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The 3D effects are noticeable – by that, we mean they are constantly hammered into your eyes.
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What exactly happened here?! Most of the effects work looks jarringly half-rendered, textureless and incomplete and the creature designs, looking like they belong at a school play instead of a major motion picture, are laughable. Veteran Hollywood visual effects supervisors Kevin Rafferty and David Ebner were in charge of the CGI work on this film, Rafferty’s credits including The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Casper, Deep Impact and The Perfect Storm and Ebner’s including Spider-Man 3, Underworld: Evolution and Sin City. This reviewer didn’t buy the digitally-created backgrounds for a half second. Given the many mythical creatures in the story and its settings of heaven, hell, the paradise of Flower Fruit Mountain and the undersea domain of the Dragon King of the East Sea, The Monkey King is heavily reliant on green screen work. The Monkey King does none of this, looking staggeringly, ridiculously phony at every turn. One of the most important tasks every fantasy film has to accomplish is that of inviting its audience to partake in its world to woo the viewer with breath-taking scenery and convince them of the reality of a fabricated, cinematic world.
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The cluttered screenplay by Szeto Kam Yuen and Edmond Wong heaves with exposition and pointless dialogue, robbing the film of the spirit of grand adventure that is a signature element of Journey to the West.Ĭhief of the cinematic crimes committed by The Monkey King is just how ghastly it all looks. Trying to take in the mind-boggling mess that is this film, one can only imagine the chaos that must have gone on behind the scenes, that in the span of four years, this sorry slop is the best director Cheang Pou-soi and his crew could come up with. The only thing “epic” about The Monkey King is the sheer levels of fail. There’s no questioning the cultural and historical importance of Journey to the West, a novel that definitely deserves as epic a cinematic treatment as can be given. The Bull Demon King has his sights set on Wukong as the key to taking over the Jade Emperor’s realm Wukong going about wreaking havoc in the heavens. He forms a friendship/kinda-romance with a fox vixen (Xia) and trains under Master Puti (Hai Yitian), who christens the monkey “Sun Wukong”. A magical monkey (Yen) hatches from the egg, more inquisitive, bolder and mischievous than his fellow monkeys who call the Mountain home. In the aftermath of the fighting, the goddess Nüwa patches up the swathes of the sky that have been torn apart, resulting in the formation of a crystal egg on Flower Fruit Mountain. Perhaps it should have never been released.Ī catastrophic battle in the heavens is waged between the forces of the Bull Demon King (Kwok) and the Jade Emperor (Chow). Starring Donnie Yen in the title role, this take on The Monkey King has been in the works for four years, with its release date postponed several times. The classical 16th Century novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en has inspired countless works across various forms of media, its opening chapters forming the basis for this origin story film. It’s the Year of the Horse, but Sun Wukong will have none of it, barging into theatres two years before the Year of the Monkey.