Mei Hu: Confucius (2010)

Cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Xun Zhou, Yi Lu, Jianbin Chen, Lu Yao, Kaili Zhang
The movie starts with a middle-aged Confucius, when he serves in the Kingdom of Lu's government, advocating his political idea that a nation should be ruled with courtesy and morality.
However, his political ambitions are plagued by an opposing clan, and so at the age of 55, the frustrated Confucius leaves the kingdom of Lu and travels through different states for 14 years, followed, fortunately, by dozens of his loyal disciples.
The movie's director, Hu Mei, is distinguished for her historical TV dramas; but nevertheless, she took a muddy and risky path when she decided to tell the story of Confucius in a biographical fashion. In the first place, historical records and documents about Confucius don't offer enough dramatic elements to help compose a good plot. More importantly, the greatness of the ancient sage is mostly evidenced by his thoughts rather than his life events; therefore, the movie was born with a drama-deficiency.
It's clear the director has realized this and tried to come up with solutions to the problem, but sadly these tactics don't work well in the movie.
The first trick up her sleeve was to search historical records for the slightest trace of drama in Confucius's life. Based on this, and also in order to create a lead actress role to balance the gender disparity in the film, the director has the queen of the Wei Kingdom try to seduce Confucius. But this dramatized Confucius, instead of becoming vivid and accessible, counters people's general impression of a detached philosopher and just ruins the solemn ambience that viewers anticipate and the director initially attempts to achieve.
The second attempt at shaping Confucius into a box office success was to add in ruthless and magnificent battle scenes. But after Red Cliff, Mulan and many other similar films already hitting the big screen, most if not all moviegoers have had enough of films with lengthy depictions of ancient wars. Especially with memories of the visual effects in "2012" and "Avatar" fresh in our minds, the war scenes in "Confucius" appear embarrassingly shabby.
As a result, the epic only serves as a sleeping pill, and your drowsiness won't be dispelled until the ending song from reclusive singer Wang Fei reverberates through the theatre.
The movie's makers apparently took it for granted that "Confucius" would come alive as long as Confucius says his famous quotes, stays calm in face of dangers and always behaves in an admirable and unassuming way. But the movie never examines the character as a human being, and as a result never goes beneath the surface.





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