When I first saw Ashes of Time a decade or so ago, I failed to find any meaning in its story. When I watched Ashes of Time Redux four or so days ago, I left the theater with the mystery of its story's meaning still intact. Wong Kar-wai's attempt to revolutionize the swordsman genre in 1994 overshot its goal, and that first aim at genre greatness was not at all improved by his recent reediting, rescoring, and recoloring. Instead of something new, progressive, and innovative, what we see in both the original and the Redux is something that's primordialâa film that has its place in the mental-land before time, in mental-time before self-consciousness, in consciousness (or sense certainty) before it's ordered by the forces of narration and human sensibility.
Because this timeless state of mind is essentially inhuman, watching one of the two Ashes of Time comes close to what it might be like to see the doings of human beings from a horse's or donkey's perspective. What are these people talking about? What are they eating at this table? What are they drinking? What is that woman waiting for? Why does he keep looking at those birds in the swirling birdcage? What is she doing with those eggs? What is he doing with that sword? What's up with the sun, the endless desert, the swordsman in the middle of the lake, the swordsmen swarming the hut? None of these impressions reach the transcendental (or sequencing) structures (or ego) of the Kantian brain; they just hit the light-sensitive cones of the retina and dissolve. The film has no beginning or end. All that matters is the now. The now is liberated from other nows. There is no series that becomes an intelligible unit. Each now is alone. The now is either beautiful or bloody, erotic or violent, lifeless or active, peaceful or terrifying.
The film was shot by Christopher Doyle, one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, but somehow all of the beauty he captured is lost like iridescent grains of sand carried away by the wind. 
