The story: “The Banquet” is a period-drama that takes place in medieval China. The emperor has just been murdered by his brother, who wastes no time usurping the throne. Immediately he tries to assassinate all other possible candidates, the most obvious of these being the crown prince who has exiled himself after his childhood sweetheart married his father. This crown prince turns out to be hard to kill though, and shows up at the imperial palace only to find his sweetheart-slash-stepmother remarried to his father’s murderer. Needless to say tensions mount in the following weeks. This culminates in a banquet where most of the invited have at least one murder planned, and the audience is shown that no amount of calculation can take into account some people’s temper, stupidity or that fatal combination of both: love.
So yes, it’s another typically Asian Tragic Romance.

As it’s also a HISTORICAL Asian Tragic Romance I won’t be able to avoid comparison with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (further to be called CTHD here), particularly since the two movies share a lot of crewmembers.
In short “The Banquet” looks productionwise like CTHD-heavy, while storywise it’s CTHD-light.

Much has been said about the epic art direction by Tim Yip, and I’ll say a bit more: it’s astounding. Seriously, we’ve heard about torture-porn and special effects-porn, but if such a thing exists as art direction-porn this movie is it. Every couple of minutes you’re introduced to a new beautiful set and/or new costumes, and even while most of the film is dark they all look better than splendid. This team won Oscars for CTHD but has also already won several awards for “The Banquet”, and I won’t dispute any of those. Sumptuous doesn’t begin to describe it and the trailers have only shown a fraction. Tip: when you first receive the Hong Kong DVD, start chapter 10 and watch for a minute (spoiler-safe). Now pick up your jaw and go watch the whole movie.

All these beautiful sets are nicely shot in lingering shots. Director Feng Xiaogang can be forgiven for allowing so many slow panning shots, as these gave me as a member of the audience the chance to take in all of the details.
All this is underscored with a fitting soundtrack by Tan Dun which is more pleasant than memorable, and at the moment I cannot tell yet if subsequent hearings will turn me into a rabid fan of the man or not.

Yuen Woo Ping (who is also billed as Executive Producer) does the fight scenes, which proves to be something of a double-edged sword. Like lots of people I loved CTHD but felt taken out of the story when the first fight started. All of a sudden there was this obvious wirework, with people bobbing unrealistically through the air. I know several people who just stopped watching at that point, no longer able to get immersed in the story.
Same here so consider yourself warned: it’s jump around city. Whatever it is you use to fight with, including crossbows, it’s apparently easier when jumping ten feet straight up in the air.
But, and this is the point, it looks so damned good! Just look at the theatre fight. We’ve seen most of these acrobatics before (well, granted, all the blood and flying body parts were new to me) but it still is stunning and makes excellent use of the set, with Imperial Guards running up and sliding down a huge ramp.

(As a side note, these Imperial Guards are an uncommonly useless bunch. They are obviously badasses and look the part, but they consistently fail to assassinate the right person. Worse even: when they are specifically ordered to protect the emperor they... well, let’s put it this way: if I would go to North Korea to kill Kim Jong-il and arrive at the palace, and the army is between me and him, and I wave my gun and say: "Stand aside, I have business with your master only!" would they actually stand aside? I don't think so, and it's probably because Kim Jong-il doesn’t use these Imperial Guards. End of side note.)

Which leaves the story and acting, and this is where some people get angry.
Daniel Wu and Ziyi Zhang play the crown prince and the stepmother, but for me it’s Ge You who runs away with the movie.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Daniel Wu but he unfortunately doesn’t have much to work with. This has a lot to do with the changes made to the original Hamlet story. Hamlet is very passive, but his monologues always give the audience reasons why he doesn’t just kill his uncle. In “The Banquet” these monologues have all disappeared, which makes our crown prince just look sullen. Is he meant to be our hero? If he is it’s just because the audience must assume it. We’re never shown a reason why we should sympathize with him (nearly being murdered doesn’t count as characterization).
It doesn’t help that we never get to know anything about the events concerning his self-imposed exile. Why did his father marry the crown prince's girlfriend? Did the crown prince hate either of them afterwards? We just don’t know. Seeing him rape his arranged fiancée in anger doesn’t get me on his side either.

The opposite happens with the usurper. The only thing we know about the previous emperor is that he married his son’s girlfriend, so what are we supposed to feel when we’re told as an audience that he’s been murdered? Maybe the emperor was a total bastard and his brother had good reason. Subsequently it makes it difficult to hate him for the actions he takes afterwards. Sure, the man is ruthless but he certainly has a point when he says any other action would get him killed immediately (which the screenplay supports), and he shows distaste for the foul acts he occasionally has to order. The so-called “bad guy” is more interesting here than the hero ever is, and Ge You is absolutely a delight to watch in the role.
A far better opponent to the usurper than the underwritten and bland crown prince is the empress. As played by Ziyi Zhang she resembles Lady Macbeth and she is once again very good. Some people may hate her in whatever she does but they have yet to convince me. There is definite chemistry and tenderness between the empress and the usurper and this always helps in selling the story.
Every Asian Tragic Romance needs an innocent girl to be abused all the time. Zhou Xun fills that thankless role admirably, but like Daniel Wu she only gets a couple of interesting moments.

To round this up: this sounds like a truism but when I watch a movie I want to SEE stuff. I will grudgingly forgive bad logic or holes in a screenplay if there are enough pretty pictures to offset this, so for me “The Banquet” delivers in spades. Failing an interesting hero the movie never quite reaches the quality of its own art direction (unlike CTHD) but I wasn’t bored for any of its minutes. I think I understand the gripes and "oscar-bait" remarks from the nay-sayers, but I just don't agree with them.
So I definitely recommend this and as luck would have it there are several good English-friendly versions of this on DVD:

The Hong Kong version
The Hong Kong special edition
The Mainland China super special with cd and wooden Sword!

(And yes I'm easily bewitched by special editions)

The Hong Kong special edition is supposedly sold out but check the 'Newly Restocked' button and you might get lucky.
I cannot vouch for the A/V quality of the Mainland China version but the set looks impressive, includes the soundtrack cd,a replica sword and is temporarily sold for a 50% discount.

That's all folks!