disgracetoscholars | CANARY REPORT: CANDLE IN THE TOMB (Reply)

Canary Report: Candle in the Tomb/鬼吹灯之精绝古城

Canary Reports are a public service to help protect everyone who makes better choices than the Disgrace to Scholars Collective. We watch these and report back in so you don’t have to. Have a drama you want us to try out? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Where To Watch It: This is show is available in its entirety on Dramafever and Viki. This is not a suggestion that you watch it.

Summary: A Chinese-American archaeologist, Shirley Yang (Joe (Qiao En) Chen) is trying to find her father who disappeared hunting for tombs in Xinjiang. The Chinese professor overseeing the hiring in Beijing introduces her to former army officer/current tomb robber Hu Bayi (Jin Dong), who learned the art of tomb feng shui from an old family book and has a special feng shui compass, and Hu’s childhood friend/co-tomb robber Wang Kaixuan (Zhao Da), called Pangzi. The team set off to the Taklamakan Desert to explore a “ghost cave” and hopefully find Shirley’s father; Hu and Wang also hope to find a way to undo the curse they are currently under because, well, they’re tomb robbers.

Review/Comments: Full disclosure: I think I got tossed on this particular grenade because my academic background is Asian art history, and hollyberries thought it would be hilarious to listen to me yell.

I honestly didn’t think I would have much to say about this drama, since I initially only made it one episode in before deciding I was bored. Then I decided if I was going to do this thing, I would do it properly and give the show at least one story arc to try and grab me. This means I grimly watched four more episodes, which in turn means I’m probably going to hatewatch the remaining sixteen. I just don’t need witnesses for that particular shame.

Candle in the Tomb is a webdrama based off an incredibly popular novel Ghost Blows Out the Light, by Zhang Muye. It’s about tomb robbers, and according to its wikipedia page, it received acclaim for its "exciting and fast-paced storyline." I’m pretty sure someone on the production team edited the wikipedia page, because it takes until Episode 3 before anything really happens.

The first episode introduces us to Hu Bayi, his old army buddy Wang Kaixuan, who is called Pangzi by everyone. As in, we don’t get his given name until the end of Episode 5. I’m going to call him Wang Kaixuan. Anyway, Hu is fresh off leaving the army, Wang is a mostly broke vendor of probably bootleg cassette tapes, and the two of them get thrown in the direction of tomb robbing as a career by a shady antiques dealer, Mr. Tooth. (He has a gold tooth, which he claims is Ming Dynasty gold but I am skeptical).

Apparently tomb robbing is a good career choice for these two idiots because Hu has the family tomb feng shui manual and the family feng shui compass, coming as he does from a line of tomb robbers. They decide to give the antiquities market a try--well, Wang Kaixuan decides they should give it a try--and the two of them head back to their home village to see if they can kind of swindle the villagers out of their old pottery. To their horror, the old chairman has already given the pottery to the government archaeology team that’s excavating a big tomb in the nearby mountains, so they set out to try and find a rumored Japanese fort. The old chairman sends a young lady by the name of Ying Zi after them to be their guide and also the most competent member of the party up until they all literally fall into a tomb.

Having discovered the tomb of a Jin dynasty (1115-1234) general, Wang talks Hu into opening the sarcophagus. First, they have to put a candle in the southwest corner, with the understand that if a ghost blows out the candle they have to put everything back and leave. Wang tries to pocket some jade; the candle goes out. Wang argues it was the wind and they should relight the candle; Hu goes along with it. The candle flame turns green, the zombified general rises from his grave, and chaos ensues.

The main thing I knew about this webdrama going in, other than tomb robbers, was that the author of the original webnovel went through and scrubbed all the references to anything supernatural before its publication as a print book. This, combined with the whole ‘nothing supernatural in dramas set in the modern period’ thing, had me wondering how the hell the producers were going to dodge the supernatural stuff when the drama summary mentions a curse.

So there’s the lumbering zombie of a very pissed off Jin general who just wants his jade back with a side of murdering the jackasses who tried to rob his tomb.

There are ghost children after the idiots stumble into the old Japanese fort, because the Japanese had found and excavated another tomb, this one with child sacrifices.

(There are also CGI attack bats, but that’s not supernatural so much as a fundamental misunderstanding of animal behavior, as well as the fact they’d all get rabies and die from that alone.)

There is thank you jade from the ghost children after the zombie general is defeated and they have carried the child sacrifices out of the tomb for a proper burial.

Zombie Jin general, ghost children, reappearing jade. And this is not supernatural how?

(hollyberries assures me that it is apparently all hallucinations, HALLUCINATIONS. I REMAIN SKEPTICAL.)

Anyway, I was mostly sad that Ying Zi went back to her village after all this while the show follows Hu and Wang back to Beijing. Ying Zi was awesome--a good shot, handler of a cool pack of dogs, possessed of much more common sense than either Hu or Wang. Alas, she is not a main character.

Back in Beijing, at the end of the fifth episode, we hit the Actual Plot, namely Shirley Yang and her team of archaeologists. As I sat there grimly watching the introduction of this merry band, I admitted to myself I was just a little invested in finding out if they all survive the Taklamakan Desert.

To summarize: The pacing is bad. So bad. Seriously, why did it take five episodes to get to Actual Plot. The cinematography suffers from being mostly shot in low light environments like a tomb and an underground fort. The CGI is...okay, and I’m pretty sure the zombie general is a guy in rubber suit. The acting is fine. Hu Bayi is stoic, Wang Kaixuan is there to be comic relief and to make bad situations worse. Mr. Tooth is there to swindle Westerners out of their money by selling them fake antiques. (This is actually pretty accurate when it comes to depicting the Beijing antiquities market post-Deng Xiaoping’s opening up of Chinese markets to the West.)

As for the whole idea that there’s tomb robber lineages with secret teachings and feng shui compasses designed to find tombs, my main reaction is WHAT LIKE IT’S HARD. Tombs throughout Chinese history, especially imperial tombs, were not been designed with subtlety in mind! There are big honking manmade tumuli over the actual graves, there’s the family shrine complex outside the tomb, there’s often a fucking boulevard lined with statues leading up to the whole thing! People were pretty sure they knew where Qin Shihuang’s tomb was well before the Terracotta Warriors turned up in a field because IT WAS A FUCKING HUGE TOMB MOUND. The surprise was more that the Terracotta Warriors were a thing, and that the tomb complex extended that far out.

I’m not even going to get into the whole issue of tomb robbing, because then I’ll start yelling about provenance and the importance of context for understanding artifacts and we’ll probably end up with me yelling about the theft of large chunks of Buddhist cave shrines in the early 20th century and it’s all downhill from there.

You can see why the Scholars Collective thought it would be hilarious to have me watch this.

Canary Ratio: 5/21 (so far, lord help me)

Canary Flashpoint: ...I can’t fast forward and still understand what’s going on, so I watched every minute of those five episodes.