Director – Lu Yang, Screenplay – Chen Shu, Haiyan Qin, Lu Yang & Yu Yang, Based on the Short Story Assassinate a Novelist by Shuang Xuetao, Producers – Ning Hao, Wan Juan & Zhang Ning, Photography – Qiming Han, Music – Jed Kurzal. Production Company – Huace Pictures/Alibaba Pictures/Free Whale Pictures/Sunac Pictures.
Cast
Lei Jiayin (Guan Ning), Yang Mi (Tu Ling), Dong Zijian (Lu Kongwen), Hewei Yu (Li Mu), Wang Shengdi (Tangerine), Guo Jingfei (The Old Man/Black Armour), Yang Yi (Lord Redmane/Yu Changhai), Tong Liya (Ban Ruo)
Plot
Guan Ning obsessively searches for his daughter Tangerine who went missing six years ago. He believes that human traffickers have abducted her. He is arrested after attacking a truck carrying trafficked children. He makes an escape aided by Tu Ling, who works for the tech tycoon Li Mu, head of the Aladdin Group. Li Mu offers Guan Ning a deal – they have located Tangerine and will give him her whereabouts if he will kill the novelist Lu Kongwen, Kongwen has written a novel Godslayer, which he is narrating by livestream as he writes it. In the story, the hero makes his way across a landscape fighting off various nemeses as he seeks to confront Lord Redmane. The fate of Lord Redmane is having an effect on Li Mu’s health and he believes that when Kongwen arrives at the story’s climax in three days’ time, this will kill him. Guan Ning sets out to follow Kongwen but finds in befriending him that he cannot bring himself to kill him.
A Writer’s Odyssey was a big-budget film released for the Chinese New Year. It is an adaptation of a short story by the acclaimed Chinese novelist Shuang Xuetao, which appears in his collection The Aviator (2017), although this is not currently available in English.
A Writer’s Odyssey falls into the genre of Meta-Fiction – a field dealing with works where stories come to life, where books can be entered into or where characters inside them develop an independent life of their own. I would draw similarities to works like The Neverending Story (1984) and sequels where a kid is able to enter the world of a book that echoes, reflects and emerges to affect the world outside; I, Madman (1989), a largely forgotten film where the killer in a book came to life and interacts with the reading heroine; or else Inkheart (2008) in which Brendan Fraser had the ability to bring characters from books into the real world. There is another whole field of these that do the same thing with film as in the likes of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), The Icicle Thief (1989) and Last Action Hero (1993).
A Writer’s Odyssey comes with the interesting premise where the novel a writer is writing somehow influences people in the real world. Somehow – the hows and whys are not made any more clear than that. Meta-fiction films often flip between adventures taking place in the real world and the parallel world, both of which reflect and mirror the other. The same happens here. However, the results are often confusing as though director Lu Yang became more carried away by creating epic action scenes in the parallel world and only occasionally remembered to get back to the mirror scenes.
Lord Redmane
I had read the premise of the film before watching but it may serve as some indication that it took a good part of half-an-hour or more into the film before it became clear what was going on. Normally a film like this will have a contrast between the world of fantasy and the grounded reality outside. For some reason here, people seem to have superpowers in the real world – hero Lei Jiayin has the ability to throw objects with unerring accuracy, while there are other characters that belong more in the pages of a comic-book including one who is wired up with batteries and can deliver electric shocks.
What you cannot deny is that Lu Yang creates some epic action sequences – a city under attack by volleys of flaming arrows; the pursuit by the red armoured monster that barrels through entire houses, leaping across rooftops and swinging a massive blade almost as big as its victims; or Lei Jiayin going into battle with a wooden suit of armour with an eye in its centre that later takes on a life of its own to become a creature.
Director Lu Yang has been making films since the 1990s, including the hit Wu XiaBrotherhood of Blades (2014) and its sequel and the war film The Sacrifice (2020).
