Henchwomen Fight

In 2016 movie Time Raiders. Actresses Mallika Sherawat and Peng Lin play as villains Snake Empress, Pingtan Musician. My expectations for this movie is it will be a modern Hollywood movie, which means if it's half decent, that would exceed my expectations..

First we start with a villain similar to Bulletproof Monk's male villain..

I really hope the movie isn't as bad as I think it is..

The fighting is good at least.

Wu Xie is telling us about his childhood, there's nothing that justify him doing that, it's not like he faced something that triggered a memory, we just have to know about his childhood for some reason, it would make more sense if the movie started with that taking us through different stages of his life, instead of taking us to the present and then give us unjustified flashbacks!!

Ok, the iron mask looks cool..

Around 28 minutes we basically get the original story of Anck Su Namun from The Mummy!!

 This movie is actually getting better than I expected it to be..

I don't know how to feel towards the way they speak English, like there's a different between speaking English and acting English, acting speaking English is hard even for native speakers, so you can see that the actors speaking English, a very good and clear English, but the acting part feels lacking, on the other hand, if it was dubbed, well, good job because I didn't notice it..

I forgot, Ning and her men ambushed the heroes around 47 minutes and started a shootout..

At first when I started checking the movie, especially the scenes of Snake Empress, I thought it would be one of these movies that blind me with CGI, and I really don't like these movies, but after I started watching the movie, the CGI is used moderately, which is kind of cool..

 Here's something I find little weird with Zhang Qiling character, when you have characters like Rick O'Connell in The Mummy, or Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, and they act indifferent towards the artifacts in the country they are in, they are often foreign explorers, they share no connection at all with the place they are disrespecting, this is different from Zhang Qiling, Zhang was introduced as a native and protector of the place, the heritage that foreigners want to take by force, yet, he acted indifferent when the good team used explosives to enter the place, he acted indifferent when his team started shooting, his team is the one that used guns in the place not "the villains", he didn't even scream "Don't!!", as if the place is sacred for him, not only that, he even took part in destroying the place to get "the villains", this is so different from The Sanctuary for example where the heroes really wanted to retrieve priceless national treasure, in the movie Zhang is really trying to be an American explorer that he kind of forgot that this place belong to him and his people, and seeing how the movie showed us how reached a high level of enlightenment to be such excellent fighter, it just make zero sense, he kind of acting absent to everything happening to the historical site!!

I swear Wu Xie and Zhang Qiling feel like a couple!!

I think the scene around 58 minutes was also in The Mummy, the scene when someone put his arm and lost it, but I think it was acid in the original..

Ok, the scene with the dolls was cool, and kind of original, it add a horror movie elements, it would be better if they didn't light the place first tho, and that's probably another problem with the movie is really trying to make something similar to The Mummy and the mirrors scene..

Come on, dude, ruining the immersion of the scene by using CGI lion!!

The whole scene since the dolls appeared till now around 1 hour 9 minutes had too much light..

This movie had the potentials to be a great horror, the zombie insects are really scary.. Which made me think, you know what would be more scary than a zombie apocalypse!! An insects zombie apocalypse, like any insect any mosquito or fly can be deadly, at least with the human zombie apocalypse you can see and avoid them, with insects, you can't even sleep in peace! Even being safe means living in psychological horror!

I misjudged the movie, the movie is really its own thing, even if it's inspired from Hollywood movies..

I can see that the creator of the movie is also a fan of Stargate, which is kind of cool.. Chinese love Hollywood movies and TV shows as much as Hollywood hate itself..

Apparently the scenes with blinding CGIs starts around 1 hour 35 minutes.. 

The gorgeous Snake Empress appears around 1 hour 37 minutes..

Snake Empress goes like "Humans are a lowly life form", yeah, compared to you, it's so unfair to humans, humanity can never pass the test when it's compared to such breathtaking beauty.. It's insane that anyone can be this beautiful, it's unfair to women because it's impossible to meet the beauty of The Snake Empress, and also unfair to men because it's impossible to find anyone as beautiful as The Snake Empress, a true goddess and any mortal who fall in love with a goddess is doomed..

The final fight starts from there, and it's long, it basically from there till the end of the movie..

Villainesses are absolutely the greatest concept in movies, nothing can ever come any close to them, and I've watched tons of movies, no character can even come close to how incredible and amazing female villains are..

Like read this poet by one of Nizar Qabbani the greatest poets in the 20s and 21s century addressing his lover, and tell me that there's any character can even come close on how he's describing his feeling of love in the poet and which character can translate such feelings in a movie better than a villainess: 

"Increase my love, increase it

O sweetest of my fits of madness

O dagger in my tissues

O piercing knife

Increase my death, for if death kills me, it will revive me

I am the oldest capital of love

And my wound is a Pharaonic inscription

My pain is a caravan sent from Damascus to China

And lost in the mouth of a dragon

O taste of snow and taste of fire

And flavor of my doubt and certainty"

Nothing can translate the contradiction of passion as powerful as villains can do, villains are all about contradiction, and that what make them one of the greatest fictional artistic concepts of all time, at least for me..

I was expecting the movie to be like modern Hollywood movies, and it indeed have elements of that, for example, from what I have noticed from how movies especially in the west are made today is this, they collect data from social media, they know what people talking about, what interest them, what they like and what they don't like, and go make the movie like "It has to contain this and that" "It has to look this and that", and the movie partially did that, for example, the movie knew that people liked elements from The Mummy, so it took elements people liked from the movie, other elements from Bulletproof Monk, others from From Dusk Till Dawn, I would say The Snake Empress intro is very similar to Salma Hayek scene in the movie, yet Time Raiders actually did it better, starting from the doll scene it started to form its own character, with modern Hollywood movies they don't do that, the way they think, if people want this and this and that, let's mix them all together in a movie and focus on the marketing and people will just go watch, but that's not how movies work, if you forced a narrative on a movie based on data you destroy immersion, if you destroyed immersion, you kind of destroyed the whole movie, movies are like characters, they are works of art, like a painting, you can't cut parts from different paintings with different styles from the greatest paintings in history of humanity and call it the greatest painting in the history of humanity, and that's what AI and modern entertainment do, which is why, I wouldn't say they make bad movies, it's somehow worse, they make movies that are hard to watch, it's like they don't think that immersion is an important element in the movie, as escapism isn't something that they care about, they collect the data, make movie based on the collected data and that's it, you basically end up seeing your social media feed in a visual form, that's why a B-movie from the 90s is often more fun to watch than a big budget movie from 2026!!     

Anyway, you can watch the full movie here..