Ancient China, gorgeous outdoor settings, a surreal story line and a mysterious character played by Ziyi Zhang. The elements add up to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but they can also describe Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers, the latest in a series of increasingly pale imitations of Ang Lee’s breakthrough martial-arts ballet. Though Crouching Tiger is in itself part of a long tradition of Hong Kong action cinema, it has inspired a new wave of iterations of the formula, none of which approach the prototype in terms of its poetically minimalist plot, beautiful photography and graceful fight scenes.

Allowing that Flying Daggers breaks no new ground, it is an enjoyable film in its own right. Yimou’s stunning cinematography more than redeems the incoherent plot of the movie, which seems to owe too much of its structure to autonomous themes that have become clichés long ago in American cinema.

The movie takes place in 859 A.D. as China’s ruling Tang Dynasty is in decline. The most serious threat to push the increasingly corrupt government into anarchy is an underground organization known as the House of Flying Daggers.

When police captains Leo and Jin hear of a mysterious woman, Mei (Zhang), with possible connections to the Flying Daggers, they decide to investigate in a beautifully filmed but absurdly serious sequence involving Mei’s ability to hit drums with the long sleeves of her gown. The scene emphasizes the force that can lie beneath superficial appearances, a recurring theme in the film.

Yimou’s setting allows for the characters to be perpetually off-balance, because both revolutionaries and the government operatives work for unstable organizations. And, of course, they are both working against each other.

The captains take Mei into custody, but do not reveal her identity to higher authorities. They decide to use her to find the leader of the Flying Daggers so that they can get a bigger reward for themselves—a move that reveals the officials’ surface corruption while concealing greater maneuverings.

The resulting journey of Mei and Jin across the countryside of China is symbolic: The youths must find a path between their increasingly independent inclinations and their roles as pawns of greater organizations. Over the course of their journey, both realize that the organizations they serve are equally corrupt; neither the government nor the Flying Daggers keep the best interests of the people at heart.

Mei and Jin’s yearning to break free of these movements in a personal “revolution” of their own is sweetly idealistic, although the theme of independence only serves to make the movie’s message more generic than its characters and setting. But these ideals are addressed realistically when Mei and Jin eventually discover how difficult it is to break free of these social constraints.

The plot’s trademark characteristic is its incongruity; the movie has no sense of proportion. All three main characters keep secrets, and the series of swift and dramatic revelations at the end of Mei and Jin’s journey pushes the bounds of belief. Their exaggeration makes the film utterly unbelievable, but admittedly fun to watch, especially with Yimou’s adept directorial flourishes. In one memorable example, a summer day surreally turns into a winter snowstorm over the span of a few hours.

The saving grace of this movie is its cinematography, which is nearly impeccable. The characteristic use of strong color and natural imagery that distinguished Yimou in this summer’s Hero returns in full force with Flying Daggers, bestowing the film with a mythic ethos that mostly excuses its often pedantic moralizing.

Usually, the stunning vistas and skillful use of color ordinarily would not be enough in the post-Lord of the Rings cinematic landscape. But the scenery is discovered by the characters and audience simultaneously. Their wonder at the astonishing scenery contrasts adroitly with the surrounding ugliness of petty human motivations, achieving a poetic effect far beyond mere appreciation of pleasant backgrounds.

The setting is integrated into the choreography of the fight scenes, although somewhat more conventionally; it incorporates the stock “fight in a stand of bamboo,” for instance, but often blends the natural with the dangerous more than the genre necessitates. In one memorable scene, the two main characters are saved from a marauding band of soldiers when an unknown, hidden presence kills their foes using wooden daggers. This shows the landscape’s danger despite its beauty, a theme that echoes Zhang’s deadly shirtsleeves.

House of Flying Daggers won’t be remembered as an outstanding film, but rather as the Crouching Tiger imitation it largely is. But though the film is hardly groundbreaking, it is still worth watching. Its themes and morals are a bit musty, but they’re still lofty, and evoke the greatness that Flying Daggers achieves best in its awe-inspiring visual bravado.