Erick-12

This film is maliciously counter-factual about recent political events in Taiwan. To avoid the obvious legal responsibility of slander and libel, it merely changes peoples's names like a _roman à clef_ while inventing the usual thriller / romance subplot in imitation of Hollywood's treatment of so-called "history". Problem is that in doing so it obliterates and suppresses all of the most relevant facts, while accepting the most idiotic conspiracy theories which multiple investigations from multiple sources have already discredited. The result is an inept pro-KMT "Blue Party" wet dream, embarrassing to watch if you are unfortunately awake in Taiwan today.

Taiwanese sci-fi, which sounds promising, and looks cool for the first few minutes. But the film is terrible, badly acted, and with the typically awful amateur script that doesn't know how to end a story but meanders off into increasingly idiotic scenarios that don't connect to the previous passages. Too bad, as the director captured a few interesting images using existing settings in Taiwan, sort of framed carefully to suggest a futuristic sci-fi world. But the overall result is too frustrating to watch, and one of the worst Taiwanese films I've ever seen. Hung Hung, writer / director, has done better work elsewhere. See, e.g., the entries here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0393297/

Very nicely filmed, somehow both visually stylish and accurate on period detail. Based on the novel of the same title by Gaskell, a work that is crucial for understanding – in an ideologically deflected way — the transition from Romanticism (the country cottage, poetry, equality, etc) to early Victorianism (industrial power, science, Darwinian adaptation, bourgeois reform, etc.) that Gaskell seems to endorse through the transformation of the heroine, and her choice of husband. Myth in action here, as in the sense of resolving this contradiction in imaginative fiction. Alas, the contradictions between Romantic values and Victorian values remains with us even into the 21st century. This perhaps explains why the BBC television production of _North and South_ was so watchable for so many viewers.