Moon Warriors is a bit of a love story with some cool action from 1993, directed by Hong Kong film legend Sammo Hung.
Andy Lau plays a guy named Fei, a villager and fisherman who has some serious combat skills with his sword. When he comes across a band of people being attacked, Fei jumps in and helps out to fend off the attackers.
Fei offers to take them back to his village to rest. He also learns that the man he protected was the Emperor, who is experiencing some difficulties with his brother who has taken control. Fei offers to help out in any way he can, and eventually must protect the Emperor’s girlfriend from being harmed during a battle.
Both Fei and the young woman run off and don’t quite get along – so naturally they fall in love.
But the two keep things very much apart due to their loyalties to Emperor – who’s a pretty nice guy. All the while they are fighting for survival and trying to regain power.
Quick & Easy
This film isn’t a very long one, going for less than 90 minutes, and it seems to just flow through very quickly sprinkling bit and pieces of action mixed with romance throughout.
The whole love triangle thing is getting a bit old though, but this movie does it tastefully. It seems to be the main character story of the film but other than that the film keeps pretty basic, and offers an interesting range of characters – like Fei.
Fei is a ‘measly village peasant’, but he doesn’t care – no one talks to him as anything less than an equal. As far as he is concerned power makes no difference! Despite all of this Fei is also incredibly kind and warm hearted – he offers a bit of a theme to the film as it shows everyone he is human and inevitably the same level of warrior as the Emperor’s men. Even in the end we see Fei fighting the Emperor’s evil brother and giving him hell!
But apart from that the movie is pretty quick and easy, not deep. It seems to me that the real story didn’t really have a chance to be told in the short time frame. Everything plot-wise is heavily compressed and pumped out quite quickly but in a decent fashion. A less experienced director would have made a mess for this movie.
The Martial Arts and Action
The fights are very fast and vicious but combined with some high flying wire work. Anyone who reads my reviews regularly would know I cannot stand wirework. In some movies it just kind of works – like this one.
If the same speed and motivation behind each fight was preserved and the wire work removed it would have been a big favorite of mine, but the movements are just too ‘low gravity’ for me (personally). Overall the fights aren’t bad though and definitely carry a high standard, performed to perfection and exciting to watch.
Overall?
Not bad, a good entertaining movie but not breaking any records. Check it out if you don’t mind wirework in the action and cheesy love stories.
On DVD –
Region 1 (US & Canada)
The Moon Warriors
Region 2 (UK, Europe, etc)
Moon Warriors [DVD] (1993)
