The Yin Yang Master movies

Once in a while, Hollywood will give a year in which two studios give us competing films about the same subject matter. According to Wikipedia, these are known as "Twin Films". For example:

1997 - Dante's Peak and Volcano
1998 - Deep Impact and Armageddon; Antz and A Bug's Life; Saving Private Ryan and A Thin Red Line
1999 - Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair
2000 - Mission to Mars and Red Planet
2007 - An American Crime and The Girl Next Door
2012 - Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman
2013 - Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down
2014 - Legend of Hercules and Hercules

...and the list goes on.

I'm sure the same thing happens in other countries that have their own robust film industries. When discussing Chinese movies (Hong Kong, Taiwan and PRC), these are bit more difficult to track, especially when discussing martial arts movies, because usually they have produced so many films in a given year that it's hard to classify them as such. Also, since Hong Kong has historically been fairly trendy when it comes to making movies, you can have a successful movie and several fly-by-night studios producing similar films in a matter of months (or weeks). It doesn't always have quite the same feel as Warner Bros and Universal making a movie about the same thing.

The Wikipedia article on twin films suggests that Ip Man: The Final Fight and The Grandmaster were examples of the phenomenon. I would include Red Cliff part 1 and Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (both from 2008) as examples, too. What other examples can you come up with?

Tonight I'll present you with a pair of short reviews about a recent example of this: two Yin Yang Master movies.

The Yin Yang Master: Dream of Eternity (2020)

Starring: Mark Chao, Allen Deng, Chun Xi, Duo Wang, Wang Ziwen, Xu Kaicheng
Director: Guo Jingming
Action Director: Nuo Sun

Qing Ming (this time played by Young Detective Dee's Mark Chao) is a Yin-Yang Master in training. His master is killed during a battle with the Evil Serpent, a giant kaiju snake that's the embodiment of all of mankind's negative emotions. The Evil Serpent's soul is currently "locked" inside the body of someone residing at the Imperial Palace. Knowing that it's time is at hand, four demon hunters (including Qing Ming) are dispatched to the palace to collect demon spirits and and "feed" them to the Four Guardians (Dragon, Tiger, Vermillion and Turtle) so as to awaken them so that they may battle the Evil Serpent when it awakens. But things do not go as planned.

After the action-packed beginning, the film becomes something of a court-based murder mystery, The court high priest is murdered and soon the demon hunters--Boya (Allen Deng); Longyue (Chun Xia, aka Jessie Li); and Shouyue (Duo Wang)--being to suspect each other of being involved in foul play. NOTE: Boya also appeared in other adaptation, albeit with a different backstory and characterization. Here, Boya and Qing Ming have a strong bromance thing going on. Things come to a head at about the 90-minute mark, after which the film becomes a warped love story. That quickly leads into an overlong climax involving a rampaging kaiju snake and angel-like Spirit Guardians battling with it. It feels like an extended cut scene from a very realistic-looking RPG game.

Dream of Eternity is a more mature production than its equally big-budget counterpart. The violence is harsher, but the story is also deeper and far more nuanced. The bad guys are just bad guys for evil's sake. They have complex motives driven by nuanced emotions and backstories. They main problem is that a lot of this we learn in the last act while we're supposed to be enjoying the climatic carnage. That would be one of the pitfalls of playing the movie like a mystery and then like a epic fantasy with a World-Ending Event: we spent the first 70% of the movie in the dark, and then the action and exposition keep on tripping over each other.

For the most part, the CGI is really good for this sort of film. The snake looks awesome, a far cry from the crap we got in films like Python and Boa and the later Anaconda sequels. The costumes are also very good. The film has great production values all around. There is some limited wuxia action courtesy of Nuo Sun, who also worked on Legend of Ravaging Dynasties. Nothing great, but not bad.

Fans of wuxia and fantasy should get something out of it. Glancing at the film's entry on Douban, it didn't seem to be very popular with the local audiences. The film had good ticket pre-sales but bad word of mouth, and Shock Wave 2 overtook it at the box office. One female reviewer said that she'd break up with her boyfriend for taking her to watch it(!). Another reviewer said that its alternate titles should be: "Doctor Strange's God Baby" and "Chen Lingzhi, please call me by your name". I'm sure the last one refers to the homosexual undertones that the friendship between Qing Ming and Boya have.

  

The Yin Yang Master (2021)

 

Starring: Chen Kun, Zhou Xun, William Chan Wai-Ting, Qu Chu-Xiao, Wang Li-Kun, Shen Yue, Cici Wang, Wang Yue-Yi, He Yong-Sheng
Director: Lin Wei-Ran
Action Director: Nicky Li Chung-Chi

Since the days of Panku, humans and monsters have walked the Earth. At some point, an evil nine-headed dragon showed up and led the monsters against the humans. He was defeated through a magic sword and the monsters were more or less banished to the Monster Realm, while the humans stayed in our world, with the Yin Yang Bureau keeping patrol over any monster who would cross over illegally into our world. One day, a murderous monster called Snow Lady (Summer Xia) is freed from her prison and tries to steal the Scale Stone, which contains the soul of the dragon. The blame falls on Yin Yang master Qing Ming (Chen Kun, of Flying Swords of Dragon Gate and Painted Skin: Resurrection), a human-monster hybrid. He flees into the forest, where he takes care of outcast monsters and spirits.

Years later, a pair of Raven warriors steal the Scale Stone and flee into the forest. The stone is stolen by Qing Ming's three Ferret spirits, one of whom swallows it. When he realizes what has happened, he heads into the Monster Realm to find the sword. Accompanying him is a human court guard, Yuen Boya (Wandering Earth's Qu Chuxiao), and cute female spirit, Shenle (Shen Yue). The Yin Yang Bureau, led by Baini (Painted Skin's Zhou Xun), is also in pursuit. Old bonds will be tested and new ones will be formed as the Scale Stone comes closer and closer into the wrong hands.

This is a wuxia fantasy filled with monsters, magical attacks, wire-assisted swordplay, talking animals, cute female nature spirits, solid digital effects, and the ever-graceful Zhou Xun. The action is handled by Nicky Li Chung-Chi, but if you don't like fantasy combat, you won't enjoy this. There is a neat fight with a four-armed opponent early on--it turns out to be three CGI ferrets beneath a cloak. But most of the action revolves around flying people, CGI ice attacks, and magical shield spells. Stuff like that.

I've noticed this in some Chinese fantasy films, and in the popular RPG Genshin Impact [1], but it often feels like the world is limited to a single human city. The world feels especially smaller that way, which is bad for what should be a sprawling epic fantasy. In this film, it almost feels like the world is limited to Pingqing City, while the Monster Realm is limited to a single city, too. I had the same vibe in League of Gods, although that one threw in an underwater city and a desert realm and stuff like that. In this movie, the world-ending conflict feels like a dispute between two cities. But this is a personal observation and not really a knock against the film.