Riders on the storm

RIDERS ON THE STORM The success of the US$10 million martial arts fantasy The Storm riders has provided a well-needed boost for the Hong Kong film industry. The long-awaited movie set a new local record in July 1998 for an opening day, grossing US$594,560, pushing the previous holder, The Lost World (US$432,150), into second place. At first, observers thought that the early grosses may have been the result of some unprecedented hype for a local film, but The Storm Riders proved critics wrong by having "legs". Final Hong Kong gross was US$5.5 million. The movie is based on a top-selling comic book series by Ma Wing-shing. Story centres on two swordfighting heroes with superpowers, Wind (Ekin Cheng) and Cloud (Aaron Kwok). As children, the two heroes are abducted by the fiendish Lord Conqueror (Sonny Chiba), who uses their powers to achieve dominance in the martial arts world. But a Buddhist priest tells Lord Conqueror that, if the two boys remain friends, they will overthrow him. The effects in The Storm Riders were deemed so important that production company Golden Harvest teamed with digital production house Centro Digital Pictures in a co-production set-up. Centro had previously won some acclaim for The Umbrella Story, a Forrest Gump-type movie which digitally placed old footage of actors like Bruce Lee into new situations. "For us, The Storm Riders was an opportunity to showcase the force and impact of martial arts action using digital effects," says visual effects supervisor Mike Wong. Digital effects for the film took 18 months to complete. "The special effects have provided unlimited scope for us to dramatise the impact of the action sequences," says director Andrew Lau. "They have also allowed us to resolve the difficulties of creating impossible sets. They have enhanced the creative space for film-makers." The results proved surprisingly enjoyable. While there still seems to be some wire-work involved, digitally- created scenes of Wind and Cloud manipulating water and other elements are very effective, and do bring a new angle to the genre. Digital recreations of locations like the 30-storey high Leshan Buddha figure in Sichuan province, China, are also credibly done, as is a 3-D CGI monster. Centro says that there are around 500 digital effects shots in the film: "It could well be the largest digital-imaging work ever produced in Hong Kong or Southeast Asia," says Wong. To give the film a hook into the all-important youth market, the hip and often downscale production company Bob & Partners Co. [of which Lau is a member] handled the creative side of things. Screenwriter Manfred Wong and director Lau had scored a series of hits with the trendy triad series Young and Dangerous, also adapted from a popular comic book, and have surprised their many critics by managing to keep their fingers on the pulse of young Hong Kong. Coupled with a plethora of stars, including singing superstar Aaron Kwok in his first picture for Harvest, Y&D regular Ekin Cheng, and sexy Taiwanese starlet Xu Qi, Harvest hoped Bob & Partners could make an old genre a new hit with a young crowd. Finally, a mainland Chinese partner, Tianshan Film Studio [based in Xinjiang province], was pulled into the mix. Tianshan - which said it was "thrilled" to be involved with the project - helped to find some exotic locations, including a giant waterfall. Chinese locations had been an important part of the success of the costume martial-arts boom that held sway at Hong Kong's box office in the early 1990s. Aided by a strong publicity campaign that included tie-ins like a sabre-shaped umbrella with Seven/Eleven stores and video-on-demand service iTV, the resulting movie went on to become Hong Kong's first "event movie," the most talked-about film since Titanic. Audience response has shown how much Hong Kong audiences have matured over the past few years. Whereas once all the talk would have been about the stars' hairstyles, now plot structure is the thing. Critics praised the special effects and the film's scope, but said that the story and structure left something to be desired. Public and critics were unanimous about the stars, too, praising the "muscular" Kwok over the somewhat effete Cheng. Richard James Havis, “Moving Pictures”, MIFED Special Issue, October 1998