天涯明月刀

Intending to watch **The Magic Blade** (1976) on _Amazon Prime_ tonight, I inattentively turned on the identically-named and similarly-genred **The Magic Blade** (2017). A horrific mistake that I won’t soon forget. **The Magic Blade** (2017) is the first of two compilation films that recut the 40-episode **The Magic Blade 天涯明月刀** (2012) television drama based on Gu Long’s _Xiaoli Feidao_ wuxia romance novel series, specifically the _Biancheng Langzi_ trilogy ending _Tianya Mingyue Dao_ (1974). Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t familiar with the two prerequisite reading assignments or really anything related to the story so my only frame of reference is the film itself. The opening to **The Magic Blade** (2017) is so incoherent that I thought it was a poorly cut trailer. That is until it kept going and started to establish characters. After 15 minutes of soap opera-esqe reaction shots and feeling like I should know what is going on, I gave into to my curiosity and did some cybersleuthing, but, of course, at that point it was too late to turn back. The editing in film is abhorrent in virtually every way. A lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s trying to cram 13 hours of story into 108 minutes, but even the fight scenes are rough early on. The fight scenes surprisingly improve as it goes along, but that’s a hollow victory when scenes constantly have abrupt cuts that pivot to other scenes with no connection to what you were just seeing. There’s literally a fight scene were the villain changes from being a white-haired ghost to a masked assassin in the middle of the action for no reason. If I had to describe **The Magic Blade** (2017) in a single statement, it would definitely be “And then... and then... and then...”. There’s never closure of any kind; things just keep happening. If that’s not what you consider to be a good time, then don’t recklessly click play like me.