Bichunmoo

COMMENTS ~ Written on 03 May 2001

Bichunmoo (or Fei Tian Wu in Chinese) was released last summer (2000) in Korea and received wonderful response from its home country. Many critics claim that Bichunmoo is "one of the few martial arts films to have the designation of being both a love story and an art film" and is a force to be reckoned with in the international film scene.

I must first confess that I can't, don't and never have been able to speak, write or understand Korean. As such, I can't really comment on the movie's script. Of course, you can argue that the subtitles would have guided my way through the dialogue but the translations leave much to be desired. Most of the time, the English and Chinese subtitles don't agree and I'm left wondering which was right. An example was when Sullie asked where Jinha was. The reply (in English subs) came as "He went to look for a place to die." The Chinese subs made more sense in saying "He went to battle someone."

As the movie was a collaboration between Hong Kong and Korea, it was no surprise that the movie comprised of many 'rip-offs' from chinese martial arts movies and drama serials. What with secret manuals, exotic moves, secret weapons, masked assassins, falling off a cliff, illegitimate children, brotherhood, betrayal, poisoning, seduction, family secrets, unrequited love and sacrificing one's life... The cauldron just bubbles with every single tried and tested idea from the past 50 years of the chinese martial arts movies scene. Throw in an occasional bird (read condor) and you'll probably end up with a sequel to Return of the Condor Heroes. I'm not saying that the ideas in the movie were bad. It's just that everything has been done before (at least more than once) and it becomes a chore knowing what's gonna come next.

The plot was more than dull, with no surprises. Alright, I'm an martial arts movie/drama serial fan so I probably knew what's happening next. I guess my friends and I were the only ones laughing in the cinema that day, because everything was so expected. You know the boy meets girl, falls in love, dad forces girl to leave, boy knows parents were murdered, boy finds girl, boy elopes with girl... By the way, this is less than half the movie so you could guess how tedious the whole movie was. The worst part was that Bichunmoo traces Jinha's life history, with flashbacks within a flashback, and scenes from the first part of the movie were cut so abruptly that some of them didn't make sense. On the whole, it felt like a 30 episode drama serial (probably with special episodes) condensed into a 2 hour movie!

The only good thing was that the fighting scenes were rather well done. Singapore audiences have been tortured with local productions of flying "horses", "boulders", "chairs" etc bursting into bits in the air, which indeed leaves much to be desired. There was even a scene whereby a distinctly popish accompaniment was used. Imagine 10+ warriors flying across roofs to the sounds of heart pumping pop music. Even Zhong Hua Ying Xiong couldn't beat that!

CONCLUSION

This movie is not for everyone even though it may have been given rather good reviews by certain people (My gang of friends were 'tricked' by two someones who said that the movie was good... I think you know who you are :) Unless you're a hardcore Korean movie fan or a martial arts fan, this movie may not be for you. On the other hand, as a martial arts fan, you'll probably blurt out the plot to your friends during the movie without watching it first! If you're really keen on watching a good Korean movie, catch Il Mare instead. It's definitely better than Bichunmoo.

Scenes from the movie

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