BA_Harrison As a little girl, Qingcheng (Xiaotong Guan) meets Goddess Manshen (Hong Chen), who makes her an offer: beauty and riches in exchange for a future in which romance will be fleeting. She accepts and grows up to be a beautiful princess (Cecilia Cheung).When fleet-footed slave Kunlun (Jang Dong-kun) poses as his injured master General Guangming (Hiroyuki Sanada) on a mission to protect their king from invader Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse), he saves the life of the princess, who immediately falls in love with her rescuer. Unfortunately for Kunlun, who was wearing his master's armour and mask, she believes that General Guangming is her saviour. The scene is now set for a tragic love triangle, with the evil Wuhuan making matters even more complicated.The Promise is a lavish, big-budget, romantic fantasy from director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine); it's heavy on the sumptuous visuals, rife with heroism and tragedy, blessed with stunning cinematography and features a shed-load of fancy wire-work and special effects. Although the storytelling is very muddled at first, it all makes sense by the end, and ultimately proves rather enchanting. Unfortunately, the film is hampered by some terrible CGI that does serve to weaken the overall effect, with an early scene in which Kunlun flees a stampede of bulls being one of the worst rendered computer generated moments in a big budget movie that I can remember.

annuskavdpol The Promise was a Chinese movie. It had side-effects that were similar to The Matrix - with flipping over in mid-air and then landing on their feet. There were lots of vibrant colours - and beautiful scenes. However this movie was nothing compared to Japanese samurai movies. The storyline of The Promise was very weak. I watched the English version and found the voice-over annoying. The voices did not match the faces of the actors. It did not seem natural.I watched this movie to learn more about the Chinese art culture and cinematic culture - but did not come out any the wiser. To me, this movie seemed to be a Hollywood copycat - with all the special effects and superficial story. I found the movie to be without truth and void mysticism.

laojim This is a film about a little girl who is hungry so she steals bread but she meets a goddess who tells her that her she can be beautiful and rich but that she will never find true love. She is told that her fate is now settled and cannot be changed, now that she has made her promise. I can't recall exactly what the promise was, but it had something to do with all that and her life does indeed turn out that way until a slave, mistaken for a general, kills the girls paramour.It is impossible to explain what is interesting and annoying about this film without skipping to the end. The middle is filled with quite pretty scenes of the king, the slave, the guy from the snow country, the girl, now grown to be a princess, and a few others. The blurb insists that it is the most beautiful film ever made but it is nowhere near that. It is, however, quite pretty. I won't get into how all the characters finish up, but I have to tell you what happens at the very end, so you might want to come back after you have seen the film.There follows, of course, a long series of complicated ups and downs for all the characters until the very end when our heroine seems to have found love indeed. Is the goddess very irritated? Peeved? Not at all. She shows up and blithely tells everyone that promises made to the gods are as fragile as any other and that fate can be changed. Now, I don't know about you, but if I had made some deal with a goddess for some unchangeable fate and then when all the suffering and struggle was over had that goddess tell me that, well, you know, it can all be changed, can't it? I would be seriously angry.I frankly don't know if this is a case of bad writing in which the author couldn't figure out a good ending so he just has the goddess, the moving power behind all of it, show up and say that your should forget all about it or if this is some sort of thing that makes sense to the Chinese way of thinking.In the Buddhist way of thinking there are gods and goddesses, demons and devils, but they aren't really very important and one can well have a form of Buddhism without any gods. Some say that Buddhism is atheistic, but i think goes a bit far. In the Chinese tradition it seems true that the gods are unreliable. Every Chinese village has a shrine to some local god who has the duty of making sure things go well for the village. If things don't do well they tear down the shrine and build a new one to some other god who will jolly well see to it that the village prospers and keeps out of trouble. Perhaps there is something of the sort at work here, I don't know. It is very odd.

Sean Flanigan This movie was fun and imaginative. I loved, Hero and House of Flying Daggers and while the three are not really up for comparison, I thought that this movie was in league with the other two. This movie was fun to watch. Some of the special effects are a little much like watching a rendering on a game console, but overall, the look and feel of the movie was uniquely constructed and thought out. As far as the storyline, it does not take long to become interesting. Did you see the 300? It draws you in as quickly as the tossing of the messengers into the well with a unique opening sequence. There are many contrasts and subtexts to film. The symbolism hits some people over the head while others may not experience it at all. I guess the only way to know for one to know is to experience it for one's self.