Once Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Once Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie Review

. . .in China, just in case you were wondering.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 2, 2018

I’m beginning to think there’s a whole separate industry subsumed within the general Asian filmmaking community that is singularly devoted to the production of mythic stories featuring gods and goddesses, a subset of hard toiling technicians all working tirelessly to provide intricately designed films that offer a series of amazing sequences drenched in CGI, along with an often just as confusing array of characters and plotlines. Just in the past few months, for example, I’ve reviewed a slew of these fantasy laden films, including The Monkey King 3, Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds, The Thousand Faces of Dunjia, and Legend of the Naga Pearls (and mind you, I'm just going back a month or two), and it’s getting to the point that I am so buried in Chinese mythology and/or quasi-mythology that it’s getting hard to remember who little “characters” like Moses and Jesus are (yes, that’s a joke). Into this growing fray comes Once Upon a Time, another film depicting various divine types in somewhat soap operatic conditions, with a star crossed love affair at the center of a story that requires a fair degree of potentially confusing shape shifting, since several characters are in fact spirit animals (for want of a better term) who (in this film’s presentation, anyway) kind of lapse in and out of human form as necessary.

Some indication of the hurdles viewers will have to jump through to try to make sense of Once Upon a Time comes right at the beginning, with the introduction of a character who is virtually in the first line called both Bai Qian and Su Su (Liu Hifei), with an indication that she either was or maybe continues to be a human who is also a divine being, but who also (just for good measure) is a fox deity. That means that in just the first few seconds we get what appears to be a princess leaping out of heavenly clouds to descend to some kind of more material world (?) where her human form (as evidenced by Liu Hifei) magically morphs into a none too convincing animated fox, and then (again, just for good measure) back into Liu Hifei once the story gets going.

There’s already an Inception like set of “realities” nested within each other, something that only continues to get more labyrinthine as the plot develops, and Bai Qian meets a heavenly prince to whom she been betrothed for thousands of years, but has never met face to face. That is the handsome and dashing Ye Hua (Yang Yang), who has an adorable little boy named Ah Li (Peng Zisu), who rather strangely calls Bai Qian “Mom” as soon as he meets her, a fact which is about as strange as Ye Hua calling her Su Su when he first meets her. Did I mention that this all happens in a magical undersea garden world that also involves sunshine so bright (don’t ask me, I’m just the messenger) that Bai Qian and/or Su Su needs to wear a blindfold? It’s just patently weird stuff, intentionally dreamlike but (like many dreams) kind of incomprehensible a lot of the time.

While a certain amount of exposition does show up somewhat later in the film, one that conveniently involves amnesia, there are still a number of questions that I personally had about any number of plot dynamics. This doesn’t just involve who exactly Bai Qian and Su Su are (is?), it’s further complicated by the fact that Ye Hua turns out to have an alter ego as well. What makes this presentationally so odd is that in one case two supposed facets (again, with a big “?”) of the same personality are shown to “in” the same person, while with another depiction, there sure seems to be two separate entities who are nonetheless somehow supposed to be identical.

All of this plays out within the context of a bunch of other truly weird stuff, like the fact that Bai Qian is a bit of a lush and not averse to sharing her stash with Ah Li, or the CGI character of Mi Gu, who I think is supposed to be some kind of forest spirit but who looks like a mutant version of Sprout from the classic Jolly Green Giant commercials (I swear I’m not making any of this up, or at least I don’t think I am, after having watched this hallucination provoking enterprise). There are villains who never really amount to much or who play into the love angle in any meaningful way, and there is a kind of cosmic starcrossed love affair element that may appeal to romantics, but it’s all dispensed with such head scratching opaqueness that any semblance of coherence is often fleeting at best.

Once Upon a Time is based on a bestselling novel called Three Lives, Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms, an effort that has also evidently been adapted into a hit Chinese television series that (according to different sources) is either titled the same as the book or called Eternal Love. My hunch is a longer form series might be a bit more understandable, since Once Upon a Time often feels like a half finished or perhaps half described fairy tale. It’s opulently beautiful almost all of the time, but I still have very little clue as to what it’s all about.

Once Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Once Upon a Time is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. According to the IMDb, this was shot with Red Cameras and finished at a 2K DI. Also according to the IMDb, this is another release that I guess no one should be surprised to hear looks like it was released in 3-D overseas (or at least in its native country), but which is only receiving a "flat" presentation on Blu-ray here (the list of Asian films released theatrical in 3-D and only on 2D in the United States is perhaps just as long as a list of mythically themed Asian films in general). While there's the expected banding evident in some of the production mastheads (not limited solely to the Well Go USA logo), the bulk of this presentation looks fantastic, at least if you factor in some predictable softness in the nonstop CGI elements. Some of the animation, especially some of the supposed "animals" or other weird hybrid creatures, is definitely not photorealistic, but a lot of the green screened backgrounds are sumptuous and often unbelievably colorful. Practical elements like costumes and props routinely feature excellent fine detail. The entire palette is suffused with a kind of gauzy, pastel ambience that lends a certain dreamlike aspect to the proceedings, something that was surely intentional and which in fact turns out to be part of the "reveal" in terms of what's going on.

Once Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Once Upon a Time features an extremely effective DTS:X mix, one which utilizes the surround channels regularly for its almost "Cirque" like score, and especially with regard to some of the very forceful sound effects, including a low frequency wash which clearly pans over the listener's head as some creatures morph. The film is kind of busily noisy at times, with a lot of goofy effects (and, frankly, goofy dialogue) competing for attention, but spaciousness is always in evidence and fidelity is absolutely top notch throughout the presentation. Dialogue is smartly prioritized, and there are no problems of any kind to report.

Once Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:42)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA releases on Blu-ray, the disc has been authored so that this sole supplement moves on automatically to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those other trailers also play automatically at disc boot up.

Once Upon a Time Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Regular readers of my reviews will know I actually tend to be a bit of a pushover for what I call "shiny object" films, outings that offer a lot of visual (and frequently sonic) allure, but which tend to have major deficits in the story and character department. That's certainly the case once again here, though I have to say Once Upon a Time was so generally confusing to me much of the time that even its amazing visuals and equally enjoyable soundtrack couldn't quite fill the void of comprehension. Well Go USA has provided a disc with solid technical merits for those who are considering a purchase.