Nine Colors Deer King 九色鹿王·前尘
4.0
4.0
There are two main characters in the film: Chang Sheng, a boy from a mountain village whose inhabitants have been struck by a mysterious illness, and Yan Yi, the crown prince whose palace has been seized by an evil demon empress. The problems of both heroes can only be solved by the mythical Nine Colors Deer King, but where to find him is unclear, especially since he is also being sought by a group of bandits and by that very demon empress, who needs the Deer King's power to become even more powerful and conquer the whole world.
In Chinese online cinema there are films with which you should never begin your acquaintance with this world, and Nine Colors Deer King is exactly one of them. This is a movie whose makers, on the one hand, try to embrace the boundless, and on the other, have absolutely no idea what to do with it – the script is a collection of disjointed scenes linked together in the most tenuous way, there is no discernible internal logic to what happens, and the characters do not even have a hint of personality, so in this situation the directors Zhong Wei-Xi and Yang Shuai can even be understood. It seems they had no choice but to say "okay, any whim for your money" and shoot everything exactly as written in the script – sort it out yourselves.
The first thing you stumble over in this film is its storytelling, which resembles the unforgettable letter home from Uncle Fyodor in Prostokvashino. The film starts with one thing, continues with another, then sharply veers off in a different direction, and you constantly feel as if you've missed something or simply don't understand it because of different mentalities. Why do the main characters, who have never met before, behave as if they know each other, why do the characters walk out of a forest and immediately find themselves in a desert, why does the film simply end the rat demon's storyline right after his transformation into a rat and never return to it, why, why, why…
Actually, the nine-colored deer king is not a random figment of this film's screenwriters' imagination but a well-known figure of Chinese folklore, and, for instance, the 1981 animated film The Nine-Colored Deer has been familiar to every Chinese person since childhood. This particular film was inspired by a legendary fresco celebrating self-sacrifice for the sake of others, and this, on the one hand, explains a lot, but, on the other, changes nothing – yes, now we know what the author wanted to say with his work, and yes, of course, audiences need to be reminded from time to time about eternal values, but the film does not become more engaging, more spectacular or simply more coherent because of it. And, in the end, why is this unsolicited lesson being taught to me at my own expense?
The makers of Nine Colors Deer King put neither plot nor action at the forefront but morality, and they did it in the most straightforward way – the characters spend a whole hour chasing each other, after which, in the very midst of yet another showdown, the deer king suddenly comes galloping up, tells everyone, like Leopold the Cat, that they're all fools and beyond help, and that people should live in harmony, and everyone immediately drops their weapons, repents and, of course, changes for the better. All of this would be utterly absurd if by this point one hadn't already realized that from this pitiful imitation of a proper film you can expect absolutely anything. After all, it doesn't bother the makers that the most striking detail of their film about ten virtues is Danielle Wang's impressive cleavage in the role of the demon empress?
4.0
4.0
