Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon has some
gorgeous settings, a fairly interesting plot, and likeable characters, but the
atrocious CGI and bizarrely unrealistic action sequences are a little
distracting.
The first Detective Dee movie was pretty disappointing,
but I only watched it in the first place because this one looked interesting,
so I was hoping it would be better. It was better, but not amazing or anything.
I felt like the first one was a little hard to follow; this one was less
confusing. The Empress' headdresses were supposed to be a big deal in the first
one, but I feel like they were more impressive in this one. Dee didn't seem to
do much "detecting" to me in the first one, and I think they did a
better job of that with this one, too. This one is actually ranked slightly
lower than Phantom Flame on IMDb, so I guess they don't agree with me.
The CGI was horrid in this one. It looked like a video
game. It was tough to reconcile it with the live action stuff going on. The
stunts were also pretty ridiculous; more like a cartoon than live action. There
were some really beautiful shots of some of the sets, though. The scene at the
dye shop with all the fabric was cool, although it took me a while to figure
out why there was all that fabric hanging up; at first it seemed like they
were just doing it to have an interesting set.
I thought Angelababy was in the first one; I must've been
getting that mixed up with the Tai Chi Hero series. I was really confused about
how Yin Ruiji got to the position she had in Phantom Flame, and why it didn't
seem like Dee recognized her in that one. But it turns out Yin Ruiji wasn't in
Phantom Flame, Shangguan Jing'er was, so now it makes sense.
