Well,
that was a waste of time. A battle film, from start to finish, and one
that comes with a heavy, heavy sense of déjà vu: anyone who has ever
seen any of the Marvel Avengers movies will surely recognize a scene or
two or five or more, not to mention whole concepts. Basically, The First Myth: The Clash of the Gods
is pretty much the Avengers dressed in mythic, wuxia trappings but, if
you can imagine it even possible, with less depth and character
development, more illogic and discontinuity, and a lot more of the kind
of CGI that makes you think you are watching a cheap animated movie.
Trailer to
The First Myth – The Clash of Gods:
The movie begins with a battle and ends with a battle, and in between there are battles. For all the action, however, The Clash of the Gods remains
amazingly dull and uninteresting, listlessly going from one familiar
set piece to the next. A token non-action scene pops up here and there
to explain this or that or offer a facsimile of character growth or
humor or human emotion or motivation, but little of the extraneous
non-battle scenes do anything to make the story any more comprehensible,
though they are sometimes a bit more interesting than the repetitive
fight scenes. People — to be exact: gods — come and go, mostly out of
the blue and especially towards the big but uninvolving climactic
battle, but the focus of the movie is generally on the main assembly of
five, sometimes six.
We
admit that we are not 100% sure that we have all the names right, but
the movie's Hulk is Ne Zha (Zhang Zhi Lu), only here the hapless human
changes into a winging quasi-gargoyle that looks like a refugee from I, Frankenstein (2014 / trailer),
a likewise crappy movie but one with better CGI. General Deng (Maggie
Lee a.k.a. Qinyao Li) is the Black Widow of the movie, not quite as
fan-boy wet-dream sexy as Scarlett Johansson's interpretation but just
as deadly and unstoppable, almost superhuman despite being human. Yang
Jian (Samual Chan)
is an Iron Man figure with a Vision-like mind stone on his forehead and
is the nominal leader of the bickering group, which must learn to fight
together.
For reasons of political correctness — Not!
— the Thor figure, named Tu Xing Sun, who has a golden rope instead of a
hammer and can burrow underground like moleman, is played for laughs by
a thespian-challenged little-person (Han Meng Wu). The movie's
highlight, as in best-acted and most fun to watch, is the secondary bad
guy, the Loki figure named Sheng Guo Bao (Ma Wen Bo), whose giant demon
panther becomes quite a pussycat after it gets its ass properly kicked.
(One really cannot help but laugh loudly when, captured, Bao gets tossed
into a jail cell with barred door made of tree branches. He's frigging
wizard, for gawd's sake.)
There
is also a Captain America figure of sorts as well as an Agent Coulson
character, not to mention a Nick Fury type, though in this case he is
not Black but an aged wizard who looks a bit like an Asian Gandalf. The
skinny bad-guy god in the sky (Paul Che of Till Death Do We Scare [ / scene], Ghost Hospital [2016 / trailer], Tales from the Occult [2022 / trailer], the bat-shit crazy Coffin Homes [2022 / trailer], the bat-shit crazy Asian reboot of Anaconda [2024 / trailer] and way more) is the movie's Saruman cum The Other cum Thanos, so of course he wants to destroy humanity...
All in all, there is really no reason to bother with The First Myth: The Clash of Gods.
Sure, the wuxia elements are intriguing, but dressing up a flogged-dead
horse does not really hide the stench of over-familiarity. That said,
over-familiarity often helps make the movie easier to follow: despite
the one-note simplicity of the narrative — battle after battle as good
deities and people vs. bad deities out to destroy humanity — the movie
has a lot of those big jumps found so often in contemporary Asian
fantasy flicks that make the viewer think that either some important
scenes have been cut (perhaps we're watching two movies cut down into
one?*) or that one must have temporarily dozed off for a bit. But what transpires on screen in The First Myth: The Clash of Gods
is never interesting enough to make one want to hit rewind to check.
Instead, one just wants the whole thing to get over with and end.
* Nope.
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