uniethesea

Despite some genuinely good acting and one of my favorite Meng Ziyi performances to date, this was almost unwatchable.
It's a narrative about female empowerment, but it constantly nerfs its women, disrespects their choices, and doesn't trust women to know their own desires.
There's the badass female general disguised as a man who discovers that she really just wants pretty dresses and to be a wife. There's the cold and untouchable female lead who, it turns out, is only saying no to skinship because she doesn't know she wants it yet. And then there's the male lead who is touted within the narrative as respecting his wife's choices and autonomy while explicitly doing the opposite. I found the narrative low-key misogynistic.
Then there's the weird pacing with random time skips, and the way they can’t make up their mind what to tell you or what to show you. It was this really bizarre combination of very loose implicit storytelling that leaves you to essentially guess at character motivations, and very detailed hand-holding you as they sort of beat information into your mind on repeat.