This story tells of a great king and his people being expelled from their homeland and hoping to claim it sometime. Things look bad when you see the violent king in power and his general, the visionary who longs to win the final battle but needs to plan the forces and women of the palace who are struggling to find salvation from that bad place. Maybe everyone lives for his goal to achieve what he wants but things look bad.
There's romance and melodrama in Shadow, and while it's less emphasized than in Zhang's other wuxia films, it pairs well with the Machiavellian intrigue.
Zhang is seriously gifted at combining eye-catching imagery with darkly engaging stories. And this film is packed with sequences that take the breath away.
Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou's breathtakingly beautiful "Shadow" is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time.
