Arrow, the Ultimate Weapon - 최종병기 활 (2011)

Great film; as all the links above seem dead, here's a torrent I found today with plenty of active seeds still. It's an 800 MB file with HC Eng Subs and is perfectly viewable if one just wants to see the movie. Alternatively, there is another 2 GB version found on Youtube that is much higher resolution, but appears to have come from the exact same source (HDTV) as the identical Television station's logo occasionally intrudes at exactly the same spot and time. However, this higher res version doesn't have subtitles. That said, what I personally find gratifying about this film (for the amateur historian in me) is that the language spoken by the invaders is actually Manchu itself. For those that don't realize what this means, let's just say that Manchu for all intents has been considered a dead language; it was last spoken a century ago by the Qing imperial court of China. After the fall of the empire, the Manchurian language slowly became replaced and subordinated to Mandarin Chinese, even within areas where Manchu was previously spoken exclusively. Thus, not only is this movie a worthy and ambitious period action film; it can be considered somewhat intellectually stimulating if one takes the time to look beyond the sword and arrow fest. The filmmakers certainly deserve tons of kudos for this; IMHO, very nicely done indeed. My personal rating of 5 of 5.

Spoiler: Dead Manchu Language Discussed In 2007 New York Times Article

Chinese Village Struggles to Save Dying Language

In their village in northeastern China, Meng Shujing, 82, standing at left, and her friends and neighbors are among the last native speakers of Manchu, the dying language of the former Qing dynasty, Chinese linguists say.

Meng Shujing, 82, left, her grandson, Shi Junguang, 30, and his son, Shi Yaobin, 5, try to keep the Manchu language alive in northeastern China.



By DAVID LAGUE
Published: March 18, 2007

Manchu Language Lives Mostly in Archives (March 17, 2007)

SANJIAZI, China — Seated cross-legged in her farmhouse on the kang, a brick sleeping platform warmed by a fire below, Meng Shujing lifted her chin and sang a lullaby in Manchu, softly but clearly. The last native speakers of Manchu live in Sanjiazi, linguists say. After several verses, Ms. Meng, a 82-year-old widow, stopped, her eyes shining. “Baby, please fall asleep quickly,” she said, translating a few lines of the song into Chinese. “Once you fall asleep, Mama can go to work. I need to set the fire, cook and feed the pigs.” “If you sing like this, a baby gets sleepy right away,” she said. She also knows that most experts believe the day is approaching when no child will doze off to the sound of the song’s comforting words. Ms. Meng is one of 18 residents of this isolated village in northeastern China, all over 80 years old, who, according to Chinese linguists and historians, are the last native speakers of Manchu.

Descendants of seminomadic tribesmen who conquered China in the 17th century, they are the last living link to a language that for more than two and a half centuries was the official voice of the Qing dynasty, the final imperial house to rule from Beijing and one of the richest and most powerful empires the world has known. With the passing of these villagers, Manchu will also die, experts say. All that will be left will be millions of documents and files — about 60 tons of Manchu-language documents are in the provincial archive in Harbin alone — along with inscriptions on monuments and important buildings in China, unintelligible to all but a handful of specialists. “I think it is inevitable,” said Zhao Jinchun, an ethnic Manchu born in Sanjiazi who taught at the village primary school for more than two decades before becoming a government official in Qiqihar, a city about 30 miles to the south. “It is just a matter of time. The Manchu language will face the same fate as some other ethnic minority languages in China and be overwhelmed by the Chinese language and culture.” (While most experts agree that Manchu is doomed, Xibo, a closely related language, is likely to survive a little longer. Xibo is spoken by about 30,000 descendants of members of an ethnic group allied to the Manchus who in the 1700s were sent to the newly conquered western region of Xinjiang. But it, too, is under relentless pressure from Chinese.)

The disappearance of Manchu will be part of a mass extinction of languages that some experts forecast will lead to the loss of half of the world’s 6,800 languages by the end of the century. Few of these threatened languages have declined so rapidly, from such prominence, as Manchu. Within decades of establishing their dynasty in 1644, the Qing rulers brought all of what was then Chinese territory under control and then embarked on a campaign of expansion that roughly doubled the size of their empire to include Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia and Taiwan. However, the dynasty’s fall in 1911 meant that the Manchus were relegated to the ranks of the more than 50 other ethnic minorities in China, their numbers dwarfed by the dominant Han, who account for 93 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people, according to official statistics.

Indistinguishable by appearance, the Manchus have since melded into the general population. About 10 million Chinese citizens now describe themselves as ethnic Manchus. Most live in what are now the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang, although substantial numbers also live in Beijing and other northern cities. For generations, the vast majority have spoken Chinese as their first language. Manchu survived only in small, isolated pockets like Sanjiazi, where, until a few decades ago, nearly all the residents were ethnic Manchus. Most are descended from the three main families that made up a military garrison established here in 1683 on the orders of the Qing emperor Kangxi to deter Russian territorial ambitions, Mr. Zhao said. The traditional Manchu-style wood and adobe farmhouses have largely been replaced by Chinese-style brick homes, local residents say. The village now looks like any other settlement in this region as a biting wind whips snow across the bare ground between the houses and piles of dried corn stalks, stacked high to feed cattle and pigs through the winter. Traditional shamanistic rites with ethnic dress and customs have also been mostly abandoned, although some wedding and funeral ceremonies retain elements of Manchu rituals, Mr. Zhao said. Villagers still observe one Manchu taboo that sets them apart from others in China’s far northeast. “We don’t eat dog meat,” Mr. Zhao said. “And we would never wear a hat made from dog fur.” The prohibition, tradition has it, honors a dog credited with having saved the life of Nurhachi (1559-1626), the founder of the Manchu state.

Even now, about three-quarters of Sanjiazi’s 1,054 residents are ethnic Manchus but the use of Chinese has spread sharply in recent decades as roads and modern communications have increasingly exposed them to the outside world. Only villagers of Ms. Meng’s generation prefer to speak Manchu. “We are still speaking it, we are still using it,” said Ms. Meng, a cheerful woman with thick gray hair pulled back in a neat bun. “If the other person can’t speak Manchu, then I’ll speak Chinese.” But she disputes the findings of visiting linguists that 18 villagers are left who can still speak fluently. By her standards, only five or six of her neighbors fit that description. Mr. Zhao, 53, estimates that 50 people in the village have a working grasp of the language. “My generation can still communicate in Manchu,” he said, although he acknowledged that most villagers now speak Chinese almost all the time at home. Ms. Meng’s 30-year-old grandson, Shi Junguang, has studied hard to improve his Manchu and teaches speaking and writing to the 76 pupils, aged 7 to 12, at the village school. This is the only primary school in China that offers classes in Manchu, officials from the local ethnic affairs office said. These lessons, shared with one other teacher, take only a small proportion of classroom time, but are popular with students, say school staff members and other village residents.

“Because they are Manchus, they are interested in these classes,” Mr. Shi said. He is also teaching basic conversation phrases to his 5-year-old son, Shi Yaobin, and encourages him to speak with his great-grandmother. “It would be a great blow for us if we lose our language,” he said. But most experts agree that attempts to preserve Manchu are futile with so few people left to speak it. “The spoken Manchu language is now a living fossil,” said Zhao Aping, an ethnic Manchu and an expert on Manchu language and history at Heilongjiang University in the provincial capital, Harbin. “Although we are expending a lot of energy on preserving the language and culture, it is very difficult. The environment is not right,” he added. Despite the predictions that it is now only a matter of time before Manchu falls silent, in Sanjiazi, Ms. Meng clings to hope. “I don’t have much time,” she said. “I don’t even know if I have tomorrow, but I will use the time to teach my grandchildren. “It is our language; how can we let it die? We are Manchu people.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/world/asia/18manchu.html?pagewanted=all

Spoiler: Links To Spoiler Reviews

http://www.arrow2011.com/p/about-arrowthe-ultimate-weapon.html
http://nanoomi.net/archives/10851

Info (English): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2025526/
Info (Korean): http://movie.daum.net/moviedetail/moviedetailMain.do?movieId=61482
Title: War Of The Arrows (aka Arrow, the Ultimate Weapon) 최종병기 활
Year: 2011
Country: Republic Of Korea
Format: HDTV Rip XvidAVI
Size: 797 MB
Runtime: 114 min
Language: Korean, Manchu
Subtitles: Korean (Hard Coded), English (Hard Coded)
Download Source: Found on Public Torrent Site

Spoiler: Other Artwork & Vidcaps

Yes, I know, there are two red dots on my face...

Dammit, I guess this means I won't be in wedding chambers tonight...

World record party crashers.

Geez, ...what brings you guys all the way here from Manchuria?

Black sailor caps on top of my hoodie; am I a fashionista or what!

I think I'm going to need to change my pants after this...

I'm supposed to be the hero; so how do I look? What? Bandit chic? WTF? Wardrobe!

Yes! It's great to be the Prince! Yeah!

Er... On second thought... maybe not... LOL...

Manchu version of Star Trek 'red shirt' LOL...

Showdown at the (Kare) O.K. Corral.

Man... what a lousy century to be born in...

Plus, one can also view the Low Res English Subbed, uninterrupted trailer on YouTube (another higher res 720p version can also be found but is not subtitled) :

[video=youtube;Xp02hETS_t8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp02hETS_t8[/video]