by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $6.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Yilong Zhu, Zhi -Zhong Huang, Shu Chen, Taisheng Chan, Ge Wang, Siyu Lu
Intro:
For those who have a higher tolerance for modern disaster cheese, this could be a decent pick for bad movie night.
In a post-Emmerich film world, the phrase “disaster movie” has become a statement of quality as much as a genre. Not to say that there are no good modern disaster flicks – J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible certainly qualifies; just that the more modern formulas owe a lot to a filmmaker who tends to view humanity through the broadest lens imaginable, which cuts into a framework that can end up relying on mass destruction and death for audience engagement. Li Jun’s Cloudy Mountain, in some respects, serves as an Eastern counterpoint to that hegemony, but it also ends up falling into quite a few of the same pitfalls.
For a start, there’s not a whole lot of tension to be found. It’s a story set in the aftermath of an earthquake, where the titular mountain is threatening to crumble and demolish a nearby town. As much as the frenetic editing tries to ramp things up, it doesn’t give the impression that much is at stake here. Casualties are few and far between, and the rare few that occur on-screen are shown in such bizarre fashion that they induce laughter more than sympathy. It urgently wants to give the impression that the situation is dangerous, but never manages to deliver.
Attempts at drama fall into either the cliched (Yilong Zhu’s Yizhou and his trauma that looks ripped right out of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons) or the outright goofy (most of the third act). Even as the ‘Party Line’ keeps bombarding its way through the dialogue, with a particular quote contrasting the story of Noah’s Ark with the Chinese government’s ability to move mountains (ironic, given what the source material claims faith is capable of), it is at its silliest when it aims for universal humanity, lacking even Emmerich’s modicum of self-awareness.
Cloudy Mountain has a lot of technical details down pat, both production-wise and in depicting the rescue effort in-story, but it’s all ultimately let down by poor tonal choices, and a lack of investment in the characters. For those who have a higher tolerance for modern disaster cheese, this could be a decent pick for bad movie night.
