Dynasty Warriors - A CGI Heavy Popular Video Game Adaptation

I saw this movie in part of the coming soon in Netflix, and knowing what it was based on made me wanted to give it a try. Lucky for me that last night when it was released, I had a little bit of time to breath after weeks of working late hours, so I could immediately watch it. OK, will go into the movie now.

Brief Story Line

Set in China during the late Han dynasty, the tyrant Dong Zhuo (Lam Suet - Saving Mr. Wu etc) was controlling the child emperor and basically ruled the kingdom. A lot of people who resent this were plotting to kill him, but he was always protected by his foster son Lu Bu (Louis Koo - A Witness Out of the Blue, Overheard etc) who was a great military general and had amazing fighting skills.

One of the warlords Cao Cao (Wang Kai - A Better Tomorrow 2018, When a Snail Falls in Love TV series etc) formed an alliance of 18 warlords who aimed to put down Dong Zhuo's reign. Three sworn brothers that consisted of Liu Bei (Tony Yang - The Adventurers, Monster Hunt 2 etc), Guan Yu (Han Geng - Ex-Files movies etc) and Zhang Fei (Justin Cheung - Deception of the Novelist etc) wanted to contribute in this fight and to defend the Han dynasty.

And how would the story conclude? Find them in this video game adaptation.

End of Brief Story Line

When I watched the trailer to this movie, to be honest I was not really impressed by the seemingly rather poor quality of CGI. Sadly when I finally watched the movie, it did not change my mind. It was indeed not good and seemed a bit too cartoonish (but not in a good way like if you are watching a comedy movie). The computer animation was totally apparent especially during fights that involved lots of people. However, when the fight was one to one (like that one involving Guan Yu) was pretty good.

I realize that this film was adapted from the game franchise of the same title produced by Koei Tecmo, so perhaps the movie makers wanted to give a strong game feeling by showing lots of awesome movements like in the game. However, I personally feel that it could have been done better, especially when their production budget was not too small (said to be HKD 300 million ~ USD 39 million). Perhaps the budget was used to pay the large ensemble of cast? 

The story though was the one that I actually kind of like. In fact I was surprised by the writing as it was quite loyal to the books, albeit in a really compressed manner. I myself had ben a fan of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story and read the books while I was in junior high, plus I had played many games adaptation, including the ones distributed by Koei (the strategy genre not the hack and slash one like this). So I was quite familiar with the names in this movie, including the plot line. In here, the focus was more on the earlier period during the yellow turban rebellion and specifically Dong Zhuo's tyranny.

As I said above, the movie had quite a lot of actors playing. Aside from the ones I mentioned, there were also additional cast like Ray Lui (Chasing the Dragon etc) as Yuan Shao, Philip Keung (Shock Wave etc) as Zhang Jiao, Guli Nazha (The Breakup Guru etc) as Diao Chan and Carina Lau (Detective Dee films, Let the Bullets Fly etc) as the mysterious sword castle master (newly created character). My favorite one in here would be Wang Kai who I thought did well portraying the young Cao Cao. But I was totally unsatisfied with Guan Yu's representation. No offence to Han Geng, but I think he did not fit his characteristic at all. Oh one fun fact, Guli Nazha also played as Diao Chan in the TV series adaptation titled God of War, Zhao Yun. 

Now back to the action part, there were only 2 highlight moments in my opinion. One was during Guan Yu's fight which was awesome because the build up was exactly what I had in mind. The other one was the climax fight. Even though it was heavy on CGI, but it was still entertaining to watch. The rest were unsatisfactory to say the least, which was not good for a supposed action movie. The ending was also pretty weird to me. It was like the director Roy Chow had something else in his mind (perhaps expecting sequels to be made which at this rate did not seem likely). It was a bit of disappointment, seeing that Roy had experienced in directing wonderful action movie like Rise of the Legend or Knock Out.

So if you are a fan of Dynasty Warriors games, there is a possibility you would like this movie with its crazy fight scenes using lots of effects. But if you are looking for a good adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, then there are quite a lot of options out there. This one might be good in terms of loyalty to the story line, but the poor CGI effects might make this not easy to stand for neutral audience. Anyway, if you want to have better fun and do not mind spending hours of your time to know the whole plot, including the battle strategies, then you can watch one of the best adaptation to my opinion, the 1994 series that consisted of 84 episodes! But if you want to see the one with lots of CGI, then this one might be to your liking.

Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars