Desmond De Life

This is a story focusing on Zhao ZiLong (Andy Lau), the Hero from the Shu Kingdom. If you know the history of Three Kingdoms or have some basic knowledge of the Three Kingdoms China history, you should know that Zhao ZiLong (赵子龙) is also known as Zhao Yun (赵云). But in this movie, he is called by the name of Zhao ZiLong.

Three Kingdoms:Resurrection of The Dragon by Daniel Lee

This is not a true history as the story is based on the novel of the same name by Daniel Lee himself. First of all, I would like to comment about the English translation of the movie title. The phrase “Resurrection of the Dragon” seems misleading, especially for non-Chinese or those without much Chinese history background. Why I said it’s misleading, because this movie has nothing to do with resurrecting a dragon. The 4 Chinese characters Jian Long Xie Jia (见龙卸甲) literally means see Long (dragon, here means ZiLong) removing his armor. If you know the Three Kingdoms history, you should know that Shu is the weakest empire among the three kingdoms. And this movie is a story of Zhao ZiLong, together with the downfall of Shu.

Zhao ZiLong (Andy Lau), Guan Xing (Vanness Wu) and Zhang Bao

The storyline is quite straight forward and it’s like watching a fast forward story of the Three Kingdoms. Like I said before, this is not a true Three Kingdoms history, so it’s a story base on the historical characters with some outstanding historical event such as Zhao ZiLong saving Liu Bei’s son from thousands of enemies all alone. I even read comments from some hardcore fans of Three Kingdoms history, critizing about this movie. Most were negative comments.

They complained that this is a very bad movie as it twisted the actual history and added imaginary characters like Luo PingAn (starring Sammo Hung) and Cao Ying (starring Maggie Q). With this fictional chracter, you can already imagine how twisted is the history. But this is not the point as this movie is best on the novel, so let’s have an open mind when watching this movie.

Cao Ying - a fictional character, played by Maggie Q

No doubt that Andy Lau is a pro actor. He is good in playing Zhao ZiLong’s role. He looks MAN and wow….very herotic. The costumes are quite nice but some argued that how come the armors look more like Japanese style armor. (You know China people always like to make critism especially against the Japanese stuff) Heck care of that, the weapons design is very unique and splendid. Take extra notice of their weapons when you watch this movie.