So, I finally rented the film Shinobi from the Cornerstone dvd place (Highlander DVD) tonight and just finished watching the film. I will jot down some notes and thoughts on it for future reference.
I was pretty excited to see this film, hearing about it months ago thanks to Kev & Yoshi, and finally seeing it out on DVD. Of course, I forgot to check that there were english menus - which there weren't - but I managed to muddle through and find the correct subtitling setting. I went to my preferred Japanese language tutorial site and looked up English in Kanji. (Yeah, I know, I should remember it from the Chinese characters, since they should be the same as the Kanji, but I forgot =P).
First thoughts: beautiful instrumental score. I have not yet checked who by, but it perfectly accentuates the beautiful scenery in those many moments of aerial cinematic splendor or scenery-chewing action locations. Second thoughts: The CGI and some of the wire-work earlier in the film is rather obvious and artificial. Luckily, that changes as the film progresses and the effects become much more natural.
Be warned: This isn't really a martial arts film. As the name implies, it's about shinobi, and features "special (CGI-enhanced fantasy) techniques" more than martial arts, and debatably has the same or less martial arts than the typical good episode of Naruto. Some of the battles are surprisingly short, and they are so for that surprise value. Which is perfectly fine for the film it is, rather than a film - say, like Feng Wun (Storm Riders) - which tries to insert a good deal of martial arts into a primarily fantasy-cgi landscape and does it badly. Here, it is the "special techniques" which steal the show. To top it off, the battle scenes - again, unlike Feng Wun - are filmed with a wonderful eye for style and camera work, almost like an anime but in live action. I'd take this film any day over any of the X-men films, which feature special supernatural techniques in a very similar way.
That said, there is one major area where I thought the film could have been better (aside from the initial effects):
The greatest area where I thought the film could have done better was in the pacing of the story. Throughout the film, I rarely felt suspense building towards the climax. Events simply happened in a relatively linear fashion, and at the climax another large set of events all happen suddenly at once. Therefore, it also comes away looking somewhat sparse in the plot department. In particular, because we don't initially know the set of characters too well, the travails they go through don't truly resonate within the viewer as much as they could have. Although they each get a single good scene where they get to expound their character's philosophy, or their history, it really is not enough to make the events that happen to each work towards enhancing the overall suspense of the film. However, I really enjoyed the climax and denouement - they were filmed very tastefully, the plot points were compelling, the thematic significance poignant, and they resonated in a manner that the rest of the film leading up to it perhaps did not.
I came away from the film thinking that it would have been the perfect final episode of a long-running series about the two villages and clans. Again, I really felt that the events and battles would have had much more emotional impact if we had been able to get to know the characters (as well as their powers as used in other battles) better. A series preceding the movie would have done that - although a spin-off prequel series (which for all we know may be in the works) wouldn't quite do it, since we know any ret-con histories were not originally written prior to the film. As it was, we never really get to know each of the characters well at all before they meet their individual fates. The fact that most only get one character-expanding scene is really too bad, because I found each of the individual characters really were quite interesting.
Final word on the film, where it stands compared to other similar genre films I like:
-Far better than House of Flying Daggers, which had neither plot nor suspense.
-I enjoyed it more than Crouching Tiger, but I'm not sure if Shinobi can be said to be more substantial, plot-wise. Even so, I still have a large number of reservations about Crouching Tiger.
-There are many similarities between Shinobi and Hero, in story structure, pacing, thematic elements. However, to go into more detail would be to give massive spoilers. Similar in enjoyability to Hero, although I still think Hero may have slightly more plot owing to the "multiple uncertain versions of the same story" effect. Plus, Hero has some great martial arts choreography in it - so it still goes higher on the list. I was - however - glad that there wasn't any of the overly gratuitous beating-over-the-head with metaphors that there was in Hero (i.e., the colour imagery, slow-motion, leaves, etc).
-Totally different class of movie than my favorite genre piece of Fearless.
All in all, an enjoyable movie. 4 lightning bolts out of 5.
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