MovieChat Forums > The Last Emperor (1988) Discussion > really really bad movie

really really bad movie

posted 9 years ago by enid-c
4 replies | jump to latest

bad acting, many of the actors are not even chinese, and many of them are not even professional actors. You can tell that they were selected only because they are asian looking and the director could not tell the difference. To me this is very unrespectful as it is a story about China. It's like the old times in Hollywood when chinese characters are played by white people with weird makeup
bad story line, no depth to the story, chronological setting makes it extremely boring. The director didn't have any profound understanding of the modern Chinese history. None of the characters is convincible. The emotions are superficial and shallow, no roots.
I've watched it several times throughout the years only to recall the beautiful architecture I once remember, but then the last time I spent two nights try to finish watching it and didn't manage to.

The only credit goes to it is that this is the last movie in history ever shot in the real forbidden city.

[–] tomkaren1994 9 years ago

First, "unrespectful" is not a word. Second, your use of "convincible" is backward from what you are apparently trying to say.

The movie was brilliant... but, you are probably not convincible regarding that opinion.

[–] Lady_Elaine_Fairchild 9 years ago

Weird since the Chinese government participated in the making of this movie I found it beautiful and it made me go to Amazon to get books to read further.

I too do not know the difference in faces- as most people of the world. I remember how they put up the test of Asian faces and even Asians could not score better than 60%

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[–] chopper-9 9 years ago

I have only seen this movie once in around 1989 so my memory is a little hazy. I was underwhelmed at the time. I thought it was beautiful to look at but an empty experience beyond that. I don't know if it was necessarily disrespectful towards the Chinese people but I do agree that it lacked any depth, It's supposed to be an epic story that is character led and on that score I feel that it failed. Compare it to Lawrence of Arabia. I feel that this is what is was aiming for but came nowhere near achieving.

"Never eat yellow snow" 

[–] Fattycakes 8 years ago

Hollywood could not support more than 1 or 2 asian actors back then. Even actors like Dennis Dun have a rather sparse filmography. Quite a few asian actors who scored a good role or 2 would later find little to no work to sustain them and some quit so the shortage of actors is understandable. Given that i think it was actually decent that alot of the actors were the right ethnicity eg. most of the big japanese parts were played by japanese. The one that stuck out was the head ennuch Chang who was actually Japanese.

Having han chinese play manchurians is not really accurate anyway.

It covered the main events and did seem to indulge in a fair bit of exotic stuff just to marvel western audiences and wasn't amazing but i found it a fair watch.