The Storm Riders proved to be an enormous domestic hit, making nearly three times as much as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did in Hong Kong. Starring the previously mentioned Ekin Cheng and another pop star turned actor Aaron Kwok (2000 AD, China Strike Force) in the duel lead roles, it also featured cult favourite Sonny Chiba as the villain, and the likes of Anthony Wong (Beast Cops) and Yu Wong Guang (had the lead role in Iron Monkey) in small roles. What made this film, and the others in a similar vein that were to come later, so controversial was the much greater use of computer graphics and other such visual gimmickry in the creation of action sequences. While in times past Hong Kong martial arts movies would be full of action created by mostly by their extremely talented stars such as Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, films like Iron Monkey and Once Upon a Time in China saw a far greater use of wires, used to give the films’ historical Chinese characters legendary powers beyond those of normal men. As had been the case in Hollywood as special effects had become all the more developed and advanced, CGI was the next obvious step. As you can imagine, this sacrifice of genuine martial artistry for flashy computer generated effects has had its fair share of criticism, but one cannot argue with the results - The Storm Riders made 42 million Hong Kong dollars upon its theatrical release, compared to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s 15. That’s not to say Lau’s film was better than Ang Lee’s masterpiece.

Set in a mythical feudal time, Lord Conquer (Sonny Chiba!) is a ruthless warlord, not only commander of a great and ever-expanding kingdom, he is also one of the world’s greatest martial artists, having spent many years perfecting his Trinity Strength – fists, palms, and kicks. Not only does he wish to crush all opposing rulers, he also wishes to defeat the world’s greatest martial artists and collect their legendary weapons. His next major martial arts duel is to be against the mysterious yet extremely powerful Sword Saint. Wishing to know about his future, he summons the prophet Mud Buddha to advise him on what his prosperous life has in store. Mud Buddha tells Conquer that he is in his ascendancy, and that his great power would only increase during the first half of his life. But he will also have to wait ten years for his duel with Sword Saint, and the second half of his life cannot yet be revealed to him and for this he must also wait ten years. Mud Buddha gives Conquer the birth charts of two children and urges him to seek them out and make them his students, they are named Wind and Cloud. He gives him an ancient Persian puzzle, which when completed will give Conquer the key to his future. Mud Buddha promises to return in ten years and leaves him with the cryptic words – “The fish with the golden scales will become a dragon when wind and cloud unite”.

In search of the Ten Greatest Weapons on Earth, Conquer faces Whispering Price who possesses the Blizzard Blade, however before Conquer can defeat his foe, Whispering Price is dragged into a cave by a great flaming beast and is never seen again, taking the blade with him and leaving his son orphaned. His son, curiously named Whispering Wind, is adopted by Conquer as a promise to his fallen father. Meanwhile Conquer’s men storm the fort of a group of sword makers, the head of which had made Man’s Best Sword - another of the Ten Greatest Weapons, and has a son called Striding Cloud. Cloud watches as his father is killed when the sword cannot be found, and is also taken to Conquer, where he and Whispering Wind are named as his heirs along with his own children – a boy named Frost and a girl named Charity. It must also be mentioned that despite Mud Buddha’s clues to wind and cloud uniting, and instructing to adopt two children named Wind and Cloud as his pupils, Conquer seems totally oblivious to the relationship between the cryptic message and the two children. Duh.

We travel to ten years later, and both Whispering Wind (Ekin Cheng) and Striding Cloud (Aaron Kwok) have grown into strong young men, who along with Frost taught powerful techniques by their sifu and ruler Conquer. Wind has grown to become a gentle and thoughtful man, while Cloud has grown to become arrogant and brooding, nearly always wearing a black cloak (must have seen Batman a bunch of times). They help Conquer take more land, crushing many other warlords and greatly spreading the influence of the Conqueror Clan. It also becomes very clear that both of them have feelings for Charity, who has grown into the rather lovely form of Kristy Yang. The two male characters and their relationships to Charity are handily illustrated, as first we see Wind take Charity into Conquer’s secret room, the Sword Graveyard. Wind flies around the room with Charity, and they play with fireflies while soppy music plays in the background its the most sickly-sweet scenes in the whole movie and makes Wind out to be the sort of lovely non-threatening guy that a gal could bring home to meet her parents. However Cloud is quite the opposite, he’s the quiet, brooding loner who is just a little on the dangerous side, just the sort of guy the girls end up liking. When Conquer sends Wind and Cloud out on special missions, the night before they leave Cloud comes to Charity’s room and, well, there’s only one sword involved and its not made of steel.

Cloud’s mission is a relatively simple one, he is to go to Unchallenged City, a neighbouring clan that wishes to join forces with Conqueror Clan. As a token, Conquer wishes Cloud to return with Unchallenged Sword, another of the Ten Greatest Weapons on Earth which is in the possession of their leader. Oh, and he also wants Cloud to bring back the leader’s head too. Wind’s mission is somewhat less unpleasant, to go with Frost to find a Shaolin monk (Roy Cheung) who has in his possession the ‘Fire Monkey’, which they need in order to locate Mud Buddha, as Conquer has grown tired of waiting for the answers to the questions about his future. Cloud’s mission is successful, the people of Unchallenged City are poisoned and their leader slaughtered at Cloud’s hand, on his birthday of all days. There is a small hitch however, as the leader’s son and a group of his men were not there – they had also gone in search of Fire Monkey, so that Mud Buddha might come bless his father on his birthday. They capture Fire Monkey despite Wind and Frost’s attempts to stop them, but lucky for them, they find Mud Buddha anyway, he happens to be a great shape shifter. Mud Buddha has with him his granddaughter who he asks Wind and Frost to find foster parents for, as poor Mud Buddha has been cursed for giving away so much of the future, cursed with horrible boils all over his body. Things take another twist however when a mysterious figure flies in from out of nowhere and snatches Mud Buddha away, even though it is obviously Conquer neither Frost nor Wind realise. Meanwhile the son of Unchallenged City’s leader return to their fort to find everybody dead, so he asks the monk to help them seek revenge.

Conquer has Mud Buddha in his clutches, and forces him to open the Persian puzzle box and reveal to him the key to his future: “The Dragon is powerful, but will be stranded when wind and cloud become a storm.” Conquer finally realises what the prophecies mean, and that his two best pupils must never become united against him. He also realises that Cloud has feelings for his daughter and so hatches a scheme to divide the two men, by decreeing that Wind, who has the purest heart, is to marry Charity. Charity seems to like both Wind and Cloud, so seems fairly happy to settle for Wind, but Cloud is understandably furious, though in a very quiet, brooding way. The day of the wedding comes, amongst the guests being the doctor Summit Yu and his daughter Muse, who were sent by their local villagers to appeal for better treatment from Conquer. Some more uninvited guests come in the form of the survivors of Unchallenged City who have come swearing revenge against Conquer, but arrive just in time to see the wedding start. However the wedding never takes place, as Cloud crashes the party, using his powers to quell the guards, and takes Charity who seems to have no problem going with him. Cloud confronts Conquer and Wind outside Conquer’s palace, Wind being forced into fighting Cloud to retain his honour. Conquer waits until a moment presents itself, and prepares a powerful energy blast to kill Cloud, until Charity sees it coming and takes the blast herself, dying in Cloud’s arms. Cloud takes Charity’s body and flees, leaving Wind and Conquer devastated from their loss. Though deeply upset by the death of his daughter, Cloud and Wind have been divided, and now Conquer can complete his plans of becoming the world’s most powerful martial artist by defeating Sword Saint and retrieving the last of the Ten Weapons – Blizzard Blade and Man’s Best Sword.

A massive commercial success in Hong Kong, it cannot be denied that what Andrew Lau has created here, with a lot of help from CGI specialists Centro, is definitely a spectacular, visually rich film. While films like Young and Dangerous had a modern urban setting and lacked much in the way of visual flair, The Storm Riders provides Lau with a backdrop where he seems to be a lot more comfortable, and provides a lot more freedom. Rather like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Storm Riders is chock full of beautiful scenery - mountains, waterfalls, rivers, great expanses of grassy plains, these provide a stunningly attractive background to the film’s proceedings. Lau’s sweeping cinematography really brings out how beautiful the settings are, and give the film a suitably epic feel. The high production values also enabled the production of those excellent sets, especially those of the castle of the Conqueror Clan, they’re solid and convincing, truly looking the part and fitting in well with their beautiful surroundings. A lot of credit has to go to the make-up and costume designers for the film too, near every character looks absolutely immaculate, our two male leads rarely have a hair out of place, and never look anything other than very cool and heroic in their period garb. Sonny Chiba looks like they brought him to life directly from the source comic book, looking so perfectly the part of the incredibly powerful warlord, his great screen presence highlighted by the great clothes he has to wear. As for the CGI, and the blending of it into the fight sequences through the use of wires, it is largely a success. While a couple of the pure CGI effects don’t quite gel and look a tad unconvincing, where the filmed action has been just been heavily augmented with computer technology the results are suitably impressive. Conquer’s battle with Sword Saint is one of the strangest and most innovative I’ve ever seen, and the final climactic battle does not disappoint, some of the visual effects used were excellent. They are still by no means perfect, but one has to remember that this is still a very new technique in Hong Kong, and this film still didn’t have a budget to match the likes of The Matrix. Ultimately this is a visually stunning film, so much time and imagination has gone into creating this world, made all the more impressive when you consider that this sort of film had never been produced in Hong Kong before.

For all the imagination that went into the visual side of the film, its sad to report that it is sadly lacking when it comes to the writing and acting departments. Sonny Chiba is the only character given any sort of depth, any opportunity to do anything other than look like a stoic cardboard cut-out. Our two male leads are possibly the two biggest perpetrators, Aaron Kwok really does nothing except look moody and/or angry for the entire film. His acting range is so limited it’s a wonder they didn’t just use computer animation to create Cloud, a virtual actor could probably emote better than Mr. Kwok could. Ekin Cheng does not do much better, spending most of the film looking noble, he at least manages to portray the smallest amount of character depth, but he’s still more one-dimensional that Ally McBeal’s figure. Kristy Yang’s Charity, too, spends her scenes looking pretty and being totally, utterly devoid of independent thought. She happily wanders through every scene without the least bit of genuine emotion, looking lovely, but she’s nothing more than a convenient plot device and Yang’s performance reflects this. All she does in this movie is stack pebbles and walk around with rags over her head, she's not exactly a good female role model. To be fair to these young ‘talents’, its not really their fault, it’s the script that is almost entirely devoid of emotion and development that is to blame. This is a film where the only character that gets any development, that creates any sympathy at all, is the lead villain. In the only scene that has any characterisation at all, Conquer bares his heart and soul to his daughter Charity on her wedding day, telling her how much he loved her mother, and how the one thing in the whole world he wanted most was for her to be happy and to be married to a good man. The tragedy of Charity’s death is best portrayed by Conquer, as he loses the one person in the world he truly cared about, and she died by his own hand. At the same time, our so-called ‘heroes’ really don’t create much sympathy at all.

As YTSL astutely points out in the review of this movie over at Hong Kong Cinema - They happily help their teacher in slaughtering thousands of people as the Conqueror Clan expands, never once questioning what happened to their parents, nor realising what an evil tyrant Conquer is. So basically, they’re fine with the mass murder, but when he kills the chick they both like, NOW he’s a big villain! Cloud is little more than a self-serving bastard for the entire film, and Wind is little more than a big wimp completely lacking in conviction until the last 25 minutes. It also becomes infuriating when the lead characters cannot work out the simplest of supposed plot twists, such as Conquer never realising that Mud Buddha’s cryptic references to “wind and cloud” related to his two students, surely proof that his enemies must have been complete and utter idiots to be so easily vanquished by such a buffoon. The writing caused the plot to become over-complicated, introducing characters and ideas they had seemingly no desire to develop any further, it almost felt like this was meant to be the first of a franchise or the pilot to a TV show – they’d get to the other characters eventually. Also infuriating is the waste of talent, the likes of Anthony Wong, Roy Cheung, and Yu Wong Guang, all of which are more talented than our main stars, are thrown away in minuscule roles. Its really no surprise that so many long-term fans of Hong Kong film came away from this feeling so very frustrated.

Many believed that The Storm Riders was an attempt by some of the bigwigs in Hong Kong movies to create a film that could compete with the latest Hollywood blockbusters. The money, time (this film took 2 years to complete) and effort that went into producing the visual aspects of the film has resulted in a very attractive film, from the various protagonists to the sets and the natural scenery, it really is very pretty. As mentioned, by and large the CGI is effective too, managing to avoid being used too frequently, and bringing a real sense of destructive power to the fight scenes, though some will criticise them for a lack of any real martial arts. However, must like the Hollywood blockbusters it wishes to emulate, The Storm Riders is sorely lacking in depth. The plot, though overly convoluted thanks to the uneven writing, is a very simply affair, almost entirely lacking in emotional development or believability. When the lead villain is given the most emotional depth, something is wrong – Cloud and Wind are like bad video game characters, you’re not really sure what’s supposed to be motivating them to do these things, they’re just doing them. There isn’t that much sympathy created because beyond looking young, hip, and very cool, they’re really not all that much different than their evil sifu. In the end, there’s just no soul there, no believability, no emotional connection with the characters, and so for all the visual style and flair that goes some way to saving this movie, it’s an entertaining but hollow experience.