Ashes of Time (1994)
Ashes of Time (Chinese: 東邪西毒) is a 1994 Hong Kong film written and directed by Wong Kar-wai, and inspired by characters from Jin Yong’s novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes. Ashes of Time grossed HK$9,023,583 during its Hong Kong run.Background
The film’s story is a prequel to the novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes as it imagines the older characters when they were younger. It focuses on the main antagonist (Ouyang Feng) and humanizes him into a protagonist while retaining his despicable qualities. Feng, known as the Western Venom, crosses paths with the other powerful wuxia masters. Their backstories are depicted with great liberty and sometimes completely subvert the intended meaning from the novel. During the film’s long-delayed production, Wong produced a parody of the same novel with the same cast titled The Eagle Shooting Heroes. Because it received limited box office success, the parallels Ashes of Time drew between modern ideas of dystopia imposed on a wuxia film have led critics to cite it as one of Wong Kar-wai’s most under- appreciated works. In the 1960s, King Hu’s Come Drink with me (Da zui xia) brought Wu Xia Pian to a superior artistic level.RELATED:
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Wong grew up immersed in Wu Xia culture. In 1972, The Way of the Dragon (Meng long guo jiang), movie directed by Bruce Lee, persuade Jiang Hu culture to the global stage. In the mid-1990, Wu xia pian entered to a new stage. Wong selects characters from “new school” Wu xia novel writer Jin Yong’s work, Legend of the Condor Heroes, and created an unprecedented Wu xia story.
Due to the original prints being lost, Wong re-edited and re-scored the film in 2008 for future theater, DVD and Blu-ray releases under the title Ashes of Time Redux. The film was reduced from 100 to 93 minutes. Both the original and Redux versions can still be found on Asian markets, while only the Redux version is available to western markets. Several criticisms of the Redux version have been noted, such as poor image quality and color mastering from the source material, cropping and removal of portions of the bottom image, poor English translations, and the re-scoring.