I admire how your edit aims to pay homage to the classic Shaw Brothers movies. As someone who skipped out on the show, I never would’ve thought of drawing comparisons to a defunct movie studio based in Hong Kong! 😄
I wouldn’t have thought it either! Or at least, not until I got about halfway through the season and was like “they’re really paying homage to wuxia films huh”
and then I read some interviews, and that’s where I came across the classic “Elevator pitch” quote that Headland gave re: “Kill Bill meets Frozen,” but then LATER said they were ALSO inspired by “Come Drink With Me,” considered by many to be the birth of the wuxia genre (it got nominated for Best Foreign Film in 67). Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” also got namechecked to explain why the show is jumping all over the place with the timeline and basically creating “mysteries” by only showing you half a story and then showing you the rest later like “Gotcha!”, but I clearly didn’t think that worked too well, so yeah. Outta here.
Whereas the standard “You destroyed my temple, now I vow revenge against yours! FIGHT ME!” setup/follow through of a TON of Shaw Bros kung-fu classics IS still present here. The trick is to try and stick as close to the story spine of that Shaw Bros inspiration, and its “get in a big-ass fight every 15-20min” rhythm with what’s given in the show, and how the show tried to present that as a lore-filled prequel-y Star Wars rule-bound THING.
I will say, even though this isn’t anywhere near as focused on all that mishigoss as the show proper was, I believe the way this plays, it’s a LOT easier (and a lot more easy to explain the stray Ren music motifs that appear to this end) for someone to headcanon this cut as the potential origin of the Knights of Ren. If one wanted to, I guess.