One climatic fight scene that people will be talking about for years to come occurs amid lush green treetops where Wudan style martial arts master Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat - Hard Boiled) battles a young upstart fighter Jen (Zhang Ziyi) on the bending limbs of trees’ thin branches in a lush forest. It’s a zippy gravity defying sequence that’s far more breathtaking and suspenseful than any parade of slow motion bullet dodging in The Matrix or any glossy sequence from a John Woo film. Drifting gravity becomes a reappearing character to the story as a mystical ally to Li.

Mysticism, irony, and tragedy collide when Li Mu Bai tries to follow a new path in life by passing along his mighty sword, the Green Destiny, to a friend of his true love’s father. Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh - Tomorrow Never Dies) is Li’s eternally patient and caring admirer who marshals justice in assisting Li with recapturing the sword while suppressing her emotions for him. Theft of the Green Destiny sets off a chain of events that pull Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien together into a power struggle with evil martial arts crone/rival Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei - Wing Chun), and her covetous yet skilled Wudan apprentice Jen Yu. Fox, who had previously murdered Li’s Wudan master, proves to be an especially menacing enemy by virtue of having stolen and studied a manual on the ancient Wudan style of martial arts. Jade Fox’s wizard-of-oz witch hat and black baggy clothing conceal a vicious and a skilled warrior who will stop at nothing to bring Li Mu Bai down.

The story folds into an epic structure that encompasses Jen’s recent romantic history with badlands bandit Lo (Chang Chen) in western China’s visually striking Xinjiang region overlooking the Himalayan Mountains. It’s revealed that Lo, in bandit tradition, kidnapped Jen away from her politically prominent family during a highway robbery. The couple’s uneasy union gives way to a hot love affair between captor and victim that Lee articulates as a complex event of class-crossing rebellion. Ang Lee relieves the film of any romantic boredom for the audience by emphasizing the harsh but radiant conditions of central Asia with Jen’s gutsy ability to fight like a banshee when she isn’t falling in love with her captor.

Irony and humor levitate Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in a tone and atmosphere that synthesize the story into a spectacle fueled vision of mystical destiny. Michelle Yeoh is remarkably elegant and mature as Li’s adoring yet neglected supporter. Chow Yun Fat proves his captivating screen presence to be magnetic as ever with his signature control and restraint as when he fights with one hand placed defiantly behind his back. If there’s such a thing as profoundness in martial arts fight scenes, you will find it in Chow Yun Fat’s supple movements and dignified face as he kicks, punches, and wields the Green Destiny with effortless grace. Ang Lee’s dazzling imagery and rich narrative textures in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon promise that the movie will become a classic in years to come.

A few years after a climbing accident causes a split between Peter Garrett (Chris O’Donnell - Cookie’s Fortune) and his sister Annie (Robin Tunney - The Craft), the two siblings are reunited at the base of K2 in the Himalayas. Peter, who has given up climbing since the accident, works as a nature photographer for National Geographic magazine, while Annie adds to her climbing resume by attempting to climb K2 with Elliot Vaughn (Bill Paxton - A Simple Plan), a selfish corporate millionaire. A quick moving storm and an avalanche strand Annie, Elliot, and their expert guide Tom McLaren (Nicholas Lea - television’s "The X-Files") inside a deep crevasse of snow and ice, from which Peter and a small team of experienced mountain climbers attempt to rescue them.

Hollywood movies don’t get much more rudimentary than Vertical Limit. Get your protagonist and antagonist up in the same high tree, throw rocks at them, throw boulders at them, and finally let your protagonist off the hook. For whatever light social commentary Vertical Limit makes about the evils of blind ambition and cold-hearted selfishness, the movie ends up as a far more negative commentary on mountain climbers themselves. For all of the dead bodies that litter mountains like Everest and K2, there is an obnoxious vacuity consistent in the personalities of people with enough of a death wish to go places where human beings clearly have no business going. Even Peter, who seems to have found sanity after his climbing disaster, oversteps rational thought by insisting that nitroglycerine be brought along to assist in a rescue mission that never demands the volatile stuff in the first place. Death and loss of body parts seems to be a fetish that mountain climbers long to fulfill, even if it’s just to be near other climbers to whom the calamities occur.

Vertical Limit was undoubtedly a very difficult film to shoot, and stands as a technical achievement of sorts. The movie was shot at 10,000 feet above sea level on Mt. Cook in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and does a very convincing job for the most part of placing an audience smack in the middle of cold high altitude terrain. Apart from a few obviously fake snowflakes and a jerky computer generated avalanche scene, Vertical Limit sets up strikingly real mountain elements of glaciers, steep terrain, and stormy conditions.