Marvel's SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS Will Have a Similar Tone To THE MATRIX

Marvel fans seem pretty stoked about Marvel’s upcoming martial arts action film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The movie will come from director Destin Daniel Cretton and Simu Liu is set to star in the film.

I’m personally happy to see that the story will explore the Ten Rings and that we will get to see the real Mandarin in action. While we wait for some additional details on the film, the director has hired Bill Pope, the cinematographer of The Matrix trilogy, to help create the visual look of the movie.

While talking to Collider, Cretton talked about hiring Pope, saying, “[Pope] has a really beautiful style, that’s both naturalistic and grounded, but also heightened, in the best way. And anybody who can shoot The Matrix is probably gonna do great with this one.” He’s then asked if The Matrix will inspire the tone of Shang-Chi, and this was his response:

“Yeah. I think particularly for our first Asian/Asian American step into the MCU, that tone feels right.”

That’s not a bad tone to have and I think it’ll work for Shang-Chi. It’ll be interesting to see how the tone ends up being utilized in the movie. Pope has worked on several other great films in his career including, Army of Darkness, Clueless, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and The Jungle Book.

The director is then asked if he could go back and tell the younger version of himself that he’d be making this movie, what that would have meant to him:

“It would have been amazing because I would have been able to have a superhero that looked like me, rather than choosing the superheroes that I could imagine looking like me, under the mask. I was really into Spider-Man, or even the Incredible Hulk, because they I could picture myself under the Spider-Man mask, or as The Hulk because, when he was The Hulk, he was not really specific to any ethnicity. So, it’ll be nice to give that kid somebody who he can at least say, ‘Oh, that one looks like me.'”

Shang-Chi first appeared in Special Marvel Edition #15 in December 1973 and was created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin. He is the son of a sinister Chinese mastermind and was raised and trained in the martial arts by his father and his instructors. He is described as a spy, a romantic, a philosopher, and an Avenger and is one of the best martial artists in the Marvel universe.

He is eventually introduced to the outside world to do his father’s bidding, and then has to come to grips with the fact his revered father might not be the humanitarian he has claimed to be and is closer to what others call him: The Devil’s Doctor. He also might be centuries old. The deceit makes them bitter enemies.

The film adaptation is also said to “modernize the hero to avoid stereotypes that many comic characters of that era were saddled with. The comic launched around the time that Enter the Dragon became a global sensation and martial arts films raged.”

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings arrives in theaters on February 12, 2021.