Chp 65. Wu Ji - The Promise

Hehe... I can’t believe I've just spent 2 hours watching a Chinese flick in Chinese language with Chinese subtitles!

Ever since The Promise appeared at imdb.com, I was dying to watch it. But I couldn’t find it anywhere at Ares and Limewire. And the very few people who are sharing it were not letting me copy at all. Finally found someone happily sharing it with me. At first I grew suspicious coz this guy might be one of those guys sharing a totally different movie under this name. But when I tested it, it was indeed the right one. And it was an amazing print! Only sour grape was, the subtitle was in Chinese. Anyway jobless me watched it.



I think the movie is definitely not up to the level of CTHD, Hero, Warriors of Heaven and Earth, House of flying daggers etc when it comes to the fight scenes. The graphics were a bit unreal... I mean, I guess that might be because the print was so clear that some of the CGs look a bit artificial and ridiculous. But the background setting was just Oh My God, if there was one place I must take my gurl to before I die, this is it. Truly breath-taking backdrops and sceneries.

There were some really good dialogues too, like when Don-Kun Jang (Kunlun) looked at Cecilia Cheung (Princess Qingcheng) and said "Ching hua mau ki" and she replied "Mai ping ling sing". awweeee that was chooo chweeeet

Hehehe... Anyway, I am definitely going to see it in the theatre once it is released coz from what I've heard, this movie is more of a love story than an action, so one HAVE to understand what the actors are talking about

Here is the gist of the story. Warning: It contains spoiler (Duh!)

One girl, one boy. Both fighting for food in a ravaged torn war zone surrounded by corpses strewn all over the Battlefield. Childish kidding and lots of Chinese dialogues later, girl ran to lake, dropped her food (which extremely resembles an idly) and cried. The river Goddess came and returned the food to her, and told her something.

Next scene: War. Evil King. With a huge army. All wearing red. On hill-tops that resembled the Grand Canyon. Down below, slaves in brown attire forced to crawl. Enemies from other side (dressed in black) released thousands of bull. All the slaves died except Hero slave. He out-crawled and out-ran the charging bulls with a wounded friend on his shoulder and actually led them back to the enemy's camp! He kept on running and running. Until he reached a place where he buried his friend. Then the red General came and probably said he was impressed by the way he ran so he made him his personal slave.

Together they ran until the General was ambushed by an Assassin who moved as fast as Hero. Just when the Assassin was about to kill the General, Hero stepped in. Hero and Assassin fought. They both moved equally fast and hence recognized each other. Assassin fled. With General injured, Hero wore the General's uniform and put on a golden mask.

Now red King became white King. Everybody dressed in white now. Enter the beautiful Princess. A bad person in red uniform tried to kill Princess. So Hero who was wearing the General's mask rescued her. Hero fell in love with Princess. But they were trapped at a waterfall. Hero, who still hadn’t disclosed his identity to Princess and evil King, jumped into the water.

Princess is now taken back and evil King fell in love with her. Put her in a huge golden cage and tried to woo her but to no avail. Later General recovered from his wounds and went to the Palace with Hero to rescue Princess. General fell in love with Princess. Princess thought it was the same man who rescued her earlier, so she too kinda liked him back. Hero very sad. But still he forced the Palace gate open so that Princess and General can escape. Hero captured and tortured by bad King, but later managed to escape too. Went back to his master, the General. Together the three of them lived happily. General humped pretty Princess in all directions. Not a scene I would recommend to your children.

And then things became even more and more confusing. Some magical race of people who saved Hero once are now killed by evil King. Maybe they were the Hero's people because they all moved as fast as him (and the Assassin who nearly killed the General once). Hero very angry. Vowed to take revenge in Chinese.

General tricked by evil King and captured. Evil King then sent army to capture Princess. Hero once again went to Palace to rescue General and Princess.

Next scene: General tied to a tree and Princess tied to a chair. Evil King laughing. Evil king revealed to Princess that he was the boy who snatched her food away from her when they were kids. He even showed her the bread he took from her (I wonder what kinda preservatives he must have been using) Anyway a small fight erupted. Evil King stabbed General. Hero suddenly appeared out of nowhere and stabbed evil King. With his last strength, evil King pulled out knife and stabbed back Hero. So, there they were, Princess crying and all three men who loved her bleeding to death. Some more Chinese dialogues. Then all three men died.

Final scene showed Hero being reborn! He took the Princess on his back and together they flew away.

Now seriously tell me, don’t you think the movie was good?

Anyway, another reason why I wanna watch the movie again with English subtitles is because I wanna see how way off I was in interpreting the movie Because I consider myself to be really good at this interpretation thingie, as I have watched countless number of Tamil and Mallyalam movies even before I could understand a single word.