The scenery is great! I loved that sequence where Song Kang-ho leaves his house and walks through the market, passing among a baby elephant, forlorn prostitutes, camels, fire-breathers, strange carts filled with unidentifiable goods, shabby and wobbly buildings, and plenty of grotesque-looking tough guys, and funky-looking spies.

The filming and editing are remarkable. There's great framing, beautiful lines of vision, nice extreme angles, and a rich mix of long shots, close-ups, mid-distance-shots. The camera is hand-held, stable, and moving along various supports. It's fun to watch the camera moving across a scene, then have the characters move across the lens of a stable camera. There's even a shot where the blood in a scene splatters onto the camera lens. The action scenes are painstakingly edited, with the cuts lasting 3-5 seconds, and a constant radical shift of angles of vision flipping the viewer all over the place. There are claustrophobically closed-in spaces and wide-open desert spaces. The fabulous wild 5-way chase scene towards the end makes even the desert seem crowded. There are all sorts of nice bits of action in there also.

The plot is plenty serviceable. It's a high-value, well-known, and much-used movie device. It's great for reminding us that we're watching a movie that's very aware of its movie-ness. In this case, it gives a team of remarkably talented and dedicated movie people the opportunity to show us how wonderful a movie can be.

The movie is well done, though it appears that it was really made for the "big screen", and loses a lot of its marvelousness when viewed on a TV screen. Jackie Chan and Jet Li are great to watch together, not just in their fight scenes, but in the camaraderie of their acting scenes. Thank goodness these two gentlemen had the foresight to learn acting! In fact, they are better than some of the other actors in the movie. The special effects are great, as well as the makeup work on Jet Li and Jackie Chan, who play dual roles in the movie.

No, it's not a typical "martial arts" movie (some of which seem to have been written by and for seventh and eighth graders and subject their casts and viewers to the ordeal of their acting attempts), but it's a wonderful story for those of us who know that the Universe is filled with the unseen and the unknown.

By the way, the "extras" included on the US SE 2-Disc Set are worth watching at least once, especially the background on the filming locations and "how it was done". Also interesting is hearing the writer speak about how the story came to be written.