A Writer's Odyssey 2

Kind of idly wondering if this will pick up more showtimes during the week, since the Taylor Swift thing basically ate theaters alive this weekend, taking up a crazy number of showtimes and seemingly making scheduling hard. It wasn't exactly a packed house, although it seems to be doing a bit better in China than the movie opening here next weekend, though it's getting stomped by the third movie in Chen Kaige's The Volunteers trilogy during its National Day opening. It's day-and-date, which suggests the first one did okay here.

It's kind of a weird sequel, because it seems like it abandons a lot of the lore of the first one. It's been four years, but it's odd looking at that movie's review and going "oh yeah!" at a bunch of things that were really pushed back or rearranged for this one. If nothing else, it's kind of an interesting way to do a sequel, one you see more often in books than movies, but also more than a bit strange.


Ci Sha Xiao shuo jia 2 (A Writer's Odyssey 2)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 October 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (eventually) or the first movie (Prime link), or buy the first on disc at Amazon

There's a moment in A Writer's Odyssey 2 where one character reminds another that "remember, they sent me to kill you" and, because I didn't revisit the original before watching this, I was like, right, there was a "they" last time! What happened to them? The funny thing is, it wasn't until re-reading my previous entry before starting this one that I realized that the feeling that the filmmakers (or the original novel The Assassination of the Author) are making things up as they go along doubles once you try to look at the series as a whole.

As the film starts, it's been a few years since Lu Kongwen (Dong Zijian) completed his serialized novel Godslayer by having his author-stand-in character slay the demonic Redmane. Somehow, in the aftermath, a charlatan/hacker going by Cicada (Chang Yuan) took control of Lu's account and is regarded as the true author of Godslayer, and has announced a sequel - but, it turns out, writing is hard, so he wants to work with Lu on it. Lu, meanwhile, is living with Guang Ning (Lei Jiayin), the would-be assassin who has reunited with his daughter Tangerine (Wang Shengdi), running a small restaurant. Lu's mind has been returning to that world of late, where Redmane has resurrected in human form (Deng Chao), and after encountering Lu Kongwen in what Lu thought was just a dream, convinces his world's Kongwen, Tangerine, and Tong Hu (also Lei Jiayin) to join him on a quest to kill the cruel God who apparently is casually writing the deaths of hundreds to highlight the cruelty of the three warlords who are fighting for control - which is to say, the real world's Lu Kongwen.

So, is Li Mu alive again, or still (since one of the genuinely weird things about the ending of the first was that the audience never knew whether the real-world CEO connected to Redmane died when he did)? No idea! There may be one blink-and-miss-it mention of Aladdin Group in the entire movie. Does Guang Ning still have an amazing ability to throw rocks for impossible results akin to Daredevil foe Bullseye? Never mentioned! What is Cicada's whole deal? Not sure, the guy sort of exits without fanfare midway through the movie and doesn't really figure into the story after that, since he doesn't have a Godslayer-world doppelganger - although, for all I know, this sort of online identity theft may be a thing that happens relatively often in China and not a big deal, but it sure seems like he's just a random plot device to knock Lu Kongwen back to dire straits but get him involved again. It's kind of sloppy writing, and even more so when you try to connect to what came before.

That said, it mostly works well enough if one comes in knowing it's a second part but not particularly worried about that. The situation lu Kongwen is in kind of seems iffy, but Dong Zijian gives a surprisingly compelling performance as a man who has briefly tasted success for doing something he loves but has stewed over how it's been taken away from him for the past few years, and see that seep into his cheerful, idealistic avatar. Deng Chao is playing to the balconies as Redname, but nevertheless manages the thing where you can see the heroes going along with him despite his obviously being evil. The crossover between the real world and the fantasy world tends to draw a grin, even when it's being very silly.

Plus, the fantasy world stuff is fairly fun. Once again, it occurs to me after the movie that Lu Kongwen is maybe meant to be the sort of fantasy writer who can really conjure up a nifty image but is kind of terrible at structure, and that's why so much of the stuff in the fantasy world seems kind of slapdash and under-explored, but also quite cool: I love the dragon airships and hope the promised/threatened third movie gives us a whole sequence built around them (as in the first, they are probably a heck of a thing to see in Imax 3D), Redmane can eat people with his hair, and it usually comes at the end of a niftily-staged duel. Returning director Lu Yang is back on the sharp blacks-and-whites aesthetic, but there's room for whimsy in his grimdark world, and the action is pretty good, feeling a bit weightier than other super-powered, CGI-heavy millieus.

Ultimately, though, the story seems kind of messy, and for a movie where the filmmakers are very explicitly saying to note the connections between the fantasy world and the real world, it doesn't seem to be about much in particular. Sure, there are metaphors all over the place - the film very helpfully underlines them - but when it comes right down to it, just what is this writer's odyssey and how is it affecting him? This movie doesn't necessarily have to be about something extraordinarily profound, but the way it bops around from playing one game to another tends to highlight that it's not quite as clever as it wants to present itself as.

Indeed, the mid-credit sequence is a bunch of "hey, this thing that was kind of fun earlier on doesn't really make any sense", hinting at something else that will show up in a part 3 (not sure what, as it involved some unsubtitled text). It's probably just enjoyable enough for me to get a ticket to that threequel when it arrives, although there's a real risk of diminishing returns.