Beijing plans to remake classic Kung-Fu films, but will Gen Z bite?

Times

4 days ago

If the real Bruce Lee fought an AI version of Bruce Lee, who would win? The world may soon be able to at least guess an answer to that knotty question.
China, the world's most enthusiastic proponent of artificial intelligence, is to use the technology to recreate Hong Kong's favourite action movies, among them the Bruce Lee kung-fu classic Fist of Fury.
The film's popularity around the world in the Seventies made Lee a pioneer for a whole series of fly-kicking Chinese action men, such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as they dispatched cruel Japanese foes and then triads, American racists and arrogant Europeans.
The China Film Foundation has announced it is to work on the project with an AI studio and the company that has acquired the rights to Fist of Fury and other classics, such as A Better Tomorrow, by the director John Woo, and the Li film Once Upon a Time in China.
The foundation said it hoped the films would be commercially successful with Generation Z, who grew up in a post-Lee world, partly as a result of being refashioned to a 'modern aesthetic' and powered by AI.
There is also a political element. Produced at a time of cultural and ideological upheaval in China, Hong Kong and the West, many of the early films — particularly Fist of Fury — bore a powerful message of Chinese strength and virtue, directly challenging ethnic stereotypes.
Although created in British Hong Kong rather than Cultural Revolutionary China, the films and their stars have been taken up since by the Communist Party as icons of a rising national power.
Zhang Pimin, the foundation's chairman, told June's Shanghai Film Festival: 'Today, with the power of technology, the 'AI revival of 100 classics' project will allow these classics to transcend time and space, breathing new life into the spirit of chivalry and national pride in the digital age.'
The growth of AI has sent shivers through western cultural industries; concerns range from plagiarism of journalism to the creation of fake versions of stars for advertising or even pornography. Writers and artists alike are resistant to the idea that computer algorithms can create art that could be as truly creative as human endeavour.
The Directors Guild of America, which is sponsoring a bill in the US to protect the film industry's intellectual property from exploitation by generative learning models, has expressed concern at the Chinese proposals. It said it 'strongly opposes the use of AI or any other technology to mutilate a film and to alter a director's vision without their consent and participation'.
'The Guild has a longstanding history of opposing such alterations on issues like colourisation or sanitisation of films to eliminate so-called 'objectionable content', or other changes that fundamentally alter a film's original style, meaning, and substance,' a statement said. 'AI is a creative tool that should be used properly to enhance the creative storytelling process.'
In China, President Xi is actively promoting AI on all fronts and tech companies are competing with each other to produce ever cheaper models to take on the Silicon Valley giants.
Critics have said that tight government censorship and limits on showing western movies have also created a culture in which film 'piracy' in all its forms is more widely accepted.
Zhang's project taps into fears among aficionados that the martial arts and other action genres that Hong Kong created have become a victim of their own success.
Lee, like Li, started out as a martial arts champion. He regularly got into trouble at school for fighting before he became a boxing and kung-fu star and set up martial arts studios in California, later going into films. Chan also trained in martial arts, starting off in films as a stuntman.
Their celluloid exploits were as real as anything in film, and in some cases they had trained their cinematic opponents in the same skills. Chuck Norris, who starred alongside Lee in The Way of the Dragon, had been his pupil.
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As the use of martial arts in film went mainstream, real-life action was replaced by computer-generated imagery, particularly in superhero franchises.
By comparison, classics from the era of Fist of Fury, in which Lee plays a put-upon Chinese martial artist who fights back against bullying Japanese soldiers in wartime Shanghai, can seem dated for more than just their Seventies dress sense and hairstyles.
The question, as Shanghai's leading state-run newspaper put it, is whether 'artificial intelligence technology can breathe new life into the hard-hitting, physically intense action of classic kung-fu films'.
The film festival released a clip of A Better Tomorrow: Cyber Border, which the creators said was intended to align the original's visual effects and narrative pacing more closely to modern tastes. Woo's A Better Tomorrow, a 1980s gangster movie, is widely regarded as one of the greatest Chinese films ever made.
The project is being backed by Ringo Yu, a less famous contemporary and co-star of Chan, but the extent of the involvement of the directors and stars of the original films is unclear.
The family of Lee, who died at the age of 32 from a cerebral oedema, and Woo himself, now 78, issued statements to the Los Angeles Times saying they had been unaware of the project and were trying to find out more.
However, Woo added: 'I'm very curious about the outcome and the effect it might have on my original film.'