Nice to see Zhang Yimou (director) and Li Gong (actress) together again. It would be a lot nicer if this movie made more sense.

In what is advertised as the 10th century (end of the Tang Dynasty?), the royal family of China qualifies as dysfunctional. We have the emperor (Chow Yun-Fat), the empress (Li Gong), a crown prince named Wan (according to the subtitles) or Xiang (IMDB) by the emperor’s former wife, and two younger princes, the martial Jia and the somewhat effete Yu, by the current wife. For reasons best left to the imagination (meaning: I never figured them out!) the emperor is gradually poisoning his wife, with the connivance of the imperial physician and the imperial physician’s daughter, who in turn is having a romance with Prince Wan, who in turn has had a romance with his stepmother the empress. Enter the physician’s wife, who turns out to be the (supposedly dead) former wife of the emperor. Enter plot by the empress to force the emperor to abdicate in favor of her older son Prince Jia. Enter armies on the march, arrow storms, and fields covered with golden chrysanthemums for the Chrysanthemum Festival (the chrysanthemum is also the empress’s emblem in the coming battle). Climax with scene straight out of Hamlet.

The movie would have made more sense to me if, somehow, the emperor were poisoning the empress to make way for his oldest son to take the throne. But in fact he pointed out early on (and his oldest son concurred) that he was preparing to grant Crown Prince status not to Wan but to Jia, who seemed a more likely candidate. In that context, I could not figure out what he was up to with his wife.

I also thought the subplot with Wan and Chan (unknowing incest) was unnecessary to the main plot.

Lots of magnificent cinematography. The imperial palace was very, very colorful. The scene of the armies battling in the palace courtyard had to be CGI (I don’t think there were that many soldiers — perhaps not that many people — in China at that period).