Black Gate

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (USA, 2003)

It’s hard to remember now, but a mere quarter-century ago, the pirate movie genre was dead and over, ninety years of cheesy swashbuckling and occasional scalawag glory doomed to the ash-heap of history. And then, grinning with malice, pirate films rose like drowned zombies and shambled back to the screen, more raffish and rakehelly than ever. And who do we have to thank for this unforeseen and unholy resurrection? A committee of corporate bean-counters at, of all places, Walt Disney Pictures — damn their eyes!

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Historical adventure and fantasy films tend to be straightforward genre pictures long on plot and action and short on deep themes and introspection, which is okay, you can’t have everything.

Or can you? Some ambitious filmmakers want it all, and are willing to risk losing an audience who expects simple action and adventure by giving them ideas to think about or visuals that are striking but hard to parse. Films with such vaulting ambitions often fall into the category of Interesting Failures, and even if they somehow pull it off, in theaters they rarely make it out of the arthouse and into wide release. That’s the case with our subjects this time around, three unique movies too unusual to find a broad global audience. But perhaps one or more of them will resonate with you.

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Hero (China/Hong Kong, 2002)

The Hong Kong cinema industry’s success as an action-film factory for 50 years starting in the 1960s has meant that most of the Chinese-language movies covered by Cinema of Swords originated there. However, once mainland China shook itself free of its painful Cultural Revolution, its own film industry began to reassert itself. Zhang Yimou was one of the new directors of the so-called “Fifth Generation” that emerged in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A native of Xi’an in remote western China, Zhang had a distinctive eye for landscapes and most of all color, and his early films were acclaimed dramas telling stories of the Chinese middle and working class, movies such as Red Sorghum (1988), Ju Dou (1990), and Raise the Red Lantern (1991).

What primarily interests us, of course, is Zhang’s work in the wuxia genre, which he took up after the success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Zhang’s Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) are big-budget productions with leading stars such Jet Li and Zhang Ziyi, but it’s really Zhang’s incredible art and action direction that make them instant classics.

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Brotherhood of the Wolf (France, 2001)

The boom in heroic fantasy novels in the wake of the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Conan revival means there is plenty of imaginative literary fodder available for film adaptations, providing heroes, villains, and plot structures ready-made for cinema. But there are also original fantasy films, of course, movies with stories and scripts written for the screen rather than drawn from books. These are often wilder and less moored to reality than their literary siblings, occasionally resulting in unlooked-for gems that are enjoyable even for repeated viewings, especially when created by a director with a strong, personal vision.

But just as often we get a by-the-numbers retread made by Hollywood hacks that is, at best, merely professional entertainment. This week we have one of each from just past the turn of our current century.

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The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line Cinema, December 2001)

Some of us waited a very long time for these movies — or at least, that’s how it felt. I grew up in the 1960s reading science fiction and fantasy; my father had read pulps like Weird Tales back in the ‘30s, and when those stories were republished as postwar paperbacks, he bought them and then passed them on to me. But I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy on my own in my junior high school library, which had pristine copies of the Houghton Mifflin hardcovers with those two-color foldout maps bound into the endpapers. I can still picture exactly where those volumes stood on those library shelves. I read them cover to cover… and then I read them again. When Dungeons & Dragons came along a few years later, giving us all the ability to tell such stories to ourselves, the course of my life was set. And here I am, 55 years after pulling The Fellowship of the Ring down from that shelf, still telling stories of heroic fantasy — and writing about them also, it seems.

So, to those of us who grew up treading in our imaginations the weed-grown paths of Middle-earth, a world to us almost as real as that of the asphalt roads and concrete pavement where we led our physical lives, the gift of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers was unexpected and kind of a miracle. Jackson was one of us, he saw the same visions we did, and he had the talent and drive to put them on the screen, in a depiction as vivid and real as what we saw in our minds when we read the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And if that act of respectful and dedicated creation isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what would be.

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Hornblower 1: The Duel (UK, 1998)

When you think about swashbucklers at sea, two time periods come to mind: that of the pirates and privateers, from the 16^th through 18^th centuries, and the Napoleonic naval era at the beginning of the 19^th. British captains and crew figure prominently in both these milieus, as you’d expect from an island nation that depended on sea trade and effective warfare on the waves.

The British, of course, are proud of their naval heritage, so in the late ‘90s, when the ITV Network set out to make a series of television adaptations of C.S. Forester’s classic Hornblower novels, somehow enough money was found to shoot film adaptations with production values rarely seen on TV before Game of Thrones. The films, well-cast and well-written, were popular enough, though the size of the productions meant that only one or two could be produced per year. And fortunately for us, they still hold up, by and large (that’s nautical lingo!), a quarter-century later.

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Dungeons & Dragons (USA/Czech Republic, 2000)

Heroic fantasy on the big screen was in a parlous state at the dawn of the 21st century, and anyone whose crystal ball was foggy about the immediate cinematic future could be forgiven for thinking that swords and sorcery films were at their nadir. The Barbarian Boom was long past, Kull the Conqueror had been terrible, the Merlin miniseries was mediocre, and Xena: Warrior Princess had run its course. It was a grim time, and especially if you were a fan of Dungeons & Dragons style adventure, the pickings were slim.

However, though 2001 would bring to the faithful Brotherhood of the Wolf, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mists of Avalon, and most spectacularly, The Fellowship of the Ring, in the darkness before that dawn, the options were thin gruel or highly spiced but raw meat — as you’ll see in the films we’re covering this time ‘round.

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The Scarlet Pimpernel (UK, 1999)

With his double identity, outlaw status, and penchant for disguise, the Scarlet Pimpernel may have been the clear template for Zorro, but in the novels, he was more secret agent than swordsman, and most screen adaptations have been light on the action side. The BBC’s 1999-2000 series of TV movies, in direct competition with ITV’s swashbuckling Hornblower shows, sought to rectify that imbalance.

Richard Carpenter’s new version of the dapper outlaw of the French Revolution was given a hidden array of gadgets reminiscent of ‘60s spy heroes, and in most episodes found occasion to put a sword in his hand. And since Carpenter made the Pimpernel a good swordsman but not great, and constantly menaced him with guns and explosives, it added a level of urgent threat to the stories not previously seen. If Richard E. Grant as Sir Percy and the Pimpernel was less light-hearted than the Leslie Howard and Anthony Andrews incarnations, he had good reason.

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Ashes of Time (Hong Kong, 1994/2008)

Chinese director Wong Kar-wai, whose films are visually intense, almost hallucinogenic, had a long-time love of the wuxia genre, and in the early ‘90s, when he was having trouble raising money for his production company, he agreed to make a historical martial arts film based on the classic Condor Heroes stories. Excited by the story but wanting it to be perfect, he spent almost three years on the project, but the result was Ashes of Time (1994), one of the most beautiful films ever to come out of Chinese cinema.

However, Wong nearly broke himself (and his cast) in making it, so he took a break to produce a spirited parody of the Condor Heroes story with essentially the same cast, The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993), also covered below. It’s a hoot. Finally, I’ve added the undeservedly obscure Journey to the Western Xia Empire (1996), which though shot in the same western Chinese wastes as Ashes of Time is a different visual experience entirely.

And with that, we’re at the end of the ‘90s wuxia film boom, so next time, it’s back to classic swashbucklers!

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