The China-made fantasy films we watched recently have been pretty great so far and this latest one is just as impressive. This one is particularly striking in how it conflates multiple disparate issues in China into one film: the popularity of online web fiction, the kidnapping of children on the streets and the scary power of the founders of the tech giant companies. This isn’t great art and there is no point in looking for deeper themes in it but it is rollicking great entertainment and a wonderfully imaginative spectacle even if some of its inspirations are very obvious.
Guan Ning has spent the last six years tracking down human traffickers who kidnapped his daughter Tangerine. He ambushes their van using his special skill in throwing small objects and discovers that it is full of children in cages but none of them is his daughter and the kidnappers manage to escape. He is later contacted by a representative of Aladdin, a large tech company in China. Due to their pervasive surveillance, they know everything that has happened and offers help to find Guan Ning’s daughter. They also know that when he sleeps Guan Ning dreams of a strange fantasy world about a young hero on a quest to kill an evil overlord known as Redmane. They reveal that this story is being written by a novelist Lu Kongwen who streams his writing online and that there is a connection between the character of Redmane and the CEO of Aladdin. Every time in the story Redmane feels pain, the CEO feels it too and he fears that when Redmane dies at the end of the book, he will die too. So he wants Guan Ning to kill Kongwen before he finishes the book in exchange for their help.
Scenes in this film jump between Guan Ning in present day China and the young hero, also named Kongwen, in a fantasy world. As usual, the fantastical elements rely on heavy use of CGI and look very video-gamey, with character inspirations obvious from games like Dark Souls. Yet in this context of a world described in a piece of web fiction that is somehow mysteriously connected to the real world, this aesthetic works perfectly. As the film progresses, some parts of the real world are filmed with the same color grading to suggest that some of the old buildings and locations blend into the fantasy world as well and of course this is meant to raise doubts about Guan Ning’s continued sanity. The fights look well animated even though the video game logic makes it difficult to feel the stakes involved. But I loved the showcasing of so many fantasy ideas: a giant boss enemy, sentient armor, dragons reimagined as manned Chinese lanterns strung together, a city whose populace are driven to kill one another. Sure, there’s not much depth to the worldbuilding but it all looks and feels so good.
As much as I love how hip the film feels in bringing together elements like authors streaming their writing online in return for donations, China’s apparently continuing phobia of child kidnappings, video game-style fantasy combat and a tech company CEO as an evil mastermind, the resolution of those threads isn’t really satisfying and doesn’t make much sense. For that matter, the existence of what amounts to minor superpowers in the real world also goes unexplained and seems to have been included to make the fights in the real world more exciting. It’s best to just sit back and enjoy the spectacle rather than overthink the plausibility of the plot or what it all means. I’m particularly amused that this film casts a Chinese tech company in a nefarious light just when the government is trying to curtail their power.
All the same this is an outstanding piece of entertainment and impressively creative. In general, I’m very impressed by how quickly the Chinese entertainment industry is able to take current fads and hits from comics and online fiction to be turned into movies and television shows. Upon reflection, I suppose that is because China suffers from a dearth of original IP and so is desperate for any new IP that becomes popular, compared to, say, Marvel for example, which can mine comics going back decades for material. That’s a good thing in my book as even I can only tolerate so many superhero action movies.