EVERYTHING CULTURALLY WRONG WITH MULAN 2020 (And How They Could've Been Fixed)

have you ever seen a movie that pissed you off so badly you make a whole youtube channel just to roast it that's me with mulan 2020 mulan brought me here and now here are the things that must be said first of all if you didn't know the majority of the production staff on this movie are white a white director white costume designer and four white screenwriters and yes it shows it's filled with like european fantasy stuff like witches dark magic and duels to the death and interpreted traditional chinese concepts in the way that only showed a surface level understanding so the story starts off with mulan's dad hua zhou telling mulan's story to their ancestors i mean okay you can already feel that they fully intend on making this movie seem asian by throwing a bunch of words around like ancestors honor family and anyway mulan is introduced as a girl who already enjoys training to fight this is an immediate departure from the ballot disney claims to be trying to adapt because in the ballad mulan starts off sighing at a weaving loom she was a very typical woman of her time but it's her determination to save her father that drives her to transcend her abilities and become a great warrior in this movie with mulan starting off as brave and powerful it doesn't leave much room for character development and she doesn't end up getting any and at this point in the movie her dad is all if you had a daughter whose chi was this powerful could you tell her that only his son could real cheat this was the part that really gave me pause and it's like one minute into the movie what is chi it's life energy it flows through everyone not just boys it's the basis of acupuncture in traditional chinese medicine it flows through the human body and the network of meridians acupuncture is when you stick needles in those viridians to manipulate someone's chi flow yes chi is a common buzzword in wushya stories or what white people call martial art movies which are based in the taoist belief that you can gain supernatural abilities by using chi but you do it by cultivating that chi that's a word this movie could have used to make it feel more right but it didn't then the camera pans to where mulan lives a distinctly southern chinese tulo why is this a problem mulan is an iconic northern chinese tale she lived in an era called the northern and southern dynasties which meant china was split in two back then the emperor of the northern dynasty would not go to the southern dynasty to conscript troops this is an example of disney getting facts wrong solely for the pretty aesthetic because the tulo are pretty and they like they look very exotic i guess in the too low little mulan chases a chicken onto a roof and falls but does a bunch of sweet maneuvers and lands on her feet to the astonishment of everyone again she's established as having an impressive ability right in childhood her mom becomes worried that because of these abilities mulan won't find a husband because people will call her a witch that's just like not how women are demonized in chinese culture like more likely she'd be called an evil spirit especially a fox spirit huli or some kind of demon the death then comes outside and tells mulan that they have a statue of a phoenix in front of their ancestral shrine because it's the emissary of their ancestors personally i haven't heard of anyone whose family has like an emissary for their ancestors what ancestors do in chinese culture is send your dreams this is called tulmong and they ask you to do like just weird [ __ ] mulan's like oh no then it's super bad that i broke her during my chicken chasing and the dad was like nah phoenix phoenix's rise from the ashes this isn't a huge problem because eastern phoenix's and western phoenixes have gotten so muddled and confused with each other that even like native chinese people don't like they mix it up too but i have to point out that traditionally chinese phoenixes don't do the whole rise from ash's thing they're just there to look beautiful and graceful and to be a good omen to the empire when they're seen your dad goes all your chi is strong mulan but she is for warriors not daughters once again completely misunderstanding what she is she is not the force it's not this mystical oriental force it's basically another physiological thing like blood would you say blood is for warriors not daughters no you wouldn't your dad also tells mulan it's time to hide her gift away hmm so they gave mulana super power they made her asian elsa in my opinion that immediately takes away a huge part of what makes mulan such a great character because mulan is not a character who was born great she works for that and that's a very like eastern story thing the protagonists of eastern stories they work hard for their abilities then the title card appears and the camera goes to the silk road in northwest china as silk road trader comes across the witch played by famous chinese actress goli she can step on me now the witch is actually a character that gave me pause way back when the trailer dropped because china doesn't have witches which is such a charged word and evokes such a specific idea that it's confusing when you use it in a chinese context because the specific idea doesn't exist in chinese culture yet this movie went with the common western ideal of which a woman who can do magic and is ostracized by society because of it now there are women in the ancient china who can do magic like shamanism soothsayers but those women are respected and generally hold high positions in the court and there are women who are criminalized for using magic such as like a court lady using a voodoo doll against one of her rival concubines it happens all the time but their crime is trying to harm someone not doing magic in general there's no persecution that happens specifically because you are a woman and you're using magic honestly there's an easy fix to the witch's entire character don't make her human make her a bird spirit instead a big thing in chinese myth is the spirit of animals or even inanimate objects cultivating their way into taking human form that she would be persecuted for because like she's not human one fix and her character would have made so much more sense she even has the existing abilities of a spirit possession shape-shifting she's got it this is why disney ships has hired a chinese screenwriter because they could have just changed some words in their script and not look like other clowns anyway movie the possessed trader goes to what looks like a western chinese garrison city i'll give credit where credit is due they got the general look right most cities in ancient china were walled and you had to go through a guarded gate like that to get in and then the rorans arrive this is where they try to be more accurate to the original ballad than the cartoon in the cartoon they used huns inaccurate and racist rorans are indeed the correct group of nomadic people that mulan would have fought but fun fact mulan is most likely from the northern way dynasty which is established by another nomadic people the shienbai the ballad even refers to her emperor as the great khan anyway the soldiers at the gate shoot an arrow at the roran leader he catches it with his bare hand then shoots it back at the city which is a signal for the witch to reveal her true form now it's unclear if she possessed the silk road traitor or like took on his appearance very unclear but she takes down some soldiers from the inside and then the rest of the romans scurry straight up the wall now i've seen some complaints about this part it doesn't deserve its scaling walls is a common trope in wusha media at this point i've accepted that the movie is not historical fiction like originally promised it's historical fantasy which is fine i don't mind supernatural elements in a retelling happens all the time in great chinese literature half of great chinese literature is just fantasy fanfiction of historical events my problem is that many of the supernatural elements in this did not feel chinese anyway the romans take the city and then the witch takes possession of a soldier to sneak into the imperial city which is clearly modeled after changhan or xi'an as it's now called the ancient capital of china you can tell by the great wild goose pagoda look likes in the background that's a thousand euro building that you can still visit in xi'an this shot is accurate what's not accurate is what's happening in the city this shot this is the main stairs of the palace i even know exactly where it's shot the palace of the king of ching and hyundai china loves its period drama so much and they made a whole city that's like a replica of an ancient chinese city just to shoot dramas in in ancient china these fancy court ladies wouldn't just be hanging out with officials on these stairs this is a solemn place especially when there's like an imperial meeting going on right behind them in the great hall that building above the stairs in the meeting the chancellor reports that the romans have taken six northern garrisons in a coordinated attack and everyone was slaughtered except for that one soldier before the chancellor and the emperor finished their discussion the soldier cuts them off to say his report which felt iffy to me because a normal soldier would never do that they would never cut emperor off would have felt more natural for the emperor to ask him to speak the soldier which is actually the witch in disguise reports that the roran and their leader bori khan fights alongside a woman whose chi is beyond imagining again this is like saying her blood is beyond imagining what would feel more natural here is to talk about the way she uses her chi not her chi itself her abilities are beyond imagining there two words and it would have even made more sense to a non-chinese audience then the emperor is like there is no place for witches in this kingdom and also that they are not afraid of dark magic and will destroy this roran army and their witch it's so something straight out of a european fantasy but it leads to the emperor issuing that infamous decree that demands one man out of every family to join the army by the way the emperor is played by jet li did you recognize him i didn't i didn't feel like the whole movie gently what happened to you why does disney make you ugly or did you just get ugly oh my god so it cuts to the streets of the capitol where this soldier shifts into the witch then shifts into a bird so it is shape-shifting then i don't know not possession it's it's so unclear so she flies all the way to the roran camp which is clearly inspired by mongolian yurts she tells the for some reason half naked boricon about the army being assembled and he's like you have proven useful witch this pisses her off and she's like not witch warrior and declares that she could tear him to pieces before she blinks this line this line is important the line is important and yet the script forgets about it and leads to the most infuriating scene of the entire movie you'll see mori khan says that she wouldn't hurt him because what she really wants is to be accepted and belong somewhere where her powers wouldn't be vilified turns out she was exiled to the desert for being a witch all right i guess but his logic is that once they take over china then she can make sure she is accepted okay so why can't she use her incredible power to take the throne for herself and don't tell me a woman can't be emperor wuzatin did it she'd be laughing at you from chinese hell after this conversation it cuts to grown-up mulan yay played by chinese-american police brutality supporter leo yfay yay while she's riding a horse she spots two rabbits running beside her she goes home and tells her family about this theorizing that one rabbit was male and the other was a female but you can't really tell why they're running that fast this is a reference to the final lines of the ballad of moolah which talks about how male and female rabbits can be identified by their facial features but when they're running side by side you can't tell anymore so mulan forcefully gendering the rabbits anyway defeats the entire point of the line and makes for a very clumsy reference if they wanted to do it right they should have had her meet the rabbits while they're grazing on the ground and be like oh you're a boy and you're a girl and then they all run off and she realizes she can't tell anymore that's the point of the line mulan's mom cuts her very exciting story off to tell her that the matchmaker has found her an auspicious match honestly this is the only part of the script that feels chinese it's very your asian mom trying to introduce you to some son of her co-worker it's very bad it's got that energy mulan begrudgingly accepts and then it cuts to a very youtube diy montage sequence of her getting a makeover with an instrumental or bring honor to a saw playing now the makeup elements that get put on her are historically accurate i have some infographics of them on my instagram i'll link them below but it doesn't change that they interpreted these elements in like the ugliest possible way they're wasted too this makeup stand that wouldn't make someone look like a clown i know they did this for comedic effect but it doesn't sit right with me that they chose to exaggerate traditional chinese makeup to a super ugly degree for a cheap joke a joke that's not even funny there are like no moments in this movie that make you laugh and then the matchmaker does this the whole sequence that's clearly only in this movie for trailer purposes like oh elegant refined these are the qualities we see in mulan the change from the cartoon sequence is that here it's actually mulan's sister that ruins it because she gets freaked out by spider mulan does some spider-man 1 cafeteria sea maneuvers to catch the falling tea set but her hair unravels as she falls anyway and the tea set is shattered and for some reason she is blamed for this fiasco instead of her sister okay also in the background of this shot oh my god so red couplets are something put beside doors in chinese culture they celebrate new year's but they have specific rules and this couplet does not meet those rules the lines are even from literature written several centuries after this era it basically says may all lovers of the world become great couples in the end and may all couples in the world all be earnest lovers in chinese these lines do not make a good couplet so the huaw family is walking through the tulo and shame when suddenly the imperial messenger shows up and announces the conscription then comes the sequence of everyone knowing that dad is too old and frail to fight but the dad is too stubborn to give up so mulan sneaks off into the night with his armor and sword a sword that has a [ __ ] you not the fbi model on it i just don't believe that it's a coincidence when it's the same three things in the exact sequence loyal brave and true versus fidelity of bravery and integrity they're literally synonyms of each other also a chinese person wouldn't just have three random characters on their sword that is some white person tattoo nonsense it would be the sword owner's name or at least a full phrase that made sense like devotion to my country and by the way there is no emotional impact to this decision scene she just leaves and then her family discovers this in the morning and they're immediately like okay we have to keep quiet about this or she's dead and we're all dead that's it that's it oh and there's no haircut scene and if you're wondering why that is it's because the original in the cartoon was historically inaccurate men kept their hair as long as women back then because in confucian beliefs your body is a gift from your parents and you have no right to damage any part of it like people back then even kept all their nails in a box if they cut them and beers technically couldn't be shaved too so all those clean shave and pretty boys you see in c dramas not accurate mulan rides across some vast landscapes with apparently only a supply of apples which did not exist in china back in the northern way dynasty but it's my this is a minor complaint she ends up in a canyon where she sees a phoenix flying by people have complained about this phoenix not being the right color or something it's like hot pink whatever honestly this is like not even remotely an important issue that needs to be addressed i don't care about the phoenix whatever it's whatever for me i think it leads her to the training camp because she mentioned being lost before in the cab cricket is a human character now his mother says he was born under an auspicious moon i have never heard a chinese mother say that some commotion happens and it causes mulan to be knocked over by a hot guy who teases her and in her attempt to channel toxic masculinity she draws her sword on him he draws his sword too but then their fight is interrupted by donnie yen at night mulan finds that she now has to deal with sharing a tent with dozens of half-naked men but she gets around the bathing issue by well they call it showering in this for some reason which gets around that issue by volunteering for night guard duty then comes the training montage it comes with no iconic song and is therefore boring as hell to watch remember that scene in the cartoon where she figures out how to climb the pole using only the weights yeah everybody remembers that scene because it showed why she was cut out to be a great warrior even so she like may not have been as physically strong as the men here there's no meaningful struggle it doesn't show mulan bonding with the others in an effective way except well except there's a scene that's a ps4 adaptation of um the a girl worth fighting for scene and in this movie it's just straight up uncomfortable because it's it's just a bunch of guys blandly objectifying women then comes the sparring scene where mulan defeats her friend acquaintance-ish person honghui with her mystical superpowers she berates herself elsa's style for showing her chi which makes no sense because if she's disguising herself as a man then showing her chi would not be a problem then everyone comes in to congratulate her for being badass but also to tell her that she literally stinks because she hasn't taken a bath since she got here so she goes to the lake to take a bath but ho hoy rudely tries to join her um he's clearly taking the place of shang from the cartoon and has some like romantic-ish tension with her but i think it's implied that he realizes she's a woman but there's no real confirmation and then there's there's no real bond between them either there's there's no emotion in this movie oh my god then it cuts to a meeting between the 12 roran tribes whose members resent that they're relying on a witch which begs the question of why the hell is she relying on them to find her place then they like they don't even accept her you make plans to destroy another garrison then it cuts back to the training camp where donnie yin calls mulan for a private meeting and says he thinks she's hiding something but plot twist that something is her powerful chi she's like why are you hiding it and she's like damn i don't know when i'm in boy mode now i can do whatever i want so then there's another montage with a voiceover of donnie and explaining chi in a way that feels slightly more accurate like he missed that it flows in everyone but it still has some weird wording that could be easily fixed like he says only the most true will connect deeply to his chi first of all it would be better phrases can cultivate their chi and second so you have to be honest to yourself to cultivate your chi i've never heard that it's always hard work it's hard work that matters when you're cultivating chi during the montage another commander teaches them about how great warrior can turn disadvantage to advantage and how four ounces can move a thousand pounds which is a popular martial arts scene in china but it just sounds so weird translated into english because it's translated very literally and the original in chinese is like it sounds like more poetic than this god so because the rorans keep taking more garrisons the training class just gets deployed ahead of schedule they come across the remains of a battlefield and it's so disappointing because it completely lacks the emotional impact of the scene in the cartoon that cartoon transition from that silly like a girl with worth fighting for a scene to the harrowing massacred village that's one of like best cinematic transitions ever just because it was such a great moment that showcased how like there truly were just boys who had no idea about the horrors of war and then suddenly they're forced to confront it in this movie i felt nothing nothing upon seeing all those dead bodies this is on par with when i went to see the lion king live action in theaters and then i felt nothing see mufasa die this is very bad spoilers sorry then comes a clash between the army and the rorans it looks so pathetic like the most people they could get was like four random buses of people this cost 200 million dollars and yet i've seen c dramas with a fraction of that budget stretched across like 70 episodes and had better war scenes than this movie boricon retreats immediately after getting showered with arrows and then the commander orders the left flank to charge and the left flank is apparently i accounted 10 people they made 10 people go chase boricon the leader of this tribe that they're struggling to fight nine of these 10 people obviously get decimated and the 10th is mulan who can't die because she's the protagonist he decides to keep pursuing them anyway and ends up running into the enemy witch who's all you're lying to yourself and is poisoning your chi i i've said enough about you let's move on so mulan passes out for a bit while the main battle rages on and then she wakes up stares at the fbi model on her sword and she decides to shed her father's armor the thing that's protecting all of her vital organs from harm and she loosens her long hair so it's free to whip all in her face while she's trying to fight it makes absolutely no logical sense they could have just shown her taking off her binder on her under her armor she she didn't need to let go of her father's probably very precious and expensive armor there are better ways to do this reveal finally there was a good template to reference if only so she comes back to the battle in her very impractical getup starts doing backflips on her horse which freaks the rorans out i'd be freaked out too and they run from her because she's a witch their own witch turns into several swarms of birds to drive the imperial soldiers into huddling under their shields and then the romans destroy whole huddles using stone throwing machines some people have said that nomads shouldn't have machines like this i don't care i'm not a war nerd i'm not getting into this i got more [ __ ] just i got more [ __ ] to dissect but moulin gets the genius plan of triggering an avalanche to bury the rorans she picks up several helmets and makes it seem like some imperial soldiers have crept up behind the rorans so they send a flaming boulder at the snowy ridge somehow she outruns this avalanche all the rora and what appears to be a considerable amount of her own comrades don't how fast is her horse after the battle ends mulan walks up to her comrades like sorry i'm a girl feel free to execute me if you want for this horrible betrayal man that's that's so empowering she gets expelled according to army laws instead while she goes off to cry on some barren mountains about this the enemy witch appears before her and tries to convince her to join her because she relates to mulan's struggle the witch like straight up tells her how bori khan retreating was a fake out and his forces are actually heading to the capitol mulan's like i know my place actual line it is my duty to fight for the kingdom and protect the emperor man so empowering there are rumors that the chinese government tampered with this script and you know what i can see i can see it mulan immediately heads back to the military base and tells the army about boricon's plans donnie hen is like no i won't listen to someone whose very existence is a lie then who way the love interest kind of dude is like you would believe hua jin why would you not believe hua mulan and then everyone else joins in like i believe hua mulan i believe hua mulan i believe hua mulan and so danian who was ready to execute her like 10 seconds ago is all all right you will lead us to the imperial city meanwhile in the imperial city a squad of about like a dozen roran is very conspicuous ninja clothes sneak very conspicuously across the rooftops the witch takes the body out of the chancellor and claims to the emperor that bori khan wants to duel him at the construction site a new palace the emperor accepts first of all a duel between heads of state not a thing in china not a thing secondly the writers have clearly never seen a sea drama because if they have they know that a chinese emperor can't even breathe differently without a whole gaggle of confucian scholars being like no your majesty stink thrives don't do this so then the witch disguised as the chancellor gives fake orders to assemble literally every guard in the city to a single courtyard somehow nobody dares to seriously question this order or refuse it they basically just wave it away as oh you're gonna question the emperor no it's so much that when mulan and her battalion arrives they walled straight into the capitol and they don't see a single person in view when they get to the courtyard it turns out that every guard in the city comes down to like 150-ish people do the writers have any idea how big cities in ancient china were especially the capital they have no excuse because they did film in china so they're like so many extras available if they wanted to fill that city and give it a more realistic sense of scale of course the minute mulan's battalion arrives the romans closed off the courtyard and attacked the soldiers that assembled for some reason meanwhile the dumbass emperor actually rise to the new palace construction site like the dumb ass he is and within half a second archers take out the few personal guards he took with them and he starts doing bed sheet kung fu to fight back when bore gun shows himself the emperor is all how did you convince my chancellor to betray me never mind that like he was the one who willingly agreed to this dumb ass duel request so like the good disney villain that he is bori khan captures the emperor using an overly complicated maneuver involving arrows and rope that gather into a net meanwhile mulan's comrades slow down the row round in the city so she can rush to find the emperor in the throne room though she finds the witch instead who looks so right sitting on that throne you know i would have forgiven like all of this movie since if they had dared to make the witch like take the throne as a symbol as an ultimate symbol of toppling the patriarchy she has the power to kill both the emperor and boricon before they even blink as she says but no we can't have nice things mulan tells the witch to join her on the noble path because apparently everything will magically turn out okay if you just out yourself to your oppressors the witch is like no it's too late for me and turns into a bird form to fly out mulan chases are across the capitals rooftops here they didn't even bother showing a few shots of civilians looking up at her so it just feels like the capital is empty and there are like 12 people in it back at the construction site boricon lights up a bunch of furnaces with the intention of burning the emperor alive instead of just killing him for some reason they got it yeah he has then he has the delay until mulan makes it there oh my god he's such he's such a devoted villain in the middle of his villain speech the witch shows up and is all the attack is meeting a fierce resistance from a woman leads the army a woman from a small village mulan arrives then and bori khan shoots an arrow at her now in the single most baffling moment of the movie instead of obliterating bori khan before he can blink like she said she could the witch dives down and takes the arrow in mulan's place and then she dies all that power and she just dies of self-sacrifice this is not empowering a woman sacrificing herself is is like the least empowering thing you can make a female character do i find it like outright offensive and apparently apparently bori khan only has this one arrow because mulan heads into the construction site no problem she had boric kind of a fight in the rafters that i don't care about because you know what i am still mad at the witch dying like that at one point mulan loses her fbi sword to the furnaces and the emperor tells her to rise up like a phoenix to fight for the kingdom and its people the actual phoenix appears behind mulan and she knocks boric on to the bottom of the construction site and frees the emperor bori khan's not dead he shoots an arrow at them which the emperor catches with his bare hand and then boycott makes the most memeable face in the entire movie oh my god it's so good and then the emperor throws the arrow in the air and mulan kicks it kicks it into bori khan killing him i don't understand this movie's obsession with mulan kicking things especially arrows why then it cuts to the battle in the city all of mulan's comrades have conveniently survived so all the villains die and all the heroes survive great explained and then it cuts to the imperial city celebrating the victory mulan is for some reason presented in the court in the presence of both the officials and the court ladies in the open which would never happen the cartoon mulan's voice actress um women she makes a cameo and i feel so bad because they put her in such an ugly cheap looking dress the emperor offers mulan a position in his imperial guard but mulan chooses to go home instead which is how the ballot ended but that doesn't mean i have to like it as mulan leaves the imperial city the pseudo love interest dude has a moment with her but they don't kiss or anything which thank god she goes home it's supposed to be emotional but it's not emotional because the movie did a terrible job of building up her bond with her family her battalion shows up hot on her heels which how does she not see them behind her like five seconds behind her and they present her with a new fbi sword yay oh but this one instead of the three fbi virtues it has a fourth virtue xiaom philiopity or devotion to family as this movie translates it great thankfully the movie ends on the battalion asking her to reconsider the emperor's offer and she smiles in a suggestion that like she's gonna take it this time but good she didn't she doesn't have to give up her prestigious opportunities for her family god you can have both so i went into this movie expecting it to be bad just because like i was on twitter and then people were like oh my god mulan so like i was expecting it to not be good but still it was like so much worse not just because like even if you push aside all of the weird inaccurate chinese cultural details it's just a terrible movie with no eternal logic and no emotional moments whatsoever no emotional moments no funny moments and like nothing is earned no character arc just so like why is it a problem for white people to write a story that's like so deeply rooted in an underrepresented culture well they put their weird orientalist interpretations on things and the story just doesn't end up feeling familiar to people of that actual culture which i find yeah this movie was disrespectful and you want peak hollywood is the costume designer apparently disney paid for her to travel around europe into museums with the eluded chinese artifacts and then also like she traveled around china for several weeks to soak up the culture and they could have just hired someone who grew up in that culture who doesn't need to be like sent on to scent on trips it's like they're trying to make things more difficult for themselves so why does it matter that this movie isn't some like documentary of um ancient china isn't it just a kid's movie well it is a kids movie that fails to do the job it promised to do which is to make a faithful adaptation of the ballad of mulan it's very clear that they just like threw a western fantasy story onto an aesthetically chinese world to go for that like sweet sweet chinese box office because honestly like money is the only thing disney cares about it's it's very clear so they it's like they want the money of chinese people but they don't want to respect chinese people this movie doesn't tell a story that feels culturally chinese it doesn't bridge any gaps of understanding between cultures it doesn't really make you interested in chinese culture because like so many elements they presented were either oppressive or ugly you know some might argue that the cast was all asians so it's fine but the cast usually actors usually don't have any input on the script actors are also contractually obligated to say nice things about the movie i mean it's great what this movie has done for asian representation on the screen but that doesn't mean that this movie should be immune from critique it was a giant missed opportunity to do better and disney should do better if it wants the money of asian people do better disney anyway if you made it to the end of all of that i i bet you're bored just sitting at home with quarantine uh you know who am i to critique disney well i am an actual chinese person who spent half my life in china and i know quite a bit about chinese history and i'm a sci-fi and fantasy author my debut novel iron widow comes out fall 2021 from penguin random house and it's a pacific rim meets the handmaid's tale retelling of china's only female emperor woodside add it on goodreads if you're interested i'll drop a link below bye

Channel: Xiran Jay Zhao

Views: 2,450,450

Rating: 4.9303274 out of 5

Keywords: mulan, xiran jay zhao, mulan review

Id: N3QKq24e0HM

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AHealthyDoseofFran]

There was something that was off about this movie from the first five minutes, but as I'm not knowledgeable on Chinese History or Culture, so couldn't truly pinpoint it (outside of the clear western feel that came from it in general - especially the Witch part). Hearing this more in detail and wow, I've learnt a lot from this and, I was disappointed with the movie before, but now I'm just stunned that they thought this was a good idea to begin with