Videogame movies have tried ignoring their source material, and they’ve tried legitimising their source material via being as dour as possible, but it’s rare that they’ve just embraced the inherent absurdity of videogames. Enter: the Dynasty Warriors movie, which looks joyfully like the Dynasty Warriors games.
If you’re not familiar with Dynasty Warriors, it’s a series of games by Koei Tecmo which are set during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. Rather than dry historical retellings though, they’re fantastic romps in which you choose a character and then beat up hundreds or thousands of men on vast battlefields.
Not too dissimilar to the trailer above, then. It’s obviously not uncommon for Asian movies to blend history and fantasy together, but it’s joyous to see Dynasty Warriors treated like the daft fun the games are. It’s also nice to see them made with an obviously considerable budget.
I also enjoyed the combination of low tech solutions and high-tech digital fakery in this little behind-the-scenes clip:
The movie is directed by Roy Chow and stars Louis Koo as Lu Bu, Wang Kai as Cao Cao, Tony Yang as Liu Bei, Han Geng as Guan Yu, Justin Cheung as Zhang Fei, Ray Liu as Yuan Shao, Gülnezer Bextiyar as Diao Chan and Carina Lau as as a mysterious character
Here is behind the scenes pic.twitter.com/NUOr9OZmlc
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) March 31, 2021
Unfortunately, there’s no announced western release date yet. The movie finished filming back in 2018, but Covid-19 has delayed its release in Hong Kong and China till later this month.