At Its Core, It's a Video Game Movie

I'm prefacing this by saying that I'm as massive fan of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, so when this movie got announced I was both terrified and excited simultaneously to see it happen. I wasn't disappointed, but neither was I wholly impressed, but I did find myself actually enjoying the movie.

The biggest thing you need to understand going into this is that this movie is, at the end of the day, a video game movie. If you're going in looking for a Three Kingdoms (2010)-Dynasty Warriors combo, this isn't it. The story is pretty straight-forward, the action is kinda insane, and so long as you take it for what it is - an adaptation of a franchise known for being a little whack - then you will enjoy this movie if for no other reason than it's nuts.

The characters are about what you'd expect from a Dynasty Warriors setting: Liu Bei and his brothers fight for righteousness and to restore the Han Dynasty, Cao Cao is coming in with ulterior motives and seeking to get rid of the crumbling Han Dynasty, and you have Dong Zhuo being the evil supervillain he is with Lu Bu on a leash. None of them are particularly deep, but considering that the video game franchise only just now made them more than archetypes (i.e. Cao Cao isn't a mustache twirling villain anymore and Liu Bei's personality is now more than "BENEVOLENCE!"), it was about what I expected going in. Wang Kai was amazing as Cao Cao and gave him an interesting bit of depth I wasn't expecting, and he was probably one of the best things about the movie. Tony Yang as Liu Bei was pretty bland overall, but that seemed more from the script and less from him. Louis Koo is about the only person I figured could have pulled off Lu Bu and he did great. I wasn't too hip on most of the cast when I saw the initial casting, but in terms of capturing what the characters were about in the source material, they did a decent job. Not good, not bad, just decent.

The story was... lackluster. Honestly, this is one of those movies where you really shouldn't be going into this for the story. There was one, and if you know anything about Romance of the Three Kingdoms, then this is hardly a spoiler: Dong Zhuo usurps the throne and our intrepid heroes form a coalition to stop him no matter the cost, but it was clearly an afterthought when placed beside the absolutely insane fight scenes that I expected out of this movie. It was pretty obvious that the movie was made around the battles between Lu Bu and... everyone. They attempted to explain how these people got their weird, whack powers and it felt dumb. If they had just owned it and had everyone's weapons shooting fire and lightning, it would have worked better than trying to explain it, honestly. It felt really cliched to have these weapons be "magical" and "given to people with great destinies" when literally everyone and their mother is slinging elemental powers around in the source material. Letting the viewer just use the suspension of disbelief would have been much more effective. The movie also ended in a weird place, which left me sitting back and going "Wait, we're ending here?" Nothing really gets resolved and that's really disappointing considering how they were building up the big battle with Cao Cao, Yuan Shao, Liu Bei and his bros against Dong Zhuo and Lu Bu. They get to Luoyang, there's a time skip, and suddenly the credits are rolling. It's a weird stopping point, especially if we never see a sequel.

The effects were okay, not horrible and the stylized way they were done weirdly fit the movie, and the fight scenes were exactly what you'd expect in a movie that was blending the crazy elements of a video game with wuxia martial arts. The crazy part is that it works. The stuff in between the fights did leave me hoping that someone would start a fight again just to get it moving because they were hands-down the best part of the movie. They were insane. They were crazy. They were chaotic.

And I loved them.

When the movie embraces the "one dude killing thousands of people on his own" motif, it is so much fun that it's insane. When it grabs ahold of what made Dynasty Warriors cool, the movie is incredible. It's so much fun and I found myself going "This is insane, and I love it!" more than once during the fight scenes. When it tries to be a melodrama with a wuxia backdrop, it fails. Horribly.

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A Hot Mess of a Drama

Alright, for starters, I love Min Guo Dramas. The romance, the danger, hot people in gorgeous period clothing - it's always a win. Except here. I was genuinely surprised to look it up and see that this drama has such good ratings here because... it is bad. Really, really bad. If you like it, I'm happy that you had a good viewing experience because this drama made me legitimately angry on a number of levels because the incompetence was just... staggering. There were moments in this drama that made me go "Oh, this is actually romantic" or "Oh, this is actually interesting", but most of it left me sighing, rolling my eyes, and wondering how I made it that far.

Things I Liked:
- The actors weren't all terrible. They genuinely had some good moments. I have no idea how they convinced some of these veteran actors to be in this drama, but they were good and the leads weren't terrible.
- There were some genuinely good, romantic moments, but not usually between the leads. The side characters had more chemistry in their couples than the ML and FL had in the entire show and I was actually invested in the romantic plots for them.
- Guangyao. He and his friends were what kept me going through this shown, not gonna lie.

Things I Disliked:
- Costumes. They were cheap and looked awful. Period dramas need good, convincing clothing to help set the setting. These looked like they were picked up from a fashion shop and styled to try and look like they were out of the early twentieth century. The hair on all of the girls were obviously all cheap wigs that were styled pretty badly and didn't fit the setting in the slightest. The uniforms were alright and the men's suits are hard to mess up, but everything else was... Yikes.
- The cinematography. Lighting didn't exist in outside shots. There was no color correcting or anything to improve how exterior shots looked at all. It looked like they just used the raw footage and did no editing whatsoever. The editing that was done was something you would see in a university film project. The facial smoothing was so horrible that it made people's jaws invisible, their mouths and eyebrows had to be re-edited onto their faces in a few scenes, it took away laugh lines and other basic features from older actors who should have them and made their faces look really weird, and was all around done in a way that made it look like a literal Snapchat filter would have done a better job. It was incredibly amateur. That isn't even going into the horrible CGI, the badly choreographed action scenes, and the terrible out of period props that got used constantly.
- The setting. It was wasted. I've seen a few reviewers here say that you need to "watch for the plot, not the accuracy" and things of similar nature, but in a period drama, the historical aspect makes up a huge chunk of the plot and background conflict that helps shape the characters. The Min Guo era in China was filled with suffering, death, drama, and war. The drama needs to reflect that or else the background means nothing. Like how the background politics of the Manchu and their states can drive a well written Qing harem drama, the clashes between the revolutionary armies and the backbiting internal strife between the various Republican warlords is supposed to help drive a good Min Guo drama. At that point, just set in in modern times because it literally never mattered. They keep bringing up the revolutionaries and the southern wars, but nothing about that ever really affected the plot at all. Having it set during this era was pointless outside of aesthetics.
- The Plot. It was... bad. It felt very forced pretty much every second that it was moving forward. My biggest gripe was that at no point did Xuanlin or Wangqing ever seem like they were in genuine danger. Xuanlin was always six steps ahead of Xu Bojun to the point where I was sitting there rolling my eyes because it was obvious he had some secret plan. The first few times, it was alright, but the plot was rinse and repeat for all 36 episodes of this same plotline. It erased any tension that these scenarios might have had by using this formula: Xuanlin gets spotted doing something shady, Bojun's spies catch him, they report it to Guangyao, Guangyao busts in and catches the bad guys, but no Xuanlin, Xuanlin gets revealed that he set the whole thing up to get his army what they need or remove some bad actors, Wangqing is somehow tangentially involved in a way where she doesn't have to do anything worthwhile except talk to some dude who immediately gives her what she wants or sees things her way, Bojun gets butthurt because he couldn't catch him, and repeat every three or so episodes.
- The leading romance. Holy heck. The romance between Xuanlin and Wanqing was AWFUL. Xuanlin at no point ever had a meaningful moment with Wanqing outside of their shared parental death bonding moment, and Wanqing fell in love with him pretty quick considering this man KIDNAPPED HER AND THREATENED TO KILL HER. Xuanlin blackmailed her, threatened her and her family, and borderline emotionally abused and manipulated her, and then ten episodes in, they're head over heels? If the build up was slower, it would have been alright, but it wasn't. They rushed it in and forced it earlier than they should have. It's one of the dramas doing this trend I've seen in a few C-Dramas where the ML is a toxic, shitty person and for some reason, the FL has an unrealistic change of heart and gets all "Oh, but he's just hurting, he isn't that bad" and suddenly loves him. It isn't romantic, it's kind of gross.

TL;DR This drama is a hot mess, wasted its setting, and is incredibly amateur in it's writing, editing, and directing, and the actors and VA's suffered for it. 2/10, do not recommend.

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