Seven unique swordsmen(including one swords-woman) band together to save a village and its people from the evil General Fire-Wind. And that's about all you need to know about the plot... and that's what is so great about this film! Although two and a half hours long it has so many fantastic characters and battles you won't find yourself checking the timer on the DVD player once. For those who find Wuxia films like Hero, House Of Flying Daggers, and Curse Of The Golden Flower to be perfect you may lose interest in this quickly. Gone is alot of the "beautiful" and artistic fights only to be replaced with more brutal swordplay action that leaves heads split and limbs detached... and thankfully next to zero flying! Many reviewers have blasted the movie for cutting its original runtime of over four hours(!) to the aforementioned two and a half, and although I'm one of the fans who would love to see the full version too, I can't knock the reasoning for the edits(although a second disc with the full-length film would have been nice Dragon Dynasty!) and they seem to have been done as well as was posible. It's true that you don't get to know all of the characters as good as you would like, but you get enough to keep you more than interested in them until the very end. Another knock is the stylish garb of the villains, who look like they have been displaced from a Mad Max movie rather then ancient China. But still, once you see just how vicious and ruthless they are, the costumes seem like a perfect choice. This is a must see for fans of Asian cinema, epic action films, or just plain old good movies... not to mention it's a nice return to form for director Tsui Hark(The Blade, Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain, Once Upon A Time In China 1-3).