His crew also seems suspiciously familiar: a bulky, muscular engineer with a scruffier version of Jet Black’s spiky beard a hyper, scrawny red-haired kid who yells a lot and runs around on all fours and a dog that’s smarter than it lets on. Like his Bebop counterpart Spike Spiegel, Yang Jian is a deceptively young man who looks sleepy and checked-out most of the time, until someone threatens him to the point where he has to bust out his startling battle skills.
Yang Jian (voiced by Wang Kai) is the leader of a four-person team of down-on-their-luck bounty hunters who can barely afford to chase their latest target. That’s a little bit of a disappointment.įrom the moment Yang Jian introduces its titular protagonist, who’s playing a melancholy bluegrass harmonica riff over a close-up of his sky-ship’s engine powering down for lack of fuel, Cowboy Bebop fans are likely to have déjà vu.
#War of the gods film series
Its only noticeable link to sci-fi comes in its opening setup: a weirdly thorough pastiche of the anime series Cowboy Bebop. Yang Jian is a much more traditional Chinese fantasy epic. It’s easy to picture a series of New Gods movies as a Marvel Cinematic Universe-like setup for an eventual crossover, as old gods return to the mortal realm, start to reshape it, and eventually come into conflict.īut Zhao and Chuan’s follow-up largely leaves the mortal world behind, and instead hangs out in the realm of the gods, whose concerns feel much less relevant to a presumably human viewing audience.
#War of the gods film movie
Zhao (director of the fascinating donghua movie White Snake) and screenwriter Mu Chuan give that story impressive specificity, with a sci-fi-tinged post-apocalyptic setting and a lot of complications around bringing ancient powers to a modern world. Nezha Reborn sets up a structure that seems designed to repeat endlessly, with endless variations: A struggling human protagonist learns that he’s the reincarnation of a mythic god. But in every other sense, the second film is a massive departure from the first - not so much an expansion of the setting as a largely unrelated story in a completely different genre. They’ll get part of what they came for, in terms of epic god battles, big operatic emotions, and elaborately beautiful visual design. See platform availability below.įans of Ji Zhao’s terrific 2021 CG animated Chinese movie New Gods: Nezha Reborn might expect something similar from his follow-up, New Gods: Yang Jian. It has been updated for the film’s digital release. This review of New Gods: Yang Jian originally ran in conjunction with the movie’s theatrical release.
0 kommentar(er)
