One night in 2024, director Yuen Woo-ping sat in a tent in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, closely supervising a perilous scene for Blades of the Guardians.
As of last Sunday, the film has grossed $200 million domestically and overseas, with international markets including North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, making it the world's second highest-grossing Chinese-language martial arts film of all time, according to industry tracker Maoyan Pro. On Saturday, the film, which was released during Spring Festival, announced that it would extend its theatrical release by one additional month, until April 16.
The sequence required two skilled swordsmen, played by Wu Jing and Yu Shi, to fight while surrounded by fire created by oil seeping through the sand. The flames were real. The original plan had called for digital effects, but the change meant the actors had to be carefully protected to avoid injury.
At 80 years old, Yuen — one of the most renowned martial arts filmmakers, known for blockbusters such as the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix films — personally demonstrated the stunts to the actors.
Leaning into his walkie-talkie, he murmured: "I just love the real things."
The line was simple and unadorned. For many diehard martial arts fans, it was enough to bring tears to their eyes.
Teasingly dubbed by netizens as "handmade martial arts", the approach — performing real action with actual punches, kicks, and horse riding across howling sands — reflects a respect for, and preservation of, one of the most appealing hallmarks of Hong Kong cinema during its golden era: stars trained in martial arts from a young age, often risking their lives to perform gravity-defying stunts.
"Through all these details, the film captures the nuances of facial expressions and action movements that could never be replaced by artificial intelligence," says Hu Zhifeng, dean of the School of Arts and Communication at Beijing Normal University.
From kung fu giant Jackie Chan's Drunken Master to iconic auteur Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster and two Ip Man films starring Donnie Yen, Yuen's decades-long career has itself become part of wuxia (martial arts hero) history. This genre — distinctive to Chinese-language cinema and rooted in Eastern aesthetics — was among the earliest to bring Chinese films to the attention of Western audiences.
