Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (fka The Green Legend) was the first original movie Netflix announced in 2014, leading off its now lengthy slate. Now, a week before its February 26th premiere, we've got a new trailer to whet our appetites. There's plenty to have fans of Ang Lee's original 2000 Wuxia epic nervous: it's dropped the subtitled Mandarin dialogue for English (despite Netflix's highly touted globalization). Lee is also not involved in the film at all; veteran martial arts director Yuen Woo-Ping has taken over instead. And then there's the release itself: while it will be screened in select IMAX theaters, the majority of viewers will stream it on a small screen, and the original Crouching Tiger was hardly a small-screen story.
The new Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon trailer is really pushing the Lady Star Wars vibes
But looking past all that for a second, let’s just take a moment to appreciate one thing: Netflix is pushing this movie as a female Star Wars, which is pretty smart.
Ladies helping ladies with their careers
To be sure, that is a bit of a reversal: Star Wars is a martial arts movie riff, its Jedi warriors just galactic descendants of the superpowered swordsmen that have populated Asian lore for millennia. And who knows how much the actual film focuses on the student-mentor relationship between Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh, reprising her role from the original) and angry young upstart “Silver Vase” (Xia Zitong) — the first trailer hinted more at a “just when I thought I was out, they pull me right back in” storyline for Yeoh. But I am definitely ready to watch a bunch of physically fantastical training montages in which one lady teaches another lady how to “listen with her mind” and save Harry Shum from a cage. Not since Damages has an double-female apprenticeship looked so lethal.
