Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

A Writer's Odyssey Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson April 6, 2022

Along with Frant Gwo's The Wandering Earth (2019), Yang Lu's fifth feature A Writer's Odyssey (2021) is one China's largest CGI spectacles in recent years. Variety's Richard Kupiers reported that Yang and his crew spent two and a half years in post-production and employed 800 special effects technicians to mount this massive epic. A Writer's Odyssey (aka Assassins in Red, its original title in North America) is based on a slender novella titled Assassinate the Novelist written by Chinese author Shuang Xuetao. For the adaptation, Yang and his three co-writers created two stories which they attempt to intertwine as loose parallel narratives. The first is set in present-day China where Guan Ning (Lei Jiayin), a torn father, has been searching six years for his missing daughter, Tangerine (Wang Shengdi). Guan possesses paranormal abilities and a dexterity to heave rocks and other foreign objects from long distances with pinpoint precision. Because he senses Tangerine may be in the back of a semi, he throws stones from atop a hill that pierce the windshield, causing the driver and his accomplice to careen off the road. It turns out that they are child traffickers but Tangerine isn't with the other children. The rider knocks Guan semi-unconscious with a long wrench and he's taken into custody by the police as one of the perpetrators. At a gas station an officer has Guan handcuffed to the back of his squad car but the arrestee is so strong that he breaks free. A mysterious woman in an SUV conveniently parked nearby yells for Guan to get in, which he does. She takes him to Aladdin Group headquarters (apparently based on the Alibaba multinational tech company). She is Tu Ling (Yang Mi), Aladdin's Chief Information Officer. Her superior is tech magnate Li Mu (Yu Hewei). Guan has been brought to Aladdin so a deal can be struck. If Guan assassinates Lu Kongwen (Dong Zijian), a bespectacled young novelist, then Aladdin will reveal the whereabouts of his daughter.

The second story is set centuries earlier and represents a wuxia fantasy imagined by Lu Kongwen, who live-streams his novel Godslayer over the Internet. Kongwen (also portrayed by Dong Zijian) is a young warrior set on avenging the death of his sister. He battles the Crimson Warriors of Lord Redmane, ruler of the Ranliang Kingdom. Kongwen is joined or attached to a parasitic creature named Black Armor (voiced by Guo Jingfei), who can break into a bunch of pieces and also reassemble into a suit of armor. It sometimes isn't clear if Black Armor is an ally of Kongwen. It has one eye in the center and can talk. Kongwen's battle with Redmane is a spectacular sight to behold. With his four arms and height of fifty feet, Redmane is a gigantic version of Mortal Kombat's Goro.

A Writer's Odyssey has received criticism for failing to blend human figures seamlessly with CGI backgrounds. I can see the point commentators have made but I've seen worse CGI/human shot combinations. The filmmakers do an excellent job of continuity editing, for instance, when an individual falls off a building and the street below turns into the cobblestones of the ancient past. The CGI in the movie is a significant achievement.

I thought that Guan was too easily swayed by Aladdin to accept the deal because they show him TV screenshots of a handful of girls who resemble Tangerine. How can he be sure that they're going to lead him to his real daughter? The filmmakers portray Guan as a vigilante and that negatively impacts his likeability. Another flaw is that the characters in the wuxia story are underdeveloped. We also don't get to hear much about their backstories. An aspect that worked for me is when one of Li Mu’s henchmen injects himself with a steroid and transforms into a mini-version of the Incredible Hulk. This is Yang Lu's method of showing how elements of the fantastical find their way into the contemporary world. Since this is a picture where story events from Godslayer shape and influence the present, the fantasy realm and real world collide.

A Writer's Odyssey Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Writer's Odyssey makes its North American debut on Blu-ray on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50 (disc size: 40.58 GB). The picture is presented in two alternating aspect ratios: 2.39:1 and 1.85:1. Present-day China is shown often (but not always) in 2.39:1 while the mystical world is frequently framed in 1.85:1. Qiming Han's gorgeous cinematography was filmed with Arri cameras. The flashback scene to Guan Ning with his wife and toddler-aged daughter (Screenshot #6) is bathed in golden light. Qiming suffuses the wuxia scenes with jaundiced sky (see capture #7). My favorite sequence is a magnificent float processional with inflatable green and red dragons (see frame grabs 14-16). There are no sources flaws on the DI prepared for this transfer. Shout! encodes the feature at an average video bitrate of 27997 kbps.

A Writer's Odyssey has also been released on Blu-ray in Hong Kong by Panorma and on UHD in China by Disk Kino. The picture was reportedly projected in 3-D at IMAX theaters (at least in China) at an aspect ratio equivalent to 1.85:1. But there is no 3-D Blu-ray on the marketplace.

Shout! has provided sixteen scene selections for the 130-minute feature.

A Writer's Odyssey Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround dubbed mix (3541 kbps, 24-bit) is the default track on Shout!'s menu. There's another English dub, the downsampled DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (1605 kbps, 24-bit). I listened to both the Mandarin DTS-HD Master 5.1 surround original sound track (3578 kbps, 24-bit) and the downconverted DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (1613 kbps, 24-bit), which is in either Mandarin or Cantonese. The 5.1 mix delivered a thunderous experience owing much to the battle scenes and the mostly symphonic score by Australian composer Jed Kurzel. There are several Matrix-style action scenes filmed in slow motion that accent swooshes or objects flying through the air. Spoken words are always crisp. The surround channels, on occasion, practically deliver the same frequency ranges as the front speakers. Kurzel's music employs traditional instruments in a grand style as well as percussion (notably timpani). He also works in an electric guitar. The 2.0 stereo has good separation but only along the FL and FR.

The Panorama has a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround (96kHz, 24-bit) in Mandarin and an LPCM Stereo mix in Cantonese. The Disk Kino has a Dolby Atmos track in Mandarin.

Shout! provides only optional English subtitles. The packaging and disc promise SDH but they're absent.

A Writer's Odyssey Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• (1:29, 1080p) - the US trailer for A Writer's Odyssey presented in 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen (mean video bitrate: 20514 kbps) with DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (1720 kbps, 24-bit). The voice actors who dubbed the original actors are heard here in English.

A Writer's Odyssey Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A Writer's Odyssey is cinematic eye candy that tells interlocking complex stories in ancient and contemporaneous times. It was confusing to be able to follow everything on my first viewing but a second watch clarified a lot of questions I had. Director Yang Lu's Brotherhood of Blades (2014), Brotherhood of Blades 2 (2017), and The Sacrifice (2020) are also available on Blu-ray. I look forward to checking those out and especially want to see his big-screen debut, My Spectacular Theatre (2010). Shout! Factory delivers what's a reference-quality Blu-ray transfer and a robust DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. Unfortunately, there are no extras. Still, this is a disc you'll want to revisit again and again. It earns a HEARTY RECOMMENDATION from me.