In ‘Blades of the Guardians,’ China’s Wild West Is Touched by a Mandate of Heaven

The big budget film version of Blades of the Guardians will beat the formal English book release of the manhua (Chinese manga) on which it is based  by a few weeks. Since Biao Ren started serialization in 2015, it has quickly became a huge hit in China and beyond, with its blend of Wild West aesthetic and intense martial arts action in a mostly plausible historical setting based on the 6th century Sui dynasty.

The premiere coinciding with Chinese New Year means it will be a big few weeks for Chinamaxxing — the social media trend of young people revisiting and loving the vibes from China. Blades of the Guardians is a noteworthy harbinger of the year to come, a notable addition to a broader culture what people are already admiring for a lot of reasons. Blades of the Guardian succeeds in transcending its comic roots by jumping into crazy stunts right from the get-go. Wu Jing, a huge action star from such other genre epics like Wolf Warrior, The Wandering Earth, and The Battle at Lake Changjin, plays Dao Ma, a former elite guard who now collects bounties in Western China with a cute little kid in tow. This gives the story a bit of a Mandalorian vibe, although they both take it from samurai movies and Lone Wolf and Cub, the classic manga series which set the stage for both of them some fifty years ago.

In Blades, the martial arts are choreographed more in the comedic Jackie Chan kung fu style than anything as grim as Wu’s previous work. The opening bar brawl sets the tone for everything that follows, with compelling fight choreography punctuated by humor. Hooks, swords, bows, and plenty of other weapons abound in epic destructive battles that slowly get more serious as the story gets on but are never any less intense. Veteran director Yuen Woo-ping comes out of retirement, and bring us a lifetime of tricks: everything from oil-laced fire whips to sandstorm horse archery.

Blades of the Guardian ★★★★(4/5 stars)
Directed by: Yuen Woo-ping
Written by:  Chao-Bin Su, Larry Yang
Starring: Wu Jing, Nicholas Tse, Yu Shi, Chen Lijun, Sun Yizhou
Running time: 126 minutes

As sheer cinematic spectacle, Blades of the Guardians is worth your money, but what’s of particular interest here is how cheap this movie was to make relative to its production values, coming in at about $100 million. Big for China, not so much for Hollywood. But what’s really surprising is that it only reached these heights after a nepotism scandal with the lead actress Nashi meant they had to set up major reshoots. Up to that point, the budget was $80 million.

Quick Digression
(because replacing a lead actress after shooting is bizarre and expensive)

• Nashi was kicked off the project for reasons that seem weird from the West. Nashi herself, and her actress mother, are ethnic Mongolians. Both made progress in tbeir entertainment career by double dipping into mutually exclusive state sanctioned benefits for minorities. Her mother used her status to get Nashi into a prestigious school in Beijing then claimed that she went to school in Inner Mongolia to get different benefits intended for people at a schooling disadvantage. Given her age at the time, it seems hardly fair to blame this on Nashi herself. Either way, while this kind of corruption isn’t uncommon in China, celebrities and public officials are held to a higher standard in regard to any unfair advantage.

This minor grift is more relevant to Blades of the Guardians than you might think. Without getting too deep into a history lesson, the Sui dynasty immediately preceded the Tang dynasty, which set the foundation for China as a coherent functional state. Dao Ma may have a specific backstory for why he turned his back on the ruling powers of China, but the opening crawl makes it clear that the lawless Wild West of this setting isn’t just an aesthetic. People come out there fleeing a cruel, oppressive, manipulative state, and Dao Ma’s task is to bring a revolution to Chang’an in the hopes of putting an end to this world’s madness.

Although the sequel is set up to show how the completion of Dao Ma’s task will help the revolution, Blades of the Guardians is still a mostly self-contained story. We find out why Dao Ma stopped being an elite officer, and why he carries the kid around with him everywhere. There’s a massive climactic battle and character arcs for everybody. Dao Ma’s mission is impeded by a political dispute related to the steppe tribes while bigger, broader villains abound in the shadows, with their own big fancy calligraphic subtitles, working their own manipulations for bigger stakes.

Blades of the Guardians is, fundamentally, a story about revolution, and not trusting anyone who would abuse state and social power for their own gain. All of which is an important corollary to the larger Chinamaxxing trend. It’s not just that Chinese culture looks cool, and seems to radiate inner peace. There’s a fundamental confidence and optimism that people in a position of power are accountable, and that if they weren’t, it will only be a matter of time before the mandate of heaven causes them to crash down. For a franchise like this to gain such popularity may initially seem counterintuitive, given China’s general reputation as an authoritarian state under President Xi.

But then, that’s what Chinamaxxing is all about. Whatever labels we apply to any state in this day and age, Chinese people have broad confidence in their government. Americans most certainly do not. All of this underscores the greater cultural contradictions of the world we live in. As AI hype in the United States continues to struggle against its own increasingly toxic influence, Chinese media focuses on technology that’s actually fun and cool, like these kung fu robots. If that comparison seems too superficial, it might also be worth checking out this general comparison of American versus Chinese attitudes in regard to artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In short, what we can see of Chinese society treats technology as a means to incremental improvement rather than as an existential rupture. Blades of the Guardians applies that practice to film. It’s a broadly optimistic vision that as bad as the world might have been in the past, it will get better. Progress does not need to come at the cost of humanity.

But, more than anything else, Blades of the Guardians is a fusion of everything that the Chinese film industry has learned since it started taking command of its own box office. Namely, that the people do not want slop, and they do want to be taken seriously. Whether it’s making an example of public corruption, honoring artistic and cultural legacies, sticking to a budget, or just staging really cool horse stunts, Blades of the Guardians is a master class in taking things that could easily go horribly wrong and making them go mostly right.