The Stories That Survive Time

I took my family to see The Odyssey on IMAX last week. After three hours of sitting there in awe, we spent the drive home talking about it enthusiastically as if we were film critics. Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the 3,000-year-old literature has now crossed $1.1 billion at the global box office, making it his biggest film ever and the highest-grossing IMAX release in history. The 70mm screenings, only 41 screens worldwide, are sold out through September.

Part of what makes The Odyssey interesting beyond its scale is what Nolan has said about how he made it. In interviews, he has been open about the Asian filmmakers who shaped his visual approach — specific works from Japanese cinema that showed him how to connect characters to their environment, how to use landscape and weather as emotional forces rather than just backdrop. The influence runs deeper than people realize.

That sent me back to thinking about Asian films that operate at the same scale. Epic, historically rooted, visually committed to worlds that feel both ancient and current. Hollywood is not the only one with that ambition. Asia has been making films like this for decades, drawing on histories and conflicts just as vast as anything in Homer’s work. This issue is about three of them.

— Yubin

In 1976, Akira Kurosawa began sketching the paintings that would eventually become Ran. Hundreds of detailed watercolors of battle formations, castle layouts, and costume designs were made over nearly a decade before the film was shot. He couldn't get it financed in Japan. The studios considered it too extravagant, too ambitious, too expensive for a director whose recent films had underperformed domestically. It took a French producer to finally say yes.

Ran is, on paper, an adaptation of King Lear — an aging warlord who divides his kingdom among his three sons and watches things unravel. But Kurosawa overlaid the Shakespeare piece with segments from Japanese history, specifically legends of the warlord Mōri Motonari, rooting the film in the Sengoku period of the 15th and 16th centuries. What emerged as the result was neither a straightforward Shakespeare adaptation nor a conventional samurai film. 

The production facts are quite difficult to believe. With a budget of $11 million, it was the most expensive Japanese film ever made at the time. Two hundred horses were imported. Costume designer Emi Wada spent two years handcrafting armor and robes for 1,400 actors, and would win the Academy Award for her work. A full-scale castle was built on the slopes of Mount Fuji, constructed complete and to scale, and then burned to the ground for the film's central battle sequence. No CGI.

The result is one of the most visually overwhelming films ever made. Roger Ebert called it "a great, glorious achievement." The US National Society of Film Critics named it Best Picture of the year. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have both cited its battle sequences as direct influences. In a recent New York Times interview, Christopher Nolan named Ran as one of his key visual references for The Odyssey, noting it shaped how he connected his characters to their environment through wind and landscape.

The film has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It was re-released theatrically in 2025 to mark its 40th anniversary, where it outperformed Marvel's Thunderbolts on a per-theater average. Some films don't age and this is one of them.

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The Admiral: Roaring Currents (명량) — Kim Han-min (Korea, 2014)

In 1597, during the Japanese invasion of Korea, Admiral Yi Sun-sin faced a Japanese fleet of 330 warships with 12 ships of his own. He won. The battle of Myeongnyang (also the Korean title) remains one of the most extraordinary naval engagements in recorded history, and the film commits fully to its scale and significance. Upon release, it sold 10 million tickets in 12 days (the fastest any Korean film had ever reached that milestone) and finished with 17.7 million total admissions, making it the highest-grossing Korean film in history. Choi Min-sik plays Admiral Yi with the weight of a man who understands he is probably going to die and chooses to fight anyway. The film is the first part of a trilogy: Hansan: Rising Dragon (2022) and Noryang: Deadly Sea (2023) continue the story of Yi's battles. This is the best one.

Stream on Amazon Prime and Apple TV (Trailer)

Red Cliff (赤壁) — John Woo (China/Hong Kong, 2009)

John Woo returned to Chinese cinema after two decades in Hollywood. Red Cliff is based on the Battle of Red Cliffs in 208 AD — one of the defining engagements of the Three Kingdoms period, when the southern alliance of Liu Bei and Sun Quan defeated the numerically superior forces of Cao Cao in a battle that effectively split China into three rival states. Woo released the film in two parts in China (totaling nearly five hours) and a single condensed international cut. Tony Leung plays the strategist Zhou Yu with his calm charisma; Takeshi Kaneshiro brings a lighter touch as Zhuge Liang. The battle sequences owe something to Kurosawa and something to Woo's own Hong Kong vocabulary. He brings to ancient China the same instinct he brought to Hong Kong noir films: men in impossible situations, moving through chaos with purpose.

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For The Odyssey, Nolan turned to Ludwig Göransson — a Swedish producer who had spent years making records with Childish Gambino before crossing into film scoring. The partnership between a pop musician and an epic filmmaker produced something neither could have made alone. Asia has its own versions of that story.

Radwimps had been making indie rock records in Japan since 2004 — earnest, melodically generous albums with a devoted fan base and no particular fame on the international market. Then director Makoto Shinkai approached them to score his new animated film. He gave them the script and asked them to freely write music that would function as both score and song, suitable also for standalone listening. 

What they produced is one of the most unusual film scores in recent Japanese cinema. Your Name (the film) tells the story of two teenagers who begin inexplicably swapping bodies, falling in love across time and space. The Radwimps’ score mirrors that structure: part orchestral sweep, part pop song, moving between instrumental passages and full vocal tracks and blurring the boundary between soundtrack and album. Nandemonaiya, the film's closing theme, is a complete song in its own right. It has been streamed hundreds of millions of times by people who have never seen the film.

The Your Name OST debuted at number one on the Oricon album chart and reached number two on the Billboard World Albums chart. The film itself became the highest-grossing anime film in history at the time of its release, overtaking Spirited Away. Radwimps have since scored two more Shinkai films, Weathering with You (2019) and Suzume (2022), each time deepening a creative partnership that has quietly become one of the most significant in contemporary Japanese cinema.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Il Mare (시월애) OST — Kim Hyun-chul (Korea, 2000)

Kim Hyun-chul had spent the 1990s building a reputation as one of Korea's most distinctive fusion jazz and pop musicians — warm, melodically sophisticated, not quite like anyone else in the Korean scene at the time. Il Mare was his third film collaboration with director Lee Hyun-seung, and the one that defined both of them. The film is a romantic fantasy about two people living in the same house two years apart, exchanging letters through a magical mailbox, and needed music that could capture the sentiment of melancholy and romance. Kim's score does exactly that. Bossa Ghetti, a light bossa nova piece that plays over the film's famous spaghetti cooking scene, became one of the most recognizable pieces of Korean film music of its era. The full OST carries a 4.9/5 rating on Melon (Korean music chart) with over 400 listener ratings reflecting not nostalgia but active, ongoing listening. Warner Bros remade the film in 2006 as The Lake House with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.

Stream on YouTube

2046 OST — Shigeru Umebayashi (Japan, 2004)

In the early 1980s, Shigeru Umebayashi was the leader and bassist of EX, a Japanese new wave rock band. When the band broke up in 1985, he turned to film scoring, rather by circumstance. He spent the next decade building a quiet reputation in Japanese cinema, until a theme he had written for Seijun Suzuki's 1991 film Yumeji found its way into Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love in 2000. Yumeji's Theme — that slow, circling waltz that plays as Maggie Cheung descends the staircase — is now immediately recognizable by many cinephiles. Wong then asked Umebayashi to write the score for 2046, his follow-up. The 2046 OST is the richer, more expansive work, moving between melancholy strings, jazz fragments, and moments of orchestral swell, and reflecting a film that spans decades and genres. A Japanese musician who started in a new wave band became the defining musical voice of Chinese art cinema's most celebrated era.

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Kuwabara Shisei was born in 1936 in Shimane Prefecture which is the part of Japan geographically closest to the Korean Peninsula. He arrived in Seoul on July 14, 1964, carrying a camera and a letter of introduction. Japan and South Korea had not yet normalized diplomatic relations. Anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea was deep and recent. He had spent eight years preparing for the trip and became one of the first Japanese photographers to work in the country. 

He came because of a photograph he had seen: an image of a Korean worker. "I felt I had to go," he later said. What began as a single trip became a sixty-year commitment. He would travel to Korea more than a hundred times.

Before Korea, Kuwabara had made his name documenting Minamata disease — the mercury poisoning crisis in Kumamoto that Japanese media had largely avoided. His photographs of the victims, taken over years of sustained access, eventually reached the American photographer W. Eugene Smith, who traveled to Minamata in 1971 and produced his own landmark work for Life magazine. 

In Korea, he photographed everything. Students protesting against the Park Chung-hee government. The dispatch of Korean troops to Vietnam. The US military presence in Dongducheon. Workers along Cheonggyecheon in the 1960s, before the stream was covered over. The slow transformation of Seoul from a city rebuilding after war into something else entirely. He photographed faces of workers, citizens, students, and soldiers during the turbulent decades of Korea's modernization, from the perspective of someone who was always an outsider.

The work was compiled in 1986 into a photobook titled Kankoku gen'ei (Korea's original scenes). He won the Lee Hye-sun Photography Award, one of Korea's oldest and most prestigious photography prizes. A Japanese photographer, honored by Korea, for spending sixty years paying attention.

A documentary film about his life and work, The Face in the Photo, is currently screening at Seoul CineCube and CGV Yongsan I'Park Mall from August 19, ahead of its theatrical release on September 2. His photographs of the DMZ can be seen at the special exhibition The Pathway of the Wind: DMZ at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History through September 13. For readers in Korea: both might be worth your time.

Black Myth: Wukong was released on August 19, 2024 by Game Science, a Chinese studio based in Shenzhen. It sold 10 million copies in its first three days — the fastest-selling game in Steam's history at the time. By early 2025, it had accumulated nearly one million reviews on the platform, placing it among the top 30 games of all time. China's overseas game revenue reached $20.5 billion in 2025, up 10% year on year.

The numbers are remarkable but the more interesting story is what the game actually is. Black Myth: Wukong is built entirely around Journey to the West — the 16th century Chinese novel that gave the world Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. Players move through landscapes modeled on real temples and architectural sites in Shanxi province, fighting demons and gods drawn directly from Chinese classical mythology. The game doesn't explain its references or soften its cultural specificity for Western audiences. It assumes a familiarity most players don't have, and trusts that the quality of the experience will carry them through anyway.

Reviews on Steam focus overwhelmingly on the graphics and the passion of the developers rather than the mythology. The CEO of Game Science, Feng Ji, has said Wukong was designed to resonate with local cultural groups first. "If the quality is high enough and it endures for a sufficient period, it will naturally radiate to the overseas market." No government backing. No global marketing strategy. Just a game rooted deeply in its own tradition that the rest of the world eventually found its way to.

Journey to the West was written 500 years ago. Sun Wukong has been a fixture of Chinese storytelling ever since. What Black Myth: Wukong did was give him a new medium and a new audience of 20 million people who had never heard of him. It’s a very good story, finally reaching the people it was always going to reach.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com