Jin Huang Cheng

Well, even to the average Chinese viewers, this half documentary, half drama Chinese movie would be very difficult to comprehend. They would be exactly like the foreigners, have to use their imagination and guessing ability to figure out what's going on in this movie. Most of the Chinese viewers, like the foreigners, could vaguely get what's going on about the storyline, but all the dialog, the lyrics of the Beijing Opera would completely unable to comprehend. The micro fonts of the subtitles in English are difficult to read. This subtitles hard-coded with the movie maybe the first ever worst came with a Chinese movie.

My wife bailed out after 25 minutes, she said it's just too cliched and too predictable.

Lack of clarity: 1. Unless you are very conversant in Mandarin or Cantonese then subtitles are necessary. But, in this case they used a barely visible small English font; poorly chosen font type for readability; most egregious was using white when most often the background was a light color or white itself. Thus a lot of important dialogue or viewing scenes were lost in trying figure out the dialogue. 2. Unless you know that period's history the script jumped around without clarity of location, characters, or cultural behavior.