Review: White Snake’s Visual Splendor Is Undone by Perfunctory Storytelling

The film feels more like a smattering of action scenes strung together by the barest thread of plot.

White Snake
Photo: GKIDS

As an origin story for the Chinese legend of more or less the same name, Light Chaser Animation’s White Snake is awash in fantastical mythology. It has shape-shifting demon snake people, a power-sucking jade hairpin, titanic monsters, and a sinister general who saps the abilities of snakes across China to augment his dark brand of kung-fu. The film’s CGI artistry can be striking, with people routinely dwarfed by colorful country landscapes of massive cliffs and mountains, but beneath that appealing exterior, White Snake feels more like a smattering of action scenes strung together by the barest thread of plot.

Consistent with its roots in legend, the story is heavily archetypal: Blanca (Zhang Zhe), a white snake demon, and Xu Xuan (Yang Tianxiang), a human snake hunter, form a tenuous alliance, traveling across the countryside in search of the key to unlocking Blanca’s past. She lost her memories in the aftermath of a battle, which opens her up to Xu Xuan’s charms; she does not, after all, remember that humans and demons are enemies, or even that she herself is a demon.

The character models have a bland, Disney-esque smoothness to them, though they lack detail in the close-ups and medium shots that dominate the film’s early stretches. Much of the story feels similarly perfunctory, as the leads fall in love less because of any discernible chemistry or romance than because that’s simply what happens when two attractive, available characters share so much screen time in a film such as this. There’s even a comic-relief animal sidekick in Xuan’s pet dog. What’s appealing here is instead everything around such conventions, a vibrant world of Chinese legend filled with things like a three-headed bird, a spinning machine adorned with countless skulls, and especially a surreal demon weapon workshop filled with floating trains of boxes and run by a woman with a fox face on the back of her head.

Advertisement

The lightning-paced action scenes are White Snake’s main attraction, each one intricately choreographed around characters’ bombastic magical powers. But as such scenes increase in number and complexity over the course of the film, they totally overwhelm the story, dragging the climax to an absurdly protracted mess of betrayals, revivals, and overused slow-motion. Any impressiveness constructed by the film eventually wears thin, until all of White Snake’s visual splendor feels more numbing than anything else.

Score: 
 Cast: Zhang Zhe, Yang Tianxiang, Zhang He, Tang Xiaoxi, Zhang Yaohan, Zheng Xiaopu, Zhang Boheng, Zhang Lei, Liu Wei  Director: Amp Wong, Zhao Ji  Screenwriter: Da Mao  Distributor: GKIDS  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.