n seventh-century China, fierce battles are regularly waged between invading Turks and armies of the Tang Dynasty, who fight to preserve the dominion of their growing empire. In the midst of these battles, a lone warrior named Lai Xi (Nakai Kiichi)—who was born Japanese but raised in China—is assigned a deadly detail: Hunt down a band of soldiers who abandoned the Tang army and bring them to justice. Facing the leadership of a heroic and formidable soldier named Li (Jiang Wen), however, Xi's assignment will hardly be a cakewalk.
Li, who has long since disappeared into the ranks of ordinary Tang citizens, is himself ordered to serve his government once again; disguised as an Arab, the former officer leads a pack of camels as they travel through the Gobi desert, carrying cargo that may hold the key to the Tang dynasty's future. Before long, Li and Xi's paths cross, and the two men forge a bond to meet in one final confrontation when Li has executed his last duty on behalf of the Tang government. What neither of them counted on, however, was the involvement of numerous other interested parties who seek the caravan's treasures for themselves and who will stop at nothing to recover them.
Banding together as an unlikely team, Li, Xi and his exiled soldiers make an arduous trek across the desert, searching for refuge and seeking respite from the hostile forces that close around them at every turn. With one last outpost standing in their way as safe haven from their enemies, the small group strike out against all odds to complete their journey and reach the Forbidden City, where Li and Xi will finally confront one another to determine who indeed is the greatest soldier in the Tang army.
The best western of the East
With a story whose landscape follows the same dusty path as countless westerns before it, Warriors of Heaven and Earth may be the first film of the distinctly American genre to arrive from Eastern shores. Writer-director He Ping has apparently made several of these films in China, but his first migration to the mighty West is an uneven affair, balanced by a meaty middle but anemic beginning and ending, that will feel familiar to fans of movies like Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but hardly resonate as deeply as its predecessors' stories. Still, it's good to see that even in seventh-century China, the sarcastic clap was already in use between erstwhile adversaries—those Asians were ahead of their time with everything!
The problem with the film is that its story and character beats feel heavily borrowed from the epics of international filmmakers like John Ford, David Lean, Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, but without a point of view that is distinctive to Ping. While the conflict between the two lead characters, one of whom is bound by duty and the other by honor, easily transcends ethnic or cultural storytelling borders, the conclusions the film arrives at veer so sharply from effective execution of said themes that we can only wonder how much of the film Ping made alone and how much was engineered by committee. To wit: The opening scenes feel like a series of vignettes, loosely assembled together to give us an unspecific idea of the conflicts that are brewing among the vast cast of characters, but never quite clarify the stakes as the machinations of the plot (such as Li's mutiny and Xi's duty-bound assignment) grind into motion.
As the physical conflicts escalate from one set piece to the next, including a terrific showdown in a gorge between the ramshackle caravan crew and an evil warlord who has designs on the treasure, the film seems to find a good rhythm, revealing character and plot in equal measure and finally making the characters not only interesting but sympathetic and complex. Sadly, this coherence is fleeting, and the conclusion feels like the desperate need for a transcendent (but completely inexplicable) denouement that will elevate the physical conflicts to some beautiful level of existentialism; instead, it simply makes very little sense—if the point of the movie was for the two men to fight one another, then why keep them apart? The juxtaposition of "good" and "evil" (as embodied, respectively, by the two warriors and their adversaries) is so exaggerated that we expect boos to accompany the score when the bad guys come on screen, and cheers when the heroes vanquish their enemies.
It's in this black-and-white, stop-start rhythm that the film fails, because it clearly has much to say and more than enough style and dexterity to say it; it's just too bad that Ping goes for an arbitrary payoff in the last moments instead of a conventional—and ultimately more satisfying—one.
