The House of Flying Reality

Warning: Will Contain Spoilers

When I watched "The House of Flying Daggers", I do not understand why most reviews found in the internet hated it. Although I admit that Hero was the better movie, HoFD doesn't deserve the raps it got from them.

I got excerpts [shown in italics] from a review in http://www.imdb.com (The International Movie Database) and will place my comments afterwards.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't work. The action scenes and the character drama have been given unequal time; something like 25/75, percentage-wise. Obviously, the plot and characterizations are important to the director. Regrettably, the plot is enormously protracted, and about two thirds into the movie we get extreme twists that turn everything around and completely undermine the premise of all the earlier key scenes. If Mei and Leo knew each other, what was the point of the initial fight in the pavilion? To what purpose were all the pretending, when everyone involved were in on it?! Also, many of the fight scenes from the first half of the movie (esp. in the forest) where Mei is supposedly blind are made meaningless once we know that she was never blind. That's not clever storytelling; that's cheating!

The extreme twists weren't really exteme, if one is observant during the film. We were given hints, a lot of them in fact, during the earlier scenes that the captain was also part of the Flying Daggers. The echo game, the singling out of Mei, the one-day "break" from the torture and Mei's smile during the echo game were just some of the hints given. The initial fight served as a way to make everyone think that they were on opposite sides. Her planned escape later would then draw out the general and his troops to where the house of flying daggers were waiting to ambush the government (who killed the old leader of the house of FD). Mei acted blind so Jin, as well as the government, would believe that she was the daughter of the old leader out to take revenge on her father's death. There was a story floating around in the government that the old leader had a blind daughter who left the group. She was a "big fish" in the eyes of the corrupt government, and would surely be an asset to lead them to the hideout of the HoFD. There were also subtle hints that the movie gave out to say that she wasn't blind.

The love story was too silly and preposterous to be believable, and all the worse for being so long-winded. And we never did see very much of the skill (or the members) of the Flying Daggers, which I thought was a great shame. Nor did we see the outcome of the final fight between the Daggers and the government soldiers! From starting out as an action movie, the film descends more and more into a bad love story, even to the point of supplying hardly any resolution to the action part of the story.

One wouldn't know this if he hasn't experienced loving two people at the same time --- his ex, and his "moved on" love. The love story was exactly like that, and even Mei couldn't choose until the end. (grabe... parang tunay na buhay.) Although it would be nice to see the skill of the Flying Daggers in the battle with the government, it would just add glamour to the film, nothing else. The flying daggers throughout the movie were enough to showcase this skill. The outcome of the final fight was implied in the final scene, as well as in the song that recurred twice in the movie. Watch it again, and "see".

The taste in movies nowadays have shifted back to the spoonfed era, but with a technological taste in it. "I must see high flying breathtaking action like the Matrix, and see a clear-cut in-your-face ending (with a strong theological or philosophical background)." Implied stories are sadly, not sufficient once more.