Monday, August 19, 2024

The First Myth: The Clash of Gods / Feng shen bang: Jue zhan wan xian zhen (China, 2021)

 
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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