First off, I am a huge fan of ROTK, I've read the complete unabridged novel. I was very excited for this movie, I've always thought ROTK needed a big screen adaptation. Comparing the novel with the movie though, the movie lacked the excitement, tension, irony, and romance that the novel had.
After the first fight scene which contained one of the most memorable scenes from the novel and the movie, the fight scenes and their choreography got way too repetitive, which, coupled with the 30 minute long battle scenes, I had myself thinking, ah, this isn't as good as I thought, when will they be done with all this repetitive glaive (chinese spear) stabbing crap?
When the fight scenes were finally done, the political intrigue wasn't as enticing as I had hoped either. I was really hoping for Zhuge Liang to be built up as the superhuman genius from the novel, I was really looking forward to the movie walking the viewer through his brilliant thinking and tactics like the novel did. The novel did such a wonderful job of showing how clever Zhuge Liang was. He was always one step ahead of his enemies, and his friends, he always knew what they were thinking in the novel, and when you thought he lost his mind and made the worst move possible, later on you'd realize, he really made an ingenious move and took everything into account with his battle strategies and tactics. The movie didn't show as much of his brilliant planning as I had hoped. To build up tension and excitement for the fight scenes and to make them truly exciting and to make the viewer feel the flow of a battle, I think showing Zhuge Liang's ingenious planning is absolutely necessary, the movie lacked this.
What they did show was a bunch of love scenes with Zhou Yu and his wife and Cao Cao and his mistress. I mean c'mon, a love scene gets like one paragraph in the novel, and Zhuge Liang's meticulous planning gets like 50 chapters, but in the movie we get more screen time of characters feeling each other up than seeing Zhuge Liang larger than life exploits.
You also get a lot of screen time for Sun Shang Xiang, they've made her a critical part of the movie and she actually participates in the battles, I thought this seemed a little silly and it took away from the urgency of the battles, at least when compared to the novel. I thought they could have done such a better job with the battle scenes, actually all of the scenes.
I guess we'll have to wait for another adaptation for ROTK to get the treatment it deserves.
After the first fight scene which contained one of the most memorable scenes from the novel and the movie, the fight scenes and their choreography got way too repetitive, which, coupled with the 30 minute long battle scenes, I had myself thinking, ah, this isn't as good as I thought, when will they be done with all this repetitive glaive (chinese spear) stabbing crap?
When the fight scenes were finally done, the political intrigue wasn't as enticing as I had hoped either. I was really hoping for Zhuge Liang to be built up as the superhuman genius from the novel, I was really looking forward to the movie walking the viewer through his brilliant thinking and tactics like the novel did. The novel did such a wonderful job of showing how clever Zhuge Liang was. He was always one step ahead of his enemies, and his friends, he always knew what they were thinking in the novel, and when you thought he lost his mind and made the worst move possible, later on you'd realize, he really made an ingenious move and took everything into account with his battle strategies and tactics. The movie didn't show as much of his brilliant planning as I had hoped. To build up tension and excitement for the fight scenes and to make them truly exciting and to make the viewer feel the flow of a battle, I think showing Zhuge Liang's ingenious planning is absolutely necessary, the movie lacked this.
What they did show was a bunch of love scenes with Zhou Yu and his wife and Cao Cao and his mistress. I mean c'mon, a love scene gets like one paragraph in the novel, and Zhuge Liang's meticulous planning gets like 50 chapters, but in the movie we get more screen time of characters feeling each other up than seeing Zhuge Liang larger than life exploits.
You also get a lot of screen time for Sun Shang Xiang, they've made her a critical part of the movie and she actually participates in the battles, I thought this seemed a little silly and it took away from the urgency of the battles, at least when compared to the novel. I thought they could have done such a better job with the battle scenes, actually all of the scenes.
I guess we'll have to wait for another adaptation for ROTK to get the treatment it deserves.