BA_Harrison As a little girl, Qingcheng (Xiaotong Guan) meets Goddess Manshen (Hong Chen), who makes her an offer: beauty and riches in exchange for a future in which romance will be fleeting. She accepts and grows up to be a beautiful princess (Cecilia Cheung).When fleet-footed slave Kunlun (Jang Dong-kun) poses as his injured master General Guangming (Hiroyuki Sanada) on a mission to protect their king from invader Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse), he saves the life of the princess, who immediately falls in love with her rescuer. Unfortunately for Kunlun, who was wearing his master's armour and mask, she believes that General Guangming is her saviour. The scene is now set for a tragic love triangle, with the evil Wuhuan making matters even more complicated.The Promise is a lavish, big-budget, romantic fantasy from director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine); it's heavy on the sumptuous visuals, rife with heroism and tragedy, blessed with stunning cinematography and features a shed-load of fancy wire-work and special effects. Although the storytelling is very muddled at first, it all makes sense by the end, and ultimately proves rather enchanting. Unfortunately, the film is hampered by some terrible CGI that does serve to weaken the overall effect, with an early scene in which Kunlun flees a stampede of bulls being one of the worst rendered computer generated moments in a big budget movie that I can remember.

muse7-3 I don't really like martial arts films unless there is plenty of flying through the air and way out special effects so this film did not disappoint at all in that direction. The imagery was beautiful and the story was interesting but I felt that something was missing from the film. In parts the editing was poor and it was hard to follow. Also the characters were rather "wooden" and didn't evoke much sympathy. I love "Hero" which had all the things that this lacked-but my favourite of all time is "Bichunmoo" which was wonderful and incredibly emotional throughout.Despite all that I did enjoy the film and may indeed watch it again! I feel that with more viewings it may grow on me, It certainly ticks all the right boxes with regard to production and story line. It may never become a classic but it is worth watching.

J_Charles Lots of better offerings from China. Don't let this one's cover and attempt at a storyline fool you into thinking this will be another "Hero" or another "Crouching Tiger".The plot is wafer thin. Not a whole lot to it. The girl who starts off as the main story character disappears for a while, comes back, but is never really the main driver of the plot. It seems like nothing really is.The CGI is pretty horrible. The running of the bulls scene would have looked better if Disney drew it for them rather than whatever computer program they tried to do it with. Think about it. Compare the Lion King rampaging animals scene with this one. No contest, the cartoon one was much more realistic.Acting, well, lets not go there. Cecilia Cheung shows a little skin and that made it watchable for a little while.4/10 - and that's being generous

thetrystero Wow, I'm so glad I did not check out the IMDb rating before watching this movie, or I would have totally missed out. I only decided to watch this because I was on a Cecilia Cheung streak (she was super-hot in "Honesty", my first CC movie), and this movie happened to (conveniently) be on crunchyroll. Awesome story, super visuals. Full of surprises at every turn. but be warned that this is NOT A KUNG-FU MOVIE. There are some pretty neat fight scenes in here (e.g. the one between WuHan and Snow Wolf in the Crimson Armor Chamber) but if you're expecting more traditional, close contact fight scenes you'll be disappointed. It's more of a fantasy fairy-tale kind of story. Watch it on HD Plasma, and completely lose yourself in it.