Courtesy of
OMY paper, I got free tickets to watch The Storm Riders 2 movie recently.
The prequel, The Storm Riders, screened 11 years ago, was a commercial success and an instant cult classic. I remember watching the movie 3 times. Both movies were based on the immensely popular, Wind & Cloud, '风云' comics series.
The Wind & Cloud comic series is like an Asian spin on Marvel superheroes comics series. It describes the fantastic world of Chinese pugilism where the heroes, Wind and Cloud faces incredible opponents and mythical beasts (infrequently) with spectacular martial arts. (If you refer to the movie posters above, Cloud is the main guy on the left). The Storm Rider movie series were live action adaptations.
The Storm Riders 2 adapts its plot from the Japanese invasion arc of the original comics series. A group of highly skilled invaders is threatening the pugilistic world and the destiny of China. Wind, Cloud and their allies must level-up their martial arts to eradicate the invaders. The process of leveling up their skills is fraught with life-threatening risks to themselves and their loved ones. Meanwhile, the invaders' leader, Godless, was sending powerful assassins to kill them before they can succeed. Will Wind & Cloud be able to repel their invaders? I'm not going to give away the ending. Instead I will give my take on the movie here.
I think the movie producers were intentionally paying tribute to the movie 300 by drawing some inspirations from that movie. After all, 300 itself was also based on a graphic novel. In the scene when Godless visits royal mausoleum with his entourage is a parallel of the Persian king entourage scene in 300. Both scenes used elaborate casts and special effects to depict the depth of pompous arrogance and power hunger in the antagonists. In SR2, the scene fell short in the execution part. Kudos to Simon Yam, who performed the part of arrogant Godless well but the special effects failed to create an atmosphere that evokes a similar effect. In this aspect, I felt that SR2 merely achieved a standard below the benchmark set by Hollywood.
One of my movie companion remarked that SR2 had no dialogue and no character development whatsoever. True and true again. Then again, what could the production team do given the source material?
The original comic series which is still running today is intended for a male working class audience featuring a cast of thousands and each character has his own uniquely convoluted fighting styles that need to be presented graphically. So the back story had to be kept simple with only snippets of conversations in between the spectacular fighting scenes to move the plot along. The only character development afforded was development in martial sense.
When I was reading the original comics series it was more than 10 years ago. I wasn't quite a big fan of the series and borrowed the series from a friend, who had a considerable collection spanning several story arcs. To me, it became a chore that I had to flip through several issues (about 30, 40 plus pages per issue) to discover that a particular fight scene was not resolved yet. A fight scene could last several issues before the next plot point could be picked up.
I was however a fan of the live action movie precisely because it is fast paced and contain the action in condensed form. I'll definitely want a DVD of the movie.