Two Of The 21st Century's Best Martial Arts Movies Owe Debts To This 3-Hour 1971 Epic
•February 12, 2026
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Why It Matters
The film’s pioneering female‑led storytelling redefined genre conventions, prompting a resurgence of high‑budget wuxia that dominates global box‑office today. Its impact illustrates the lasting commercial value of innovative narrative structures in martial‑arts cinema.
Key Takeaways
- •A Touch of Zen (1971) achieved 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating.
- •Film introduced feminist heroine, influencing modern wuxia.
- •Ang Lee cites King Hu as inspiration for Crouching Tiger.
- •House of Flying Daggers follows Zen’s narrative and visual style.
- •Despite box office flop, film reshaped 21st‑century martial arts cinema.
Pulse Analysis
The 1971 two‑part wuxia masterpiece A Touch of Zen arrived at a time when Chinese cinema was experimenting with mythic storytelling and elaborate choreography. Directed by King Hu after his earlier successes Come Drink With Me and Dragon Inn, the film combined lush landscapes, intricate wirework, and a narrative centered on a scholarly protagonist and a formidable female swordswoman. Critics lauded its visual poetry and progressive gender dynamics, awarding it a 97 % rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite modest box‑office returns. Its 180‑minute runtime allowed a sprawling, meditative pace that set a new artistic benchmark for the genre.
The ripple effects of Hu’s vision are evident in the early‑2000s wuxia renaissance. Ang Lee openly credited A Touch of Zen for shaping the tonal balance and choreography in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, while Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers borrowed the film’s emphasis on a strong female lead and lyrical fight sequences. Both modern classics echo Zen’s use of natural settings as narrative characters and its integration of philosophical dialogue with action. This intertextuality demonstrates how a single historic work can inform the aesthetic vocabulary of subsequent blockbusters.
From a business perspective, the legacy of A Touch of Zen underscores the commercial upside of revisiting and reinterpreting classic storytelling frameworks. Studios now recognize that audiences respond to nuanced heroines and richly textured world‑building, prompting higher budgets for wuxia productions that aim for global distribution. Moreover, the film’s critical acclaim has become a case study in how artistic risk—such as splitting a story across two releases—can yield long‑term brand equity. As streaming platforms seek distinctive content, the Zen blueprint offers a template for marrying heritage cinema with contemporary market demands.
Two Of The 21st Century's Best Martial Arts Movies Owe Debts To This 3-Hour 1971 Epic
Two of the best martial arts movies of the 21st century owe debts to A Touch of Zen
By Nicholas Raymond
Published Feb 11, 2026, 10:00 PM EST
Nicholas Raymond is an author and journalist based out of Alabama, where he proudly roots for the Alabama Crimson Tide football team. A graduate of the University of Montevallo, he has a degree in mass communication with a concentration in journalism.
Two of the best martial arts movies of the 21st century owe debts to A Touch of Zen, a two‑part wuxia epic from 1971. Characterized by a fantasy‑like ancient‑China setting and heavy emphasis on swordplay and wirework, the martial‑arts subgenre known as wuxia has produced a long list of all‑time great films, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The popularity of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon led to other forays into that kind of world, with The House of Flying Daggers joining it as one of the 21st‑century’s best martial‑arts films. The two were part of a wave of wuxia movies that launched in the early 2000s, but they were hardly the first of their kind.
Rather than represent a new trend, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Flying Daggers reflected a resurgence of a medium that had once defined the martial‑arts genre. A major factor in the popularity once enjoyed by wuxia films was the critical success of A Touch of Zen.
A Touch of Zen’s Legacy
A few years after directing two wuxia masterpieces in Come Drink With Me and Dragon Inn in the mid‑1960s, celebrated Chinese filmmaker King Hu helmed a third, A Touch of Zen, in 1970. Rather than releasing the whole story at once, it was split in half due to budget costs, with the second portion hitting theaters in 1971.
Since then, A Touch of Zen has been treated as one film, re‑released and aired as such, allowing it to run at a whopping total of 180 minutes. It tells a long, sprawling narrative about a good‑natured scholar and a female swordswoman on the run, who meet, share an adventure together, and eventually form a romantic relationship.
Although both parts of the story failed at the box office, the film was revered by critics and continues to be a beloved entry into the world of wuxia, underscored by its remarkable 97 % score on Rotten Tomatoes.
A Touch of Zen Had a Major Influence on Other Wuxia Films
It’s not just critics and audiences that loved A Touch of Zen. Notable martial‑arts filmmakers—including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Ang Lee—have cited their fondness both for its director, King Hu, and his work on A Touch of Zen specifically.
The film’s feminist themes and the way it allows a female character to carry the story on her shoulders (a staple of many King Hu films) were unorthodox at the time. A Touch of Zen’s heavy reliance on its headstrong, unconventional heroine received a lot of praise and laid the groundwork for other female‑led wuxia movies, with House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon being its two biggest successors.
Film Details
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Release Date: November 18, 1971
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Runtime: 200 minutes
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Director: King Hu
Cast
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Hsu Feng – Yang Hui‑ching
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Shih Chun – Ku Shen Chai
Writers
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King Hu
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Pu Songling
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