She knows money is needed for everything in life, and when not beating up jerks, she takes on any and every street job she can find, including selling melons on the street, cooking barbequed meat at a stall, and serving as a bodyguard and driver for the local sex workers at night after scaring them about how unsafe the streets are. Ye Liu Xi is also unpredictably quirky in her pragmatism. She gives off a Lara Croft vibe without looking like anyone was trying to rip off the character. Ni Ni invests her with an effortlessly cool and snarky vibe as a tough-as-nails heroine who has no patience for bullshit and looks like she would kick your ass for looking at her the wrong way. Ye Liu Xi is one of the most unique new heroines in adventure thrillers. ![]() Parallel World is Ni Ni's Show: Everyone Else is Just Along for the Ride The fact that she gets top billing says it all. In China, any TV series that lands Ni Ni as a lead is considered a major event, and she's the main attraction in Parallel World. She would have a huge international career right now if the Western film industry hadn't chosen to ignore Chinese movies. Ni Ni was discovered by Zhang Yimou and cast in his WWII drama The Flowers of War with co-lead Christian Bale in 2011 and has been one of China's top movie stars ever since. There aren't contrived situations to signal sexual tension, only subtle glances and micro reactions between the two leads as they work together, bicker, and needle each other until they finally admit they're in love. The slowly emerging love story between Chang Dong and Ye Liu Xi is the most surprising adult romance on television right now. There's some cheesy CGI and a lot of dramatic padding, but the real draw is Ni Ni's charisma and her chemistry with Bai Yu, who looks like a younger, more hangdog version of Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. Parallel World is unabashed pulp storytelling that drags a bit like all Chinese drama series stretched out to too many episodes, but the exotic real desert locations and epic sense of high adventure keep the attention. They encounter tomb raiders, gangsters, mysterious life-size shadow puppets with a life of their own, living sandstorms, deadly sand zombies, changelings, and, eventually, a portal to a parallel lost world where exiled clans and sorcerers from the Tang Dynasty have created their own society. Chang Dong's buddy Fei Tang ( Zhao Da), a cowardly antiques dealer and part-time smuggler, tags along before they pick up a gangster's niece ( Xia Meng) and her lovelorn bodyguard ( Li Yun Rui). Ye Liu Xi believes this is linked to the mystery of who she is and where she came from. Chang Dong needs closure by going into the desert to recover her body and his party's and solve the mystery of how the party died. Ye Liu Xi entices Chang Dong with a picture of his girlfriend's body, thought lost in the desert. She spends the next year in the desert towns picking up odd jobs and side gigs to earn enough money to hire disgraced desert explorer Chang Dong ( Bai Yu), still mourning the loss of his party of nineteen people, including his girlfriend, in a doomed expedition two years before. She has no memory of who she is or where she came from and picks the name Ye Liu Xi ( Ni Ni). ![]() She drives the victim back to the nearest town after calling the cops and grabs food and drink from the first table she sees. When a sleazy smuggler cuts her body down to loot it, she comes back to life and beats the crap out of him before rescuing the woman he kidnapped and getting her out of the trunk of his car. Parallel World, adapted from a bestselling novel by Wei Yu (original title: "West Out of the Jade Passing"), begins with a woman hanging from a noose on a tree in the middle of the desert. Rider Haggard, and now it's a popular mainstay in Chinese pop culture. It's a genre that goes all the way back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. You know the score with "tomb raider adventures." They're often an ensemble led by a male hero where the group goes on an expedition to a strange land and encounters supernatural creatures, lost artifacts, and lost civilizations. And we're always on the lookout for the shows that stand out. Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones-style adventures have been a mainstay in Chinese novels and television for at least a decade now, which makes it ironic that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny bombed at the Chinese box office because they don't know or care about Indiana Jones when they already have plenty of entries in that genre. ![]() ![]() Parallel World is another highlight of the current season of Chinese TV dramas that's a bit different: a contemporary tomb raider fantasy adventure that gives us the coolest heroine currently on TV, played by one of China's biggest movie stars Ni NI.
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