MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*
I don't know if the film's title in Chinese specified "YOUNG Detective Dee" or not, but wherever it started, maybe some promoter wanted to stress to audiences that this film was a prequel to Tsui Hark's first movie in the series, PHANTOM FLAME. If so, the third and last film in the Hark series, also a prequel to FLAME, dispensed with that qualifier.
The prequel idea seems to have spawned a continuity problem, though. Wiki says that FLAME transpires in 689 CE, while DRAGON takes place about twenty years earlier, and involves the first time Empress Wu (again Carina Lau) meets Detective Dee (now played by Mark Chao), whose standing seems vague at best. But he must have done something impressive, for the Empress wants Dee to solve the mystery of a sea creature that destroys her fleet. The continuity problem would seem to be that FLAME was saying that Wu ascended to empress-hood in 689, but DRAGON, set in 665, implies that she is already in full authority. The problem might stem from bad subtitles, or it may be that Tsui Hark, focused mostly on providing impressive set-pieces, didn't care about internal consistency.
Like its predecessor, DRAGON always displays fine production values, but the import of the story is hard to follow and to invest with much emotional tone. In contrast to most rationalistic detective-stories, there really is a monster, though the beast, a mutated manta ray, is the product of Chinese super-science. Similarly, the villains who create the sea monster also mutate an ordinary fellow into a two-legged reptile-man. I don't know why the villains do this. However, the film's only strong emotional moments come from those scenes in which a young woman, in love with the original human, seeks to protect Reptile Guy. The film ends with Dee's triumph after various big splashy set-pieces, and he's given a court position. I don't yet know if the last of the Hark films establishes why Dee has been in prison at the start of FLAME.
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