Battleangel | Personal

I had a chance to see Jet Li’s latest martial arts epic Fearless (Huo Yuan Jia) the other day and felt that it warranted some sort of commentary. Especially since I was going on about unsung movies of 2006 the other day. Now, obviously the premiered a year ago in China and has raked in millions but can by no stretch of the english language be described as mainstream. Or an international hit for many reasons, the most obvious being that it had a limited release pretty much everywhere. Which of course is sad since Fearless has an important story to tell, unlike some of the other hilarious martial arts blockbusters to come out of China in the last couple of years.

Above all else, Fearless is a quite genuine take on Chinese history and what befell the nation around the turn of the last century as it succumbed to internal struggles and foreign imperialist powers. The fate of the characters and the plot may be larger than life but this particular interpretation of history is very close to the mark. And it is an important lesson for China to remember as it is once again opening up to the world. It should also be a lesson to those same haughty, coveting nations that sealed China’s fate the last time around, fermenting the Boxer rebellion, further civil war and a isolationism. Also, I found the relationship between “Huo Yuanjia” (Jet Li) and “Tanaka Anno” (Nakamura Shido) a very pertinent analogy of the relationship between China and Japan, as it could have been. That is if Japanese society hadn’t been perverted by western (US) influence during the Meiji era, leading in effect to Japan’s imperialistic policies in the region. As aptly illustrated by “Mr. Mita” (Harada Masato), the “bespectacled antagonistic Japanese meiji-era governmental figure who embraces western customs at the expense of the traditional Japanese way-of-life.”