The Warrior and the Wolf (2009)

Fantastic!

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

I watched now "The Warrior and the Wolf" two times and it worked rather well for me as an art film.For me the film is structured in three parts: 1) war 2) warrior and woman 3) folk tale about humans shape-changed into wolves.The time-structure of the first part "war" is not easy to follow at first viewing, but on the other hand not as hard as I feared from the reviews. The first part reminds me very much of the first part in Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)", where a scholar from central China is shaped into a warrior by a general in the western out-reaches of the Chinese empire soon to be overrun by tribal people. This part has the same feeling of following a whirling leaf in a storm.The second part "warrior and woman" is still reminding me of the scholar's story in "Tun-huang", because the scholar-warrior finds a princess, hides her in a store-house, and finally forces intercourse, after which she considers herself his wife. I like the second part best, because it shows the strongest acting as the actors portray very conflicting emotions. Odagiri has convinced me now in three different eccentric roles: mad samurai, uninformed prince, peace-loving warrior. Some reviewers wrote about repeated rape and Stockholm syndrome. My impressions were more that here animalistic behaviour overruled humanist behaviour. The woman is very conflicted. Maggie Q. is somewhat less convincing than Jo Odagiri, but her character is the more difficult to portray. She is partly a wolf and partly human and thus her humanity leads her to moral behaviour while her wolf nature leads her to quite different expressions by which she lures the warrior to the wolf side.The third part, the folk tale, is for me the weakest. Not in the sense of the director's vision but in the sense of handicraft. It uses cgi and trained animals, but nevertheless it's simply a bit less convincing because those "tricks" are still discernible and thus a bit irritating to me. I can infer what the director wanted to tell, and that works quite well for me, but since I feel irritated by the artefacts of make-belief I perceive the last part as the least perfect.Overall for me the film has very good pictures, good direction, and great acting. I have not read the original short story, but by comparing Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)" and short-story "The Hunting Gun (1949)" with the film I think that the director captured Yasushi's style quite well.In my view the film might be quite attractive for people who like modern poetry, in the sense of feeling comfortable with visualisations based on mental associations and produced by a disjunctive structure. The film "The Warrior and the Wolf (2009)" reminded me in style and nihilistic atmosphere of the films "Valhalla Rising (2009)" and "Dust (2001)", but worked decidedly better for me than these two.

THE WARRIOR AND THE WOLF is a beautiful film to look at. The lush cinematography with its wide landscape shots of endless expanses of wilderness, hilly terrain and distant mountains is a glory to behold. The colours are vivid and the director has a real eye for nature's beauty. Wolves play a large part in the film's background and they've never looked so appealing as they do here. The addition of a wolf pup to the storyline only adds to that feeling.A shame then that in all other respects this is a dog, rather than a wolf, of a film. It starts off muddled, with murky choppily-edited battle sequences and a disjointed feel to the narrative. The erstwhile hero of the piece is a pacifist shepherd one moment and a ruthless leader of men the next. I didn't have a clue what was going on in regards to the historical backdrop and it's always a giveaway of poor writing when they have to keep including on-screen text at regular intervals to tell the viewer what's supposed to be going on.After half an hour or so of this, the action shifts to a supposedly cursed village where the lead character meets a woman and rapes her. Then he rapes her again, and again after that. Eventually, the woman falls in love with her attacker, a plot point that is so repellent as to be purely offensive. The ending of the film just peters out with no real explanation of what's happened or what we just watched. Odagiri plays the lead with the same stony-faced expression from beginning to end and Maggie Q is relegated to a window-dressing role with pretty much all of her scenes taking place in the bedroom. If you're looking for a decent Chinese historical then give this one a wide berth.

For a start, this is not a martial arts movie although I did discover it while browsing through the martial arts section of a online retailer.This movie is short, has very little dialogue and the plot is vague at best.Because of the lack of dialogue it is very difficult to get a feel for any of the main characters or a involvement in what little story there is.Don't let the fact that it is from the same producer as Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fool you into thinking this movie could be any good.

The trailer is somewhat misleading. Rather than a heroic epic, this is an intimate tale of love and passion (perhaps in reversed order), which is not surprising if you have seen director TIAN Zhuangzhuang's 2002 remake of the all time Chinese film classic "Springtime in a small town". His painfully slow pace is often too trying for the average audience's patience. At least one walked out in the show I attended.The first one-third of the movie is devoted to establishing the main protagonist – a quick-witted but mild-tempered young shepherd's initiation into the brutality of warfare and eventual transformation into a seasoned warrior, all this done in magnificently shot landscapes that are at once splendorous and desolate. The appearance of a mysterious, beautiful woman from a "cursed" tribe shifts the mood of the movie, with ensuing hot steaming sex scenes aplenty. In the last third of the film, the legend finally emerges, with the mist that shrouded the curse lifted, only to bring the audience into a new realm of mysticism.Jo Odagiri and Magie Q bring to this movie convincing performances of a relationship that started with raw passion but evolves into something deeper. As mentioned, cinematography is something to look forward to. There isn't much by way of spectacular action but one scene showing a huge wolf pack fleeing from a devastating storm is quite impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more people disappointed than pleased by this movie. Should that be the case, I would blame it on the trailer which creates the wrong kind of expectation.