I don’t usually write reviews but I felt like I needed to do it for this one, since I really don’t know how to feel about it...

After watching the trailer I was really excited to watch This movie and in the beginning I did also really like it. The visuals are absolutely *chef’s kiss*. The cinematography, set design, special effects, and styling works really well together to bring this univers to life and I instantly fell in love with it.

I also instantly fell for the main character. He is very charming, which might in part be because Xiao Zhan could make a rock seem charming, and with the introduction he was given its hard not to immediately start rooting for him. However, as the story went on I started getting increasingly more and more frustrated with how passive he is. The main character never seems to really DO anything. Instead things juste sort of happens to him and he never really questions it.
I was also happy to see that the story has several female characters, but all of the side characters feel very underdeveloped. Some of them weren’t even introduced until the last third of the movie, where they were only given a few minutes of screen time.

My biggest problem with the story is the plot - or lack there of... I had to pause the movie somewhere in the middle to go and read what the movie is even supposed to be about, but even then I was watching the movie and thinking “that isn’t what is happening though?”, and when there was only 20 minutes left of the movie I still wasn’t sure what the plot was supposed to be. I spent the whole movie just waiting for it to begin, and it wasn’t until the last 10-15 minutes, that I felt like things were finally starting to get somewhere. I’m excited for the second movie, because the first one left on an interesting note, but I don’t think that this one stands very well on it’s own. I haven’t seen the series, but I definitely got the impression that this story is better suited for a series format rather than for movies.