I watched Eagle Shooting Heroes a few months before this movie, and enjoyed every farcical HK in-joke and cliché that was shovelled into it. The cast seemed to be enjoying every minute of it, and the fight scenes were well up to HK standards. Unfortunately, Wong Kar Wai, while he is an excellent director of modern themes, completely missed the point with Ashes of Time. It tries to be a philosophical martial arts movie, but lacks the adrenal rush of even the most basic Tsui Hark Wu Xia movies. Brigitte Lin reprises a role that martial arts fans would have seen a great many times previously, and the exploding cliffs and erupting lake are by no means original. Swordsman 2 and East is Red both played the supernatural card to the hilt, with the added benefit of some fantastic fight scenes.
Much as I admire Doyle's camera-work in Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, In the Mood For Love, Away With Words, and Last Life in the Universe, I feel that martial arts action cinematography is sufficiently specialised as to be a little beyond his reach. It's not that difficult to see why the shooting schedule went out of the window, or why the cast rushed off to make Eagle Shooting Heroes during the hiatus.
The freezeframe action sequences just look weak in comparison to 99% of HK action sequences, and rather than driving the narrative, they almost drag it to a standstill. I can only assume that there was either no action director on the set, or that the person doing that job was seriously inept, and the jerky style was used to cover the weakness of the fight scenes. A shame really, because Eagle Shooting Heroes shows that the cast were very capable of performing complicated fight scenes with their eyes shut. They weren't exactly novices at the genre, and with a competent action director, they are far more convincing as fighters.
And therein lies the problem with this movie. None of the fighters are convincing, because we never really see them fight. We see some blurry slow-mo, and greyed out freezeframes, but never get a real sense of what makes them so fearsome. And because of that, the grand sentiments expressed by the leads are rendered almost meaningless.
I like some of Wong Kar Wai's films, but not all of them, and I certainly don't place him on a pedestal where criticism is not permitted. He makes great original films, but his attempts to cover well worn traditional HK genres (Heroic bloodshed in As Tears Go By, and martial arts in Ashes of Time) have resulted in his weakest movies. Action films require as many, if not more, thought processes as more artistic character-driven movies, and also demand a certain quality threshold in the action scenes, which an auteur might mistakenly assume comes naturally. It doesn't.
Much as I admire Doyle's camera-work in Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, In the Mood For Love, Away With Words, and Last Life in the Universe, I feel that martial arts action cinematography is sufficiently specialised as to be a little beyond his reach. It's not that difficult to see why the shooting schedule went out of the window, or why the cast rushed off to make Eagle Shooting Heroes during the hiatus.
The freezeframe action sequences just look weak in comparison to 99% of HK action sequences, and rather than driving the narrative, they almost drag it to a standstill. I can only assume that there was either no action director on the set, or that the person doing that job was seriously inept, and the jerky style was used to cover the weakness of the fight scenes. A shame really, because Eagle Shooting Heroes shows that the cast were very capable of performing complicated fight scenes with their eyes shut. They weren't exactly novices at the genre, and with a competent action director, they are far more convincing as fighters.
And therein lies the problem with this movie. None of the fighters are convincing, because we never really see them fight. We see some blurry slow-mo, and greyed out freezeframes, but never get a real sense of what makes them so fearsome. And because of that, the grand sentiments expressed by the leads are rendered almost meaningless.
I like some of Wong Kar Wai's films, but not all of them, and I certainly don't place him on a pedestal where criticism is not permitted. He makes great original films, but his attempts to cover well worn traditional HK genres (Heroic bloodshed in As Tears Go By, and martial arts in Ashes of Time) have resulted in his weakest movies. Action films require as many, if not more, thought processes as more artistic character-driven movies, and also demand a certain quality threshold in the action scenes, which an auteur might mistakenly assume comes naturally. It doesn't.