Korean television series of the same name. I probably will watch that show sometime as I hear it’s good but I haven’t done so yet. Meanwhile its existence makes searching for information on this film difficult due to the shared single-word name and I suspect helped cause this to somewhat fly under the radar.

During the Warring States period of China, Shin and Hyo are two orphans who work as slave in a small village. Both dream of leaving this life by becoming great generals and so in their spare time, they teach themselves swordsmanship by sparring incessantly with sticks. One day chancellor Shobunkun notices them training and takes Hyo away to serve in the palace. Shin continues to train by himself until one evening when Hyo returns heavily injured. Before dying, he reveals that the king’s brother has mounted a coup to seize the throne and charges Shin with a mission. Shin makes it to the meeting point and realizes that the king Ei Sei looks exactly the same as Hyo who was taken to the palace to serve as a body double. Though angry at the king, Shin dispatches the assassin sent after him and decides to help him regain his throne. They are also joined by a young girl from a local mountain tribe who serves as their guide.

This is pretty much anime shot in live-action and so heavily features every trope of the genre, including the loudly bombastic Shin as the main character. It does look very good and I’m actually surprised by the quality of the CGI. The sense of place and scale is amazing and so spectacular as to make you wonder where they could have possibly filmed those towering mountains and the sprawling palace. The action looks great as well. It’s not that the fight choreography is that good as all of those flashy moves look highly impractical. But the Japanese excel at creating memorable characters, designing their look, costumes and movesets to make each one highly distinctive. The general Ouki is a great example with his huge size and equally outlandish guandao. Yet as my wife notes, what makes his character so scary is the creepy smile that is constantly pasted on his face as if he were some kind of puppet. I know that superheroes in Western media use colorful costumes to achieve this kind of distinctiveness but they’re still rather bad at using movements and fighting techniques to make characters look unique. It can get silly with how inspiring speeches can get characters to ignore their wounds, but the fights look exciting and entertaining to me.

Beyond the film itself, I find myself somewhat weirded out that this is a fully Japanese film that is about the unification of China by the state of Qin. I knew before this that the Japanese have a fondness for the Warring States era and so set all kinds of comics and games in it but this is the first time I’ve seen this in a film. So it’s still startling to see the Japanese embrace it so completely and champion the unification by way of conquest as a noble, uplifting endeavor especially when it is combined with the characteristic anime trope about chasing your dreams to the absolute fullest. I realize that this is basically just a comic book movie that shouldn’t be taken too seriously but I can think of few other media that embrace this glorification of conquest and martial greatness with such passion these days. Most such media at least try to frame it as a war of self defense or present the quest for martial prowess as personal self-improvement. But this one really is all about the glory, which makes me a bit uneasy.

Anyway misgivings about the theme aside, this is certainly an effective and entertaining action movie, a better spectacle than the much more expensively made Terminator: Dark Fate that we also watched recently for example. A comparison with Baahubali is also useful here. Where the Indian film goes so far as to nearly make itself a parody, Kingdom takes care to stay within the bounds of the reasonable while still being fantastic in its scope. I wonder if Indian audiences were to watch this, would they find it boringly tame and underwhelming?