I really don’t know what to make of Seven Swords. As Felicity said in class, it’s a bad movie. That’s an understatement that doesn’t even really need to be stated, but I’ll pause a bit to show what I mean.
People tend to be lenient with action movies – we don’t expect much – especially Eastern action movies – we don’t understand much – which makes the terrible reception somewhat more telling of exactly how bad Seven Swords is. It has a 23% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, which takes mainly American/Canadian/British reviewers, with reviewers saying that “Tsui is capable of better than this” and expressing boredom, feeling unengaged. Asian reviewers haven’t smiled on it either. The Kung Fu Cult Cinema review (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai films and reviewers) cites a lack of sufficient action to make up for the subpar plot and shallow characters: “while each sword is unique in its own way, we only get a slight taste of their destruction” – he concludes it is “just another film in the large library of the wuxia genre”. Twitch, a review of self-described strange little films around the world, with an emphasis on Asian movies, does not even give it that honor: “A very disappointing film and falling far short of the mark in the wuxia genre”, faulting a disjointed narrative and cliched action sequences. Love Hong Kong Film was kinder – action, “iconic” characters, cinematic vibe are all “good enough”.
What I found most strange about Seven Swords was not the lackluster action or subpar narrative – that no longer surprises me, having spent a semester watching Taiwanese fantasy action-dramas – it was the pseudo-Western approach he took to his movie (Western as in the West, not as in cowboys, which would have been more interesting). Particularly the futuristic villains that looked like KISS fans and had spinning toothed wheels that cut limbs off with what appeared to be robotic power. Plus the scene at Mt. Heaven looked like it was sliced out of Batman Begins. The traditional vs. industrial theme is one usually hyped by European fantasizers – they have older, scarier dreams of the industrial revolution – Asians are still in the midst of their industrial revolution. I’m glad I’m not the only one that got the Lord of the Rings vibe: movieXclusive, a Singaporean site, felt the same: “a cousin of LOTR: The Two Towers, with its marauding band of villains and foot soldiers in black armour looking like nasty Uruk-hais, the heralding of villagers to safe haven, and the featuring of archers and cannons in battles. Some might even see similarities to the Star Wars subplot of the Jedi extermination here”.
I don’t see this as a bad thing – far be it for a biracial child to decry cultural experimentation – and when I saw the opening sequence, I was excited: old-style martial arts in a technologically advanced world on Asia’s terms? I’ve been waiting my whole life for this, I thought – it even reminded me of my novel. Besides, it’s a fitting response to the incorporation of wuxia themes into American action productions (see L. Crystal Michallet-Romero’s thesis on this). One wonders if perhaps the China-thing might be replaced (or at least challenged) by the West-thing. Unfortunately, Seven Swords does not carry this (admittedly heavy) burden successfully. Whereas the far superior Once Upon a Time in China I and II offered insight into the depiction and portrayal of the West in Hong Kong thought, Seven Swords can’t comment on Tolkien or Lucas because it seems to forget about the obvious Western influence of the beginning in the second half. Whereas the Once Upon a Time in China movies actively engaged, through dialogue and characterization, with images of the West, Seven Swords simply takes these images like clothes, puts them on, and then kills the characters wearing them – no commentary, no critique.
To make it worse, Seven Swords does this to the detriment of its traditional wuxia elements (as the reviews indicate), as well as failing to evolve the way other recent wuxia films (Hero, Fearless, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) have of late. These other movies have shown a moral-spiritual elevation over violence and glory (as argued by The Straits Times), requiring strong central heroes with noble, self-sacrifical traits. Seven Swords is surprisingly devoid of such characters, instead letting the (rather Western) Three Musketeers’ all-for-one-and-one-for-all mentality succeed as all not only do the seven swordsmen survive unscathed, but none of them explicitly sacrifice anything for another (showing great divergence from the Seven Samurai Kurosawa picture it’s based on). Neither true wuxia nor an interesting merge, Seven Swords is left half-baked, halfway effort. If the West was the object-desire, this movie found a false version of it, but does not seem to be conscious that it is a false version, because it offers no commentary of potential falsehoods and discrepancies. Ironically, the audience realizes that our “Maltese Falcon” is false (as Mike Pinsky discusses in relation to Lacan), partly because the editing job – the “smoothing over” of the mirror to give the illusion of the complete whole – is so shoddy.
