The Curse of the Golden Flower

Curse of the Melodramatic plotline

Meako from Sheffield [Highly rated reviewer] , 19/04/2007

Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon....all wonderful, beautifully filmed and choreographed, and touching films. Paced well, acted with style, and offering a vision of Mythic China that western audiences had not seen before. So, it is such as shame that Curse of the Golden Flower is so dull!

The story is set in the latter stages of the Later Tang dynasty, and is as fantastically soap-operatic as Dallas ever was! The Imperial family are tearing themselves apart in lusts for power, revenge, or freedom. The Empress (Gong Li) is having a secret affair with her stepson. The Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) is slowly poisoning the Empress. The stepson, the Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye) is having an affair with the daughter of the Imperial Doctor. The other sons want the throne for themselves when their father passes away. Oil is struck in the desert and JR has been shot.

Okay, ignore that last sentence, that was just a sly dig at the melodramatic nature of this film. Not only melodramatic, but drearily paced melodrama at that! The film simply takes too long to tell us very little. The first half hour or so is a chore to stay awake through, with the constant reminders of plot points hammered home at every opportunity. It seems that, like Hero, this film has very little plot which they wanted to drag out for as long as they could. Unlike Hero, however, they fill the time with nothing interesting, whereas that earlier film filled the time with more action.

On a plus side, Golden Flower looks magnificent. The vibrant colors of the Imperial palace, the massive armies dressed in fabulous costumery, the luxurious set designs. All draw the eyes into the film and cannot fail to impress. Sumptuous and lavish, the cinematography is impeccable. The score to the film reflects well on the visuals, truly conveying the majesty and beauty of the moment in history.

Sadly, aside from these visuals, and the key battle moments towards the latter half of the film, the film feels empty and vacant, and far too overblown for its own good. As a film on its own merit, Flower would not have received the release it got. It is only due to the popularity of the earlier films that this distinctly average film is getting so much attention.

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Flawed but so worthwhile

Kinders from Felixstowe, UK , 21/09/2007

I cringe at quotations on film posters from critics claiming to have seen 'the best' of this or 'the funniest' of that. Such subjective absolutism suggests to me that the reviewer can't be trusted. And yet I'm not going to apologise for the outrageous claims that are littered about this review, because they're all true.

Curse of the Golden Flower is a very distinctly divided film. Excusing the stunning production design, there's little to interest in the first half, which is little more than reams of exposition, spiced up with a rather unnecessarily camp quantity of gore. The music is dreadfully overstated and, while the film is clearly going somewhere significant, it seems to take a laboriously long time to get there.

But then the ninjas arrive. They are the best ninjas ever. They glide from the mountains, fifty of them, to a single spot with the most indescribable elegance, and swing and weave around each other in ways that Spider-man wishes he could even imagine.

And that's just the start (at least, it should be - but it's easy to ignore the slow opening hour when what's coming comes). When Curse of the Golden Flower peaks, it does so with such beautiful, inventive, stunning, original, moving, unspeakably jaw-dropping brilliance that I can't find a way to begin describing it in any detail. No hyperbole is necessary in the following claims: this film boasts battle scenes to rival and, often, better the best of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It contains cinematography the like of which you will genuinely never have seen before. Take the wonderful colour-coded lighting of Hero and multiply it by a googol. The drama itself recalls the best of Shakespeare's tragedies. And anybody who creamed themselves over the way Robert Rodriguez clicked some icons and contrasted black and white with colour in Sin City will marvel at the way Yimou Zhang achieves the same effect (yet far superior) using that tired old film technique: lighting.

The summary of this opinion is that the action sequences in Curse of the Golden Flower are, essentially, the best action sequences ever, ever. It's a shame that the lulls are not terribly interesting, and especially so since the first lull lasts a whole hour. But the heavy flaws in the film only make it all the more significant that a dedicated film perfectionist and pedant like myself can happily say the following: this is the best film that I've seen in years.

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Stunning!

A customer from North London , 16/04/2007

You really can't fault this film! All the actors were so brilliant that I have no idea who actually stood at the most. Chow's performance of the ice cold Emperor, was truly amazing (although his green/ grey contacts looked like he has onset cataracts!) Perhaps the other reviewers expecting more action should have kept an open mind. This is a movie that's rich in character, plot, intrigue:the fact that it didn't have more action than alot of viewers expected doesn't make one iota of difference to the brilliance of the film. If anything, the end turned out to be quite bloody.Unlike most fans of this genre of film, I'm not always impressed seeing people fly through the air in fancy fight scenes, for me a good plot is more satisfying. Watch this film:it's a visual gem, with a really engrossing plot that is well worth the watch. If however, you want to see men/women flying through the air in fancy fight scenes for an hour and a half, then watch something else!

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Visually stunning

A customer from Birmingham, England. , 08/05/2007

My starting point is that I loved 'Hero', but was disappointed with 'House of the Flying Daggers'.

This film is not really like either. The battle scenes are limited and the flying ninjas (who make a couple of appearances) don't really fit in. The storyline is more like a Shakespearean royal drama, with a cruel Emperor, a beautiful, scheming wife, and sons torn in their loyalty between the two.

The first half of the film, where the spectacular scale of the Royal Palace, and the claustrophobic nature of life for those living within it, I found wonderful. The second half, where the action starts, I was less impressed with.

However, the scale of this movie is immense. The Royal Palace has never looked so spectacular - loads of gold, jewels, intense colours, especially red and yellow. Some of the set pieces, such as an army of ten thousand, all clad in gold armour, moving in unison through the palace, are awe inspiring.

It is a film for the big screen. A film to blown away by because of its use of colour, the mastery of its scale, and the tremendous performance by Gong Li as the Emperor's dying Consort. In those regards, it is an epic.

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good

A customer from Bridgend , 15/01/2008

it was a good film, i think i expected it to be along the lines of house of flying daggers, it was different but i was glued to the tv.

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Golden Flower - golden touch

A customer from Rhyl wales , 10/03/2008

Having visited the Forbidden Palace a few years ago, this film brought back memories of the atmosphere and scale of that magnificent place. The story is beautiful and the cinematography first class. I wish I had held on to this to watch again!

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