Double World Mini-Review
After missing watching a movie on the Saturday that I was released from the hospital, I wanted to get back into the movie watching habit, so I decided to forgo my plan of watching movies from different streaming services and just watched a movie on Netflix. I was looking for something fun and breezy, in the same vein of The Forbidden Kingdom movie starring Jackie Chan. A while back Netflix had a movie called Monster Hunt (a martial arts takeoff of Monster Hunter, I believe) and while I thought about watching that one, I saw a featured movie on Netflix that looked similar: Double World.
Chinese Martial Arts Movie
Double World is a fantasy martial arts movie that plays it mostly straight, except there are a couple of fairly major fantasy elements. While in no way Game of Thrones, there is a light fantasy element to the movie that, in addition to light “unreality moves” (a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), lend the movie less realistic bend than most martial arts movies, which was what I was looking for.
After a little research, I seen that the movie is based on a fairly popular MMORPG in China. This makes sense, as there is a bit of Warcraft to the proceedings–a sense of a fully realized world in which only part of it exists on-screen and the audience should know more about what is happening in the world and is able to fill in the gaps because the movie never explicitly explains the world or the relevance of all the players.
Suprisingly Dark Movie
So, did I enjoy the movie? Surprisingly, no. Or at least, not as much as I was hoping I would. Unlike other movies in the same genre, this one has a completely different tone. I was hoping for a movie more like The Forbidden Kingdom or the Detective Dee movies or even The 14 Blades, but the movie’s tone is much darker than those movies. Death is rampant in the movie and not just heroic death, but also capricious death and violent, visceral death. I can’t go into too much detail here without spoilers, but suffice to say that this movie is more in line with movies like Ip Man and Kung fu Killer that are more intense and more contemplative about the nature of death and honor than what I was hoping to watch.
I really just wanted a fun, breezy martial arts movie–and it is that (mostly), for the first half of the movie. The second half, however, devolves into the nature of revenge and vengeance, of characters finding out their heritages and it isn’t what they were expecting, and characters doing silly things, like going off on their own, which we all know from the horror movie icon Scream, that that is a sure way to not survive to the end of the movie.
Not Sure that I Understood Everything in the World
As I mentioned above, I’m pretty sure that I missed quite a bit of the world/world-building. I originally intended to talk about this in relationship to Chinese history/mythology, as it always seems like I was missing part of the puzzle of the world. The world never quite felt “complete” to me, and I thought it was because I was lacking in enough knowledge of Chinese history (of which I have a pretty good foundation, but I’m no expert/historian) or Chinese mythology (of which I only have a passing knowledge).
However, in looking up articles about the movie, I see it is because this world is built on a video game property that I’ve never heard of, let alone played. That is why the world seems missing or incomplete as I’m sure the director and screenwriters believed that their audience would be familiar with the game world and, by extension, would be able to fill in the gaps with prior knowledge. However, like Warcraft, the movie world ends up feeling incomplete in some way as if you only have a partial grasp of what’s happening in the world of the story. Compare that to something like Brandon Sanders’ Stormlight Archive series where the world is an integral part of the story.
Overall Rating (C + 78)
Rating: 3 out of 5.
So, I think this one could have been something special as I really like the characters and the story (especially the first half). However, the fight scenes, while inventive for the fantasy world, weren’t the best ones I’ve seen in a martial arts movie. Also, the dark turn in the 2nd half of the movie was at odds with the fairly light, happy-go- lucky beginning of the movie. I think this movie is one that, while not a wasted opportunity, could have really been something special. The Forbidden Kingdom was one that had an American who was center stage–I think that without the dark tone to this one, Double World could have been as impressive The Forbidden Kingdom.
Sidney
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