Xi you ji: Da nao tian gong

I just saw this film with my mother, a 65-year old Chinese woman (who has trained under some masters of kung fu), who grew up reading the stories of the Monkey King (whereas I'm more familiar with the Japanese Series, 'Monkey Magic'). My mother was delighted at how faithful this film was, with so many of the characters and substories being very close to how she remembers them.

Unlike other reviewers, we found the CGI to be quite good (a couple of bad spots, but in other places, stunning!) We thought the acting and direction was also really good. Donnie Yen is such a wonderful and naughty monkey. His movement is fantastic, whether he was fighting or being a lazy monkey. Chow Yun Fat a benevolent Jade Emperor, and Aaron Kwok a coolly evil demon king.

The film is also incredibly fun. This isn't going to win any Oscars, but if you're out to have fun, it's a better adaptation of the beginning of Journey to the West than most.

No spoilers... It is just a intro to Chinese folklore....I got It...for westerners this it is a fun fare. I know the history...but they left out so much...but I found it to be very entertaining.It was funny emotional and very captive, I thought that Donnie... like always...he delivers and goes thru all the way...listen don't put it down so much, put the bias a side and you will find it shorter that the long hour of watching the whole soap...I like it and I watched those long month of the soaps...enjoy...I did...I would like to see what the sequel hold for us...man I love it...they got me from beginning to end. Yet To me Donnie Yen could do no wrong...ass does Jet Li.

On paper, everything about The Monkey King screams blockbuster. It's an adaptation of Journey To The West, the classic Chinese novel which tells the hugely-beloved tale of a daring, gifted monkey who falls from the heavens and must find his way back again. It stars three of Chinese cinema's most familiar and respected faces: Donnie Yen, Chow Yun-Fat and Aaron Kwok. Hollywood talents have been recruited to oversee the make-up and special effects for the film. In theory, this is a film to get enormously excited about.

In practice, everything about The Monkey King screams travesty. The movie is remarkably faithful to some elements of the novel, and deviates tragically in others. All three stars are hamstrung in their roles, forced to play the fool or brood anti-heroically in place of a script that actually gives them something real and meaty to do. The CGI is mostly awful, and the make-up/costumes almost laughably amateurish. Brew all those mistakes together, and director Cheang Pou-Soi has really mucked it up big-time.

The film opens with an epic war in the heavens, one that results in the goddess Nüwa having to sacrifice herself to rebuild the celestial palace of the Jade Emperor (Chow). Monkey (Yen) is one of the vestiges of Nüwa's grace, cast down to the mortal realm and trapped in a mountain. Monkey's fate, so it seems, can bring peace or chaos; his own mischievous personality balanced between good and evil. As he trains with a pack of human disciples who mock him for being more simian than they are, Monkey picks up skills, weapons, and a monumental ego. Soon, he establishes himself as the King of Huaguo Mountain, where he lives with his obedient flock of monkeys. But, under the manipulative influence of the Bull Demon King (Kwok), Monkey soon finds himself returning to the heavenly palace to wreak havoc beyond anyone's worst nightmares.

Journey To The West is, truly, a marvellous source of material for a film adaptation: it's morally rich, thematically complex and spiritually enlightening, with huge helpings of adventure, fantasy and derring-do. The allegory, of course, is one that chimes with the Buddhist scriptures: the hubris of Monkey doubles as that of humankind, the notion that we believe ourselves to be somehow greater and more important than we are, that we can rail against the heavens and win. Monkey's journey is one of humility and, eventually, enlightenment.

Almost miraculously, The Monkey King - which focuses on Monkey's fall from grace, a mix of his own arrogance and the demonic lies he unfortunately chooses to believe - wastes almost every iota of the novel's magic and potential. The script is dreadful, blundering from scene to scene with little care for continuity or character development. It dutifully checks off each stage of Monkey's rebellion against the Jade Emperor - from anointing himself the Great Sage Equal To Heaven to, briefly, becoming the divine horsekeeper and later eating forbidden celestial peaches - but fails to connect any of them in a meaningful way. In fact, it shambles about so much that it becomes unintentionally funny.

You might think that the three actors holding up the film might salvage it in some way. They do, and they don't, largely because the terrible script prevents them from doing much good. Yen manages to be charismatically cheeky as Monkey, even though he seems to think that acting like a monkey involves blinking a lot and very fast. He gets approximately one scene to tumble through the air with his trademark acrobatic grace, after which he's submerged beneath a maelstrom of CGI and wirework. Kwok has been set to dark, brooding mode, which he does quite well, but he never really bothers to snap out of it. Chow, with his blue contact lenses, is the only one who seems to be in on the joke, twinkling his way through scenes that require him to throw off extraneous lines of dialogue or float unconscious in mid-air.

It's hard to shake the feeling, too, that most of the film's budget went to securing the services of Yen, Kwok and Chow. The other actors seem to have wandered in from a grade-school production of Journey To The West, dressed in costumes they might as well have made themselves. Peter Ho, in particular, is hilariously bad as Er Lang Shen, the devious celestial deity who has it in for Monkey. Through much of his unfortunately considerable screen-time, Ho looks permanently constipated. Cameos from the likes of pop singers Kelly Chen and Gigi Leung - the former plays Guan Yin, Goddess Of Mercy, and the latter the immortal moon-dwelling Chang'E - add to the generally trippy effect of the film.

The special effects are, on the whole, terrible: a lot of the time, the film feels like a creaky albeit well-intentioned television adaptation from the 1970s, which is unfortunate given the forty intervening years of technological development. Everything is green-screened within an inch of its life, and almost all of it feels awfully fake. Some moments are nicely-rendered, but those are soon forgotten beneath the deluge of psychedelic Buddhas and sparkly goddesses. Leave us not forget the costumes, which look as if they were picked up from a store dumping its unwanted Halloween stock.

If you can suffer through the first two-thirds of the film, The Monkey King actually seems to find its feet in its final half-hour. The action beats have a genuine snap of tension and the drama is rounded out by a welcome touch of comedy. It's still a surreal and not altogether well- put-together mess, but it's a great deal more effective in a narrative sense. Too bad it comes about an hour after the audience has run out of doubt from which the film can benefit.

Although it is true that the big part of the original (huge) book was about the Pilgrimage mentioned in the Synopsis, there are two things you should know: the pilgrimage was more an adventure full of battles, monsters, magic powers, and epic Characters, rather than just a pilgrimage; and this movie concentrates on the first part of the book, before the pilgrimage (actually the Monk does not even appear), on the genesis of the Monkey King. The book was written by a great Taoist monk and it is full of hidden knowledge which not everybody can consciously understand, but it is so well done, so full of adventure and action and funny things, so intriguing and entertaining, that in the centuries it became one of the (if not the) most important books in the popular Chinese culture. There are many layers in it and it was made in such a way that almost anybody can enjoy it. The Monkey King became an extremely popular character, and even Dragonball comes from that book! This film is a bit strange, the special effects are not the best, and some things in the realization will need a bit effort from the western audience, but it is OK, you must understand that as said this is a Chinese story and obviously not made with the western people as main target. But whether you are interested or not in the background of the story, the film is pleasant and entertaining and you can surely enjoy it :) Now I just hope there will be other movies with the rest of the book!

Being an American imbued in this ego-mongering, greed-centric culture and it's pitifully vacuous religious folklore and totally unfamiliar with the story behind the 'Monkey King', I was hesitant to watch this since I had to read subtitles which turned out to be difficult at best due to translation issues, but I did manage to get the gist of the story as it unfolded, and I couldn't help becoming involved in the characters soon after it began. The special effects were not the cutting edge I've grown to expect from Hollywood, but considering the complex fantasy nature of the story, I'm glad that they didn't waste time and money trying to go that route since this story is obviously full of ancient iconic elements that have such a nebulous foundation with each other and history that the relationships between them and the time-line of events would not have flowed as well if they had. I thoroughly enjoyed the spirit of innocence and interminable joy demonstrated by the Monkey King at each stage of his travels. The spirit of his appreciation for life was contagious, and I found myself feeling better about my own reality as a result.