An older Wu Xie (Lu Hanāa Chinese/Korean boy band idol) is approached by a writer to tell the story of what happened when he was a teen. Wu Xie had belonged to a traditional family of grave robbers. His family had tried to keep him out of the business, but his flair for tinkering and exploring turned up the key to the Snake Empressās tomb. The family set outs, accompanied by the sullen and secretive martial arts master Zhang Qiling (Jing Boran). Zhang Qiling is ageless, having lived so long that heās forgotten his past, though he does recall his fight fifty years earlier with Hendrix (Vanni Corbellini), a Western arch-villain seeking immortality in the tomb.
Time Raiders (thatās ātime,ā not ātombā) is based on a different, popular set of novels, ones that have also spawned a TV series. It also takes the adventure fantasy route, with characters routinely doing the impossible. As with many Asian action films, we have an angsty, manly-man hero who seldom speaks and often gazes off into the universe, when not kicking ass with his over-sized sword and Spider-Man-like danger sense. He is befriended by the young, cheerful, effeminate protagonist. Chinese eyes might see it differently, but for Westerners (and even more the Japanese), the homo-erotic subtext is overwhelming. Thatās the only character development we get, so best to cling to it. The rest of the time is spent with over-the-top action fighting CGI opponents against CGI backgrounds. I like a bit of CGI, but Iād like some story to go with it. Here, CGI is king. Well, make that ābaronā as the effects work isnāt bad, but isnāt good enough to support the feature on its own. At least someone should have told them that real room are not lit evenly everywhere like in a video game.
A few scenes are impressive (a Rube Goldberg machine to light the ancient tomb is fabulous) but none of it means anything or has any emotional power. For a cheap Saturday afternoon at home, Time Raiders plays out alright, but really would work best for children who donāt mind subtitles (or speak Chinese).
More interesting than the film is trying to making sense of it. Extensive time is spent on flashbacks and visions that the film never clearly explains and that, in a competent narrative, should have been left out. The masked man Wu met as a child is apparently supposed to have been Zhang, who has probably forgotten the incident. But so what? Why is that important? There is the vaguest implication that Zhang may actually be Wu, who has somehow time-traveled to the past and thereby given some meaning to the title. But that doesnāt help us with the censors. That Wu, as an older man, is miserable and his family is gone gives us our necessary lesson that grave robbing is bad. But Time RaidersĀ doesnāt come up with a non-supernatural explanation for the Snake Empress or immortality. It does bring up her using electromagnetic force fields and keeps flashing into space to show stars zipping about and crashing into each other, but that doesnāt help. Rather, I suspect the filmmakers sold the story to the government in a simpler way: none of it happened. It is all a tale that Wu is telling the writer, one that he clings to instead of the truth, that his family all died while raiding a non-magical tomb and that it is his fault because he found the key. It is rare that some variation on āit was all a dreamā is preferable to other options, but in this case, it is the only way to make the film mean anything.