"The Moon Warriors" (aka "Zhan shen chuan shuo") has every ingredient to be a masterful epic Wuxia movie. It has an impressive cast list, a well-established director, beautiful scenery, good props and costumes, lots of action and good choreography...
...but it ultimately failed to be more than a mediocre movie given the fact that the entire movie seemed nothing more than a scramble of bits and pieces of different story lines put together in a fairly incoherent assembly in order to make a movie. There was no overly coherent red line throughout the course of the movie, and it was a chaotic mess as the story jumped all over the place.
I watched "The Moon Warriors" for the first time around the mid- to late 1990's. I wasn't overly impressed back then, but had purchased it solely because of Maggie Cheung starred in it. And now returning to the movie about 20 years later, I am sad to say that the movie still isn't all that impressive for me.
What is impressive, though, is the cast list for "The Moon Warrior". They had managed to acquire some really big talents for this movie, which includes Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui. And that is one of the main reasons for watching this movie; the cast ensemble.
The martial arts and fighting sequences were also quite good and well-choreographed. And this is essential to this particular genre of movies.
I do also enjoy the details in movies, such as seen in the props, sets, landscape, etc. And there was a lot of nice touches to this movie, both in costume and sets.
But the storyline was just killed off by a way too scrambled and confusing directorial attempt at making something epic. And it was a shame, because "The Moon Warriors" really had all the right things served on a silver platter in order to be a very outstanding movie.
I am going to have to settle on a mediocre five out of ten stars for this 1992 Hong Kong movie, although it pains me somewhat, as I am a big fan of both Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau.
