Is The Taoist Wizard Purely An Entertainment Film ?

The Taoist Wizard directed by Choi Dong Hun is a fantasy action movie. It seems like a classic blockbuster. I really enjoyed the film due to the twists and turns in the plot. When I compare this film to all the other films that we have watched in class I feel like this one is that hardest to analyze. This film is purely for entertainment. All the battle scenes where they are jumping so high and the use of animated characters like the goblins is to suture the viewers into the world of the movie. The sound used in the fighting scenes is non diegetic sound meaning outside of the story world to create a more believable space. The music is to create atmosphere and develops the idea of how viewers are transcending space as they watch the film.

The plot involves a lot of changes in space either between a difference of 500 years between1509 and 2009 or in terms of smaller space from a changing room to a beach or from the battle scene back into dream. After reading the Kim Kyung Hyun article I was thinking about how  the director shows the characters continuously transforming and transcending space, does he want us to question whether or not Woochi’s reality is an illusion? During the battle scene the space changes back to where his master lived in 1509 and he wakes up and the whole film up to this part has been a bad dream. The use of that narrative technique is used quite frequently in many Hollywood films that I have seen, this made my view of the film more concrete that it is mainly for entertainment and not to convey a secret political message. All in all I really enjoyed the film especially with the cute protagonist.