Almost every image in this film has a million unspoken words and many expressed words actually hinting at many images your mind can conceive at that very moment - it's just up to you what you take from it. In reality of this bleak world Tsui Hark showing us the way how to survive and at the same time there's searching for non-existent love and harmony (almost i'd say the lost paradise), it is so far away from a usual action film, it's more about a wicked human behaviour and feelings, very interesting demonstration of a corrupt world wherein is not a way of escape. Though not a revolutionary landmark film of the high caliber of "Seven Swords", yet, this masterpiece is another proof (with many more - Chinese Feast, Don't Play With Fire, Peking Opera Blues, Green Snake, Butterfly Murders, Once Upon A Time In China, Seven Swords, Legend Of Zu) that an innovator and revolutionary perfectionist "Tsui Hark" rightfully belongs to the same league of such greats like H.Hawks, O.Welles, A.Kurosawa, F.Truffaut, S.Leone, S.Fuller, J.L.Godard, R.Polanski. After all, he's responsible for many more classics than even the great A.Hitchcock himself! Which seems to me quite ironical.