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| Chow-Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Zhiyi,
Chang Chen, Lung Shung, Cheng Pei Pei |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Sir
Te (Sihung Lung): When it comes to emotions, even great heroes can
be idiots.
Two
martial arts masters struggle to retrieve a magical sword after it is
stolen by a young adventuress.
 Until
recently, the Asian martial arts cinema has proved unaccessible to a
major Western audience. And although movies like The Matrix and
Charlie's Angels have popularized some of the martial arts movie's
techniques, the genre hasn't seen a hit film in the West since the days
of Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. With Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, Ang Lee, a director best known for his finely honed high-brow
dramas such as Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm,
has managed to pull off the impossible and present a movie that is both
true to its genre roots and accessible to a worldwide audience.
Crouching Tiger jettisons genre staples like the usual corny
slapstick humor, oblique plotting and amateurish acting, focusing instead
on the epic story, the performances and the eloquent staging of the
action. The spectacular fight scenes are staged to provide a better
overall view of the action, bringing an unprecedented smoothness and
balletic grace to the many impressive battles, each of which has its
own specific mood, function and place in the story. There will still
be complaints from both sides of the cultural divide: as hard as the
film works to clarify the many aspects of Chinese culture and myth that
play a role in the film, Wester viewers are still required to make quite
a leap of the imagination and leave a lot of preconceived notions behind
to enter this magical world. And the very fact that many story elements
that will be very familiar to Chinese viewers are so explicitly explained,
slows down the action and has brought the film some criticism from Chinese
audiences. The film's worldwide commercial success and critical acclaim
however illustrate how well Ang Lee has bridged the cultural gap, and
brought the best of both worlds to a fantasy epic that transports you
to another place and time that you can't help but wish to revisit again
and again.
Read our feature Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Meaning
for answers to the most frequently asked questions about this movie. |
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A
semi-illegal Region 0 was widely circulated from Asia soon after the
film's American and European theatrical release. Identical regular releases
are now available for Region 1 and Region 2. A Superbit DVD
has also been released for Region 1 and Region 2 with a DTS track and
better transfer but no extras [see separate
review].
The
anamorphic widescreen image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx.
2.35:1. The picture has a good, well-balanced overall look to it, certainly
better than any previous DVD release of any Chinese martial arts movie,
but there is a surprising amount of minor damage like white specks and
scratches on the source print, and several shots are very grainy. Also,
edge-enhancement is quite obvious at times, giving some of the shots
a rather artificial look. On the bright side, black levels and shadow
detail are both excellent, and there is hardly a trace of compression
artifacting or visual noise.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix is both subtle and quite powerful, providing
a great stage for the amazing score and enhancing the action sequences
with precise, intricate directional sound effects.
Director
Ang Lee and screenwriter and executive producer James Schamus provide
an outstanding audio commentary track, full of sardonic wit and
self-deprecatory joking along with a wealth of background information
on the genre in general and the specific elements in this film. The
two have worked together for years and have a most pleasant conversational
style and effortless banter going on. 'Unleashing Dragons' provides
a fairly brief but well-done making-of featurette, which is followed
by a shorter featurette focusing specifically on Tan Dun's magnificent
music score. The two items have a combined running time of 23 minutes.
A 14-minute interview with Michelle Yeoh delves a little further
into this actress's experience on the film, as well as the director's
working methods. Scenes from the film and behind-the-scenes material
is nicely edited together with the interview footage to provide an entertaining
and informative featurette. Both the international and the American
theatrical trailers are also on board. The
menu screens employ introductory and transitional animations drawn from
the film's fight sequences that prove to be a little too long when moving
from screen to screen with any frequency at all. All of the screens have
some minor animated elements incorporated along with some sound cues.
A minor annoyance is the soundtrack, which defaults to the dubbed English-language
track rather than the original Mandarin with subtitles.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: 2001,
updated: April 16, 2002
Click
here for IMDB info on Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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