Watch The Promise For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Admirable film.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This is a film about a little girl who is hungry so she steals bread but she meets a goddess who tells her that her she can be beautiful and rich but that she will never find true love. She is told that her fate is now settled and cannot be changed, now that she has made her promise. I can't recall exactly what the promise was, but it had something to do with all that and her life does indeed turn out that way until a slave, mistaken for a general, kills the girls paramour.It is impossible to explain what is interesting and annoying about this film without skipping to the end. The middle is filled with quite pretty scenes of the king, the slave, the guy from the snow country, the girl, now grown to be a princess, and a few others. The blurb insists that it is the most beautiful film ever made but it is nowhere near that. It is, however, quite pretty. I won't get into how all the characters finish up, but I have to tell you what happens at the very end, so you might want to come back after you have seen the film.There follows, of course, a long series of complicated ups and downs for all the characters until the very end when our heroine seems to have found love indeed. Is the goddess very irritated? Peeved? Not at all. She shows up and blithely tells everyone that promises made to the gods are as fragile as any other and that fate can be changed. Now, I don't know about you, but if I had made some deal with a goddess for some unchangeable fate and then when all the suffering and struggle was over had that goddess tell me that, well, you know, it can all be changed, can't it? I would be seriously angry.I frankly don't know if this is a case of bad writing in which the author couldn't figure out a good ending so he just has the goddess, the moving power behind all of it, show up and say that your should forget all about it or if this is some sort of thing that makes sense to the Chinese way of thinking.In the Buddhist way of thinking there are gods and goddesses, demons and devils, but they aren't really very important and one can well have a form of Buddhism without any gods. Some say that Buddhism is atheistic, but i think goes a bit far. In the Chinese tradition it seems true that the gods are unreliable. Every Chinese village has a shrine to some local god who has the duty of making sure things go well for the village. If things don't do well they tear down the shrine and build a new one to some other god who will jolly well see to it that the village prospers and keeps out of trouble. Perhaps there is something of the sort at work here, I don't know. It is very odd.

Mounting up all the celebrated faces in recent Asian cinemas doesn't necessarily mean they would produce a good film, nor spending tens of millions of dollars.The whole movie was decorated by CGI, but sadly most scenes look cheesy and doesn't make any sense at all.The beautiful colors are all abused. The story is so weird and unacceptable that the director had to add a set of subtitle explanation in the beginning. the makers simply wanted to visualize every message in the film, including the hypocritical "true love" message. The action sequences and emotions of the main characters are all big nonsenses. The whole movie looks like a magnificent parody.It's not funny at all to force the non-Chinese actors to speak Chinese Mandarin, even though most of them handled their job OK. But the movie marks the sick tendency of Asian movie-making, which is abusing money to attract eyeballs.I bought this movie from the shelf of unpopular original movies in a store. For only .40$. The store owner is desperately selling this movie at the price of nearly crap.Politely,I gave it a 4/10.

I beg everyone to read my comment because this is for crying out loud. I bought this movie today and I was very excited to see chinas new big event. But unfortunately this movie is not a movie. It has absolutely no plot, it is very slow, you don't understand the actions the characters are taking and all the chroma effects, as well CGI, are poorly shot and done. I know what I am talking about because I am working in this business.If that's what people like and will be the future of cinema (300 another poorly made movie) than I want to work as a street-cleaner.I don't understand how people prefer all this fake images instead of all the real thing or do I have to remind you older Chinese martial art films, with more difficult action scenes and no CGI.Of course the sequence with the Buffalo's or what ever they were, is kind of difficult to create in reality, But the fights and all the running? Anyway, it seems people like very fake and boring things like Shoot'em Up or 300. Because there is nothing original about that.

After having watched many Chines martial arts film, I was amazed that I could still be thrilled and surprised, but this film did just that.Writer/director Kaige Chen has put together a film that transcends countries and presents a tale of love and magic in a martial arts dance that is simply spectacular in its visual presentation.Starring Dong-Kun Jang (Typhoon) as the slave who seeks the princess (Cecilia Cheung) and saves her several times, and Hiroyuki Sanada (The Last Samurai) as the General who is both his boss and his rival.The magic and cinematography and costuming and music of this film all add together to present a timeless tale that will delight all.