When the two meet up again as the war for humanity's souls approaches, allegiances are tested and details are revealed about the nature of their masters, as well as the truth about Zhong Kui's past.ĭespite being a committed sentinel to the human realm equipped with a mystical fan that bequeaths him with the size and strength of demons whenever used, the story relies on Zhong Kui actually being a pretty clueless demon slayer and protector of his designated city. Hell has its own tricks up its sleeve: Snow Girl ( Snow Flower and the Secret Fan's Li Bingbing), a loyal ice spirit and her troop of beautiful shape-shifting demons, someone with connections to Zhong Kui from years ago. As a doomsday moment approaches where the denizens of the underworld will come to claim the souls of humanity, heavenly figure Zhang Daoxian (Winston Chao) ramps up his magical training of a demon slayer, storied Chinese antihero Zhong Kui ( Painted Skin's Chen Kun), to counter their offenses with a super-powerful being and safeguard a significant crystal recently retrieved from them, which shall be kept in a large human town that reveres the divine. The plot for Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal wedges into an awkward zone between simple archetypal storytelling and elaborate mythological twists and turns, hinged on the struggle between Heaven and Hell over the fate of the human realm in ancient China. What wasn't expected was how dreadfully weak both the garish visuals and laborious storytelling would appear in the final product, resulting in a befuddling waste of its underlying production value that struggles to justify its existence. Expectations that Peter Pau and Tianyu Zhao might draw from his prior work for something similar were naturally kept in check after seeing the film's busy trailer, though, which mixes overzealous graphics and odes to ancient folklore in what looks more like a stream of videogame cutscenes than a motion picture. While his efforts in the director's chair are few, his eye as a cinematographer has been responsible for capturing the beauty of numerous different martial-arts fantasies, from the carefully elevated realism of his Oscar-winning work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the colorful, energetic zaniness of the cult classic Bride With White Hair. Peter Pau, the co-director of China's grandiose, CG-heavy blockbuster Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal, is no stranger to the realm of the outlandish.
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