Asian Tag Team Power
Musa the Warior is the final product of a $60 million collaboration between the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese film communities. It took five years of planning and production to get this massive war epic completed and I'd have to say that it was fairly worth it.

On the whole, I know jack-crap about Korean cinema. The only Korean flick I own is the pre-U.S.-remake remake of The Ring titled The Ring Virus (which somehow drags hermaphrodites into the rearranged "plot"). Fortunately, Musa has more than made up for that debacle of a purchase.

In a cracked nutshell...
The premise behind Musa is this: a Korean diplomatic envoy (comprised mostly of soldiers) heads into China to make friends with the Mings. Due to a series of extremely unfortunate misunderstandings -- kind of like Alanis Morrissette's "Ironic" where it's not really ironic but just stuff that sucks -- a bunch of our Korean heroes get slaughtered. After a running into a band of Mongols with a captive Ming princess (the lovely Zhang Ziyi), things spiral progressively more out of control as the Korean general makes one bad decision after another. Further violence ensues.

Despite the unruly death count, you actually get a good feel for the main characters, all of whom I would consider classifying as, in one way or another, tragic. Unlike many other contemporary Asian period pieces, Musa has no wire-fu. Do not expect to see extended choreographed duels or beautiful sequences of balletic kung fu. Musa has all the gritty realism one would expect from a documentary-like war epic with quick, bloody, and graphic deaths all around.

In a cracked nutshell...
If you layed down a foundation of Saving Private Ryan, stacked on some Braveheart, erected some walls of Crouching Riger, Hidden Dragon, spackled with some Robin Hood, and caulked with some "Battle of Helm's Deep" from The Two Towers, you might get a roofless house that looked something like Musa.

While there were a bunch of familiar elements, I still might place Musa up the in catergory of must-see artsy import Asian movies right along side Crouching Tiger and Hero.

On the web: Musa the Warrior DVD at Poker Industries