Xin Shen Bang: Nezha Chongsheng

This was a pretty cool film. The CGI animation was done very well and the action was exciting. The story and characters were alright, but I wouldn't say they were anything too special either. They were serviceable enough to form a cohesive and somewhat interesting plot, but the story definitely took a backseat to the action and the visuals. This is not the type of movie you should watch if you are looking for a riveting plot with deep characters and themes, but even without these it is enjoyable enough. I did appreciate the mythological inspirations included in the movie, these elements were fairly interesting.

Reasons to watch this movie
- Cool art
- Nicely directed action scenes
- cool concept

Reasons you can skip this movie
- The plot is lacking and badly explained concepts
- The conflict is meh and generic with nothing new, and kind of badly executed while it could have been done in a very better way.
- Lack of character development (MC hardly changes in his ways till the end)
- Forced unneeded climaxes
...
Now if you are not aware of Nezha and its lore and everything, the plot of the movie will be hard for you to understand as it is very poorly explained in the movie. This one is a one time watch or a skip.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Before you start, know that English is not my original language, so the text may have some typos or things like that.

Well, to begin this analysis, I would like to make it clear that much of the film's fantasy is based on Taoism, a philosophical and religious translation from Chinese Buddhist mythology, so it may happen that during the film some pretexts and quotes get a little bit bad explained, with this in mind I recommend that you try to know the basics about to better absorb the experience.

We have as protagonist Li Jinxuang, a young man who works in a smuggling ... service in a city dominated by a wealthy group that deprives the city of water to control and scold the population. Right away we have a very convincing proposal, it looks more like a generic dystopia show that we find everywhere, but in this case we focus on the protagonist and his journey as a kind of receptacle for Nezha, a protective god of the religion I mentioned previously, but in any case it brings a little repetitive messages in the industry like the way in which greed and hatred are wrong and only attract bad things and that kind of thing, but the real ambition of the film is to be an exhibition of scenes from VERY well produced and directed action, which makes it a lot of fun, but that's it.

The film is full of problems in the narrative, random climaxes are inserted in any scenes just to catch the viewer's attention since the characters and the plot lack dramatic load and textual value. Their interactions sound more like stupid pretexts to bring action scenes than relationships themselves, and an example of this is the encounter that triggered everything that happened during history, which was basically the tantrum of a rich man (son of the main antagonist) who wanted to soooo much the protagonist's bike, and that instead of just accepting the denial of selling the bike, he preferred to take it by force because no one should deny anything to a super bad and superior guy like him. The cast of the film is an emotional plot device drawer that works like a color pencil box, whenever we need an emotional catharsis from the protagonist we take a random character that he likes and barely treat him, that way, he gets furious and he can take out all his rage on his enemies as powerful as he (but not as angry) and so we have a Deus ex machina factory and a dramatic appeal sequence that just doesn't work due to the lack of depth of the colored pencils.

When I say that the film gives up everything to show its beautiful action to the viewer (let's be honest, that's all he has), I'm not exaggerating, all pacing is very unstable during the film, some scenes are too fast and some transitions are just skip between events that end up without the natural conclusion that each one should. You can see this in a large part of the film, which consists of training our protagonist, who should be a kind of maturity to control Nezha in the best way, when in reality, they are just quick scenes of him learning to fight and building armor, that we barely know how it works.

If someone is glad with beautiful action scenes, this film is highly recommended for that person, in my case, I felt seeing a random AMV but with a lot of desire to go beyond that, for this reason I do not recommend the film to anyone who cares about a well-structured, self-respecting story.