Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Glad I got to catch this one in theaters again, the first time I saw it was when it released when I was 7 years old. As the only Chinese kid in my grade, this movie made me feel like Chinese people were literally magic.
As an adult the fight choreography holds up, I think much of the best storytelling comes from the fights themselves. The actual plot around the sword gets a bit contrived, it's actually funny how it just like, gets stolen again and again. But I do love how each character interacts with the theme of desire and selfishness.
One thing that did not age well is the subtitles. I don't know if it's a decision just for this movie or if it's a product of it's time, but they are so concise and leave out so much nuance and detail that you could get if you even had a passing understanding of Mandarin Chinese. I'm glad I could pick up on some of the language that really does inspire more beauty than the subtitles sometimes let's on, as without it the dialog can seem really dry. I think modern foreign language films don't feel the need to compromise so much on the verbosity or detail of the localization and we are all better for that.
Also holy shit Chow Yun Fat is terrible at Mandarin and I feel for him so hard, makes me think I could be in a Chinese language film.
But yeah I love this film. Zhang Ziyi dressed as the twinkiest boy imaginable kicking the shit out of like 100 guys in a restaurant will never get old.
This review was originally posted on Letterboxd and is being archived here at sceawian.com. These archived reviews are selected by the author in order to document her progress as a film writer. You can find the link to the original review here.