Shadow

This movie was actually kind of awesome! This is a Chinese film, released last year in its home country but released in 2019 in North America. In ancient China, an army commander’s decoy, or shadow, trains for a one-on-one battle to the death with the commander of the enemy army to determine who wins a captured city, and it just gets crazier from there. While this movie was kind of slow for the first half hour or so, it really picks up after that! This movie is absolutely beautiful. It has a colour scheme of mostly black and white. It is always cloudy and it is always raining. It looks like a painting, it’s just a feast for the eyes. The performances were really good. A lot of the acting in this movie is very subtle and you need to pay close attention to their facial expressions and body language. The fight choreography is also brilliant. It’s super bloody and brutal, and also very creative! The main character fights with one of the coolest weapons I’ve ever seen in a movie, an umbrella made out of blades! The music was also pretty fantastic. Overall, I highly recommend this movie! It’s beautiful, unique and awesome! Check it out!

Zhang Yimou movies are all very similar to me (Except the fantastic House of Flying Daggers) in that they are all pretty to look at but have very little substance, no character development and overall neither bore nor interest me. They put me in an entertainment limbo zone, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I almost feel a sort of meditation looking at beautiful images and hearing sounds but not feeling anything what so ever. Here the color is drained to a monochrome except for flesh tones. Hero was the same way, colors represented the acts but nothing meant anything. It ends when the credits roll, other wise I would not know it's over.

Esta muy bien hecha, tiene buenos efectos, la historia es interesante, el problema que no es peli para cualquiera

Chinese writer/director Yimou Zhang’s ‘Shadow’ is largely an example of a trailer being better than the film itself. The trailer is captivating, leading one to believe the movie is going to be mixture of martial arts fighting and palace intrigue. However, the full extent of the film is largely unbalanced in this regard, with most of the runtime bogged down with political maneuvering and the action sequences only ramping up towards the last quarter of the movie. What stands out most is the strikingly beautiful set design, featuring a stark black and white color palette inspired by the ancient Chinese painting tradition of ink brush. Yet the most challenging aspect of the movie is trying to keep track of the plot’s myriad twists and turns. It’d assumably be easily to do if one were fluent in the native language. However, trying to follow the labyrinthian storyline is exceedingly difficult given the fact that the plot is dense and the film is subtitled. As a result, we’d recommend watching 2016’s ‘The Handmaiden’ instead, which is a better representative in the genre.

I loved his previous movie... But this one bored the bejesus out of me... Visual pretty nice... Choreography meh... Story even more meh.... Just really mediocre... Or maybe i expected way more...