The Banquet

Hamlet, IN ANCIENT CHINA!

The Banquet, known also by its international release title Legend of the Black Scorpion is a 2006 Wuxia adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, with a few notable changes and twists. Gertrude's Expy, the empress Wan, is rewritten as a much younger and more ambitious woman, who is playing a game of her own as the revenge plot marches on.

In the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, Wu Luan is a prince who has left home to pursue the arts to forget his heartbreak. His father has taken and married the woman he loved. Three years later, his uncle murders his father and takes the throne and Wan for himself. Wu Luan returns to court at the summons of the empress to protect him from assassination attempts, and from here he attempts to learn the truth of his father's death and exact revenge on his uncle.

While this is going on, the emperor is completely smitten with Wan and she uses this to her advantage, carving out a place for herself in his court and consolidating her own power. The empress has a plan, and she is biding her time, waiting to make her move.

Because of the time it was made, the similar setting and themes, and the fact that Gong Li was originally slotted for the role of the empress, the movie is often compared with Curse of the Golden Flower.

Tropes used in The Banquet include:
  • Break the Cutie: Qing, who starts the movie as a hopeful young bride-to-be and is slowly broken by the corruption around her. Then she's poisoned.
  • Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Wu Luan and Qing, who deconstruct this as the original play does.
  • The Chessmaster: The empress.
  • Conspicuous CG: Some of the blood effects look a little out of place.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: Pei Hong's execution. All the more cool and unusual for the fact that he invented the method of his death.
  • Deadly Decadent Court: Everyone is trying to kill everyone.
  • Downer Ending: It's based on Hamlet, remember.
  • Due to the Dead: One of the emperor's rare good moments involves ordering that Qing have a state funeral.
  • Foil: Qing and the empress, Pei Hong and Minister Yin, the empress and Wu Luan
  • Gambit Pileup: The banquet at the end of the film.
  • God Save Us From the Queen: The general response to the empress.
  • The Good King: Wu Luan's father is implied to have been this.
  • Hot-Blooded: Yin Sun, the Laertes Expy.
  • Hot Mom: The empress, who is four years younger than Wu Luan. Justified in that she is his stepmother and was engaged to him before marrying his father.
  • The Ingenue: Qing.
  • Insistent Terminology: The first conversation of the movie between Wan and the emperor is basically them deciding if they will settle into the role of husband and wife by playing with calling each other in-laws.
    • Pei Hong dies for referring to the empress as the empress dowager, loudly and clearly.
  • Kill'Em All: The emperor sends assassins to kill Wu Luan, but all the men in his acting troupe are wearing identical masks and can't be told apart. The assassins are forced to kill all of them. None of them is Wu Luan.
  • Lady in Red: The empress wears either red or black for most of the film. Scenes emphasizing her sexual dominance over the emperor show her in, or surrounded by, red fabric.
  • Laughing Mad: Pei Hong, after he finds he's the only man of integrity left.
  • Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Qing and the empress.
  • Man in White: Wu Luan wears white through most of the film. His mask on the other hand turns increasingly dark as the court becomes more corrupt.
  • Manipulative Bastard: The empress.
  • Oblivious to Love: Wu Luan spends so much of the movie focused on the empress that he can't tell Qing is honestly in love with him.
  • Perfect Poison: The black scorpion venom that killed the old emperor.
  • Poison Is Corrosive: Wu Luan's hand starts to rot after he grabs a poisoned blade.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: The empress wins the throne, but loses the man she loves in the process.
  • Scenery Porn: Largely in black,white, and red, though scenes at the theater are also overwhelmingly green.
  • Show Within a Show: Wu Luan puts on a play for the empress's coronation. This doesn't just get the emperor, the tension in the room implicates that everyone knows what he's on about.
  • Sibling Triangle: The emperor murdered his brother and married his brother's wife. Wan didn't want anything to do with this, but she submits. Or appears to.
  • Waif Fu: A wuxia film with Zhang Ziyi is almost guaranteed to have this.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: The empress admonishes Wu Luan more than once when he says or does something stupid that's going to get him killed.
  • Woman in Black: The empress wears either black or red for most of the film. Black is worn particularly in scenes where she's quietly scaring the crap out of everybody.
  • Woman in White: The empress at the beginning of the film and her first on-screen meeting with Wu Luan. This is an emphasis of her lost childish innocence and purity.
  • Xanatos Gambit:
  • You Killed My Father: Again, Hamlet.
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