Tag: Ye Xinyu

Invincible Swordsman (笑傲江湖, Luo Yiwei, 2025)

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Adapted from Jin Yong’s wuxia classic The Smiling Proud Warrior, Invincible Swordsman (笑傲江湖,
xiào ào jiānghú) has a hard battle to fight in covering the same ground as 1992’s Swordsman II which featured an iconic performance from Brigitte Lin as the androgynous Invincible Asia. Produced by streaming network IQYI and Tencent, the film has a more epic feel than the studio’s similarly pitched wuxia and was also released in cinemas but is undoubtedly a much more conventional affair let down by an over-reliance on CGI.

To recap, Ren Woxing (Terence Yin Chi-Wai) led the demonic Sun and Moon Sect in despotic fashion slaughtering many of his own followers. Consequently, they flocked behind Invincible East (Zhang Yuqi ) to free them who eventually defeated Woxing and has imprisoned him in the basement of their lair. Meanwhile, drunken but earnest swordsman of the Mount Hua sect Linghu Chong (Tim Huang) has befriended Woxing’s daughter Ren Yinging (Xuan Lu) through their shared love of music and is kicked out of the clan for treason. Nevertheless, he’s taken on as a disciple by the charismatic Feng Qingyang (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) who continues teaching him martial arts before he’s called back to the world of Jianghu by Yingying who warns him his friends are in danger after teaming up to defeat Invincible East who has now become even more despotic than Woxing in drinking the blood of their victims to stay young.

Even so, breaking Woxing out of containment so he can take out Invincible East seems like a bold plan given there’s no guarantee he’ll actually do that and even less he won’t just go back to his old ways afterwards. Linghu Chong only participates out of loyalty to his men and as a favour to Yingying and is therefore constantly insisting that none of this is anything to do with him because he’s leaving the martial arts world. It’s a fault with the source material, but it’s quite frustrating that all these women are hopelessly in love with the actually quite bland Linghu Chong who has a nasty habit of turning up every time a woman is about to fight someone and heroically standing in front of her. Ironically, that’s how he meets “Invincible East” without realising, or at least the nameless final substitute of Invincible East who has become the public face of the legendary warrior. 

Christened “Little Fish,” by a besotted Linghu Chong who believes her to be a damsel in distress, she is the only female substitute of Invincible East who has undergone self-castration in order to achieve a higher level of martial arts and in the film’s conception thereby feminised. Unlike the ’92 version, however, Little Fish is concretely female and bar a brief flirtation with some of her maids more preoccupied with her lack of individual identity in having no name of her own. Consequently, her love of Linghu Chong becomes an opposing identity though she feels herself forced to take on the persona of Invincible East. Linghu Chong too is fascinated by her mystery which causes him to act in a caddish way towards Yingying who is otherwise positioned as his rightful love interest even if their romance is frustrated by the relationships of their respective clans.

What they’re really fighting is Invinsible East’s corruption of Jianghu which it wants to rule in its entirety. The corruption has already worked its way into the Mount Hua sect as ambitious couturiers vie for power and throw their lot in with the Sun and Moon sect in the hope of advancement. Luo does his best to conjure a sense of the majestic in the elaborate action set pieces, but the over-reliance on wire work and CGI particularly for the swords leaves them feeling inconsequential while there’s barely any actual martial arts content as the fights revolve around the martial arts stances rather than combat. Frequent homages to the ’92 film including the use of its iconic song also serve to highlight the disparity in scope and vision though even if Zhang Yuqi appears to be channelling Brigitte Lin there is genuine poignancy in her tragic love for Linghu Chong which is also the longing for freedom and another identity that is forever denied her. With his belief in Jianghu well and truly destroyed, Linghu Chong finds himself a lonely wanderer and refugee from a martial arts world largely devoid of hope or honour and adrift with seemingly no destination in sight.

Invincible Swordsman is released on Digital 19th August courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Restart the Earth (重启地球, Lin Zhenzhao, 2021)

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Maybe it’s only fair enough if the plants finally turn against us and reclaim the world from the effects of our industry. We haven’t taken very good care of this planet, after all. In Lin Zhenzhao’s well produced low budget streamer Restart the Earth (重启地球. chóngqǐ dìqiú), humanity ironically tries to use science to repair its scientific mistakes but predictably ends up making everything even worse when an experimental program designed to halt desertification suddenly causes plant life to become sentient and develop a craving for human flesh. 

Yang Hao (He Shengming) lost his wife, a botanist, during the original attack and has spent the last two years safeguarding his little girl Yuanyuan (Zhang Mingcan) from the same fate. He wants to find a shelter, but ends up running into a troop of soldiers after a plant attack who tell him that the plants are about to launch a new offensive and all human life will end in a matter of hours if they are not able to achieve their mission of injecting a neutralising element into the plants’ root base in the core of the Earth. Like any good post-apocalyptic dad, Hao has a choice to make. As he tells Yuanyuan he has no interest in saving the world and only wants to save her, but is shamed into joining the cause by Yuanyuan’s disapproval and decides to accompany the soldiers who are in dire need of his engineering skills. 

Personal sacrifice for the greater good is very much the theme of the film. Several of the soldiers actively sacrifice their own lives either to save Yuanyuan or to make sure the planet-saving serum makes its way to the next checkpoint while reminding us that they too have families who might be waiting for them at home. As Hao later affirms, he’s just an “ordinary Chinese citizen”, somehow convincing several world powers not to give up on saving the planet no matter how hopeless it seems simply by reminding them of the power of hope. But it’s precisely this “ordinary” heroism that later saves the world, sending a message that is both egalitarian and collectivist in insisting that everyone has a role to play in a well functioning society. 

Then again, the “catastrophe” as it’s called is very much manmade. It began with climate change which then led to the scientific experimentation which quite spectacularly backfired. In essence it’s all down to “bad” science (and some bad plants that were brought in from abroad by a foreign scientist). Man likes to think it can master its environment, as someone later puts it, but the environment decided to fight back. Even so the solution lies in more of the same as Hao has the bright idea of harnessing the power of nature to break through the plants’ firewall. 

The plants themselves take on the appearance of dragon-like monsters snaking through ruined buildings or else snapping up humans with claw-like tentacles. As the plant-based ring of terror encircles the Earth, giant hand-like branches seem to sprout from the ground ready to smash and grab. Post-apocalyptic production design conjures a land of ruin half-reclaimed by nature, while Lin pays frequent homage to other similarly themed franchises. The soldiers’ uniforms have more than a touch of Attack on Titan, while he also seems to directly reference Aliens as well as a series of other post-apolypytic dramas in which a tightly bound team of survivors must band together to face off against an insidious enemy. 

The idea is essentially to reboot the Earth, but in another sense perhaps that’s what the plants were also trying to do. Maybe we shouldn’t really be rooting for a human victory though it’s also possible that the supercharged plants would soon consume the planet anyway. In any case, the messages about the dangers of climate change and importance of responsible science are secondary to those of the heroism of personal sacrifice for the greater good along with the determination to keep hope alive when it seems all is lost. Noticeably well put together for a low budget streamer Lin’s post-apocalyptic action drama suggests the end of the world might not be that far away but can at least be held at bay if only by the power of human selflessness.

Restart the Earth is released in the UK on blu-ray, DVD, and Download to Own on 22nd May courtesy of Dazzler Media.

Trailer (English subtitles)