The construction of storytelling in transnational action cinema : a comparative studie of a major Chinese and American production

This paper means to examine a Chinese language blockbuster in comparison to an American counterpart. The point is to examine the cultural differences and similarities in two similar stories produced in two different production environments. Two films that display both remarkable similarities and differences due to their respective cultural context of production. Here David Bordwell’s narratological schematics is applied to investigate how a Chinese film using a similar approach to Hollywood storytelling differentiates itself. In conclusion, the storytelling and plot construction are slightly less sophisticated in the Chinese film, and the reliance on computer generated imagery plays a bigger part than the physical performances usually associated with Chinese language action-cinema. The result of this study also highlight the differences in the depiction of the detective character and the analysis also raises the question of how we could attribute the cultural differences that emerges in this analysis