Six people are set on a collision course when Jan Wen (Joseph Huang, 黃聖球) shoots a man in a night market on his 18th birthday. The teenager, who spends his time playing the online game King’s World (王者世界) and creating a popular Web comic with his pal Xing (Devin Pan, 潘綱大), is being forced by his strict father to study abroad after scoring poorly on his college exams. As he reaches a breaking point, he orders a gun online.
While society is often quick to condemn such perpetrators (and their parents), the social and psychological reasons leading up to the shooting remain a mystery, especially since this sort of violence rarely happens in Taiwan.
This is not the first production examining the topic after Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) in 2014 shocked the nation with his Taipei MRT knife rampage; notable productions include the 2019 drama series The World Between Us (我們與惡的距離) and last year’s Terrorizers (青春弒戀).
Photo courtesy of Hope Marketing Entertainment
Director Lou Yi-an (樓一安) gets quite ambitious with Goddamned Asura (該死的阿修羅), shifting from virtual gaming and reality, Jan Wen’s Web comic to an alternate “what if” timeline to weave a stylish, fast-paced, yet somewhat overloaded tale from the six seemingly random lives that are affected.
Of course, they’re all somewhat troubled and connected somehow, mostly through King’s World.
Mold (Mo Tzu-yi, 莫子儀) is an investigative reporter writing a story on urban renewal of a low-income housing complex (how many times has that Nanjichang Residences (南機場) courtyard appeared on the big screen?), juvenile delinquent Zero (Wang Yu-xuan, 王渝萱) is a gamer who lives in the complex with her alcoholic mother, Vita (Huang Pei-jia, 黃姵嘉) is a stressed out advertising executive trying to promote the game and her fiance Sheng (Lai Hao-che, 賴澔哲) is a popular King’s World livestreamer who works as an urban renewal officer for the city.
Photo courtesy of Hope Marketing Entertainment
The links between them definitely run deeper than that, but revealing more would spoil the plot. In response to society judging people and their transgressions in too simplistic a manner, this film goes all out to show that nothing is that straightforward.
The theme of being trapped is often seen in the imagery; Jan Wen and Xing repeatedly try to free a dog locked in a small cage, and the Roomba vacuum cleaner in Xing’s apartment is stuck in a small area, going round and round in circles. The acting is solid across the board, and production value high except for the soundtrack, which is rather generic and monotonous.
The viewer needs to focus on each character and their actions to completely follow the events and make sense of the different aspects of reality presented, and it’s definitely an entertaining watch that also works the brain.
Although some have bigger roles than others, the six characters are complex and multi-dimensional, each showing their positive and negative sides. Lou has obviously given them much thought and there are surprisingly no glaring plot holes in such a tangled web. There’s still a lot to keep track of, however, and the dizzying narrative makes the film less impactful and memorable by the end.
Things get a bit preachy in the last part as Lou searches for a resolution; the message is clear enough that a tiny shift of events could result in completely different decisions and outcomes, and that people shouldn’t be so quick to pass judgment on those who commit horrific acts. Anyone could possibly become a killer depending on what goes wrong that day — Mold, for example, almost beats Jan Wen to death in anger after witnessing the shooting.
However, how much does this idea abscond the responsibilities of the perpetrators? Life is not a video game that can just be reset, just like how Jan Wen’s father couldn’t, in his words, “reset” his son’s life by sending him out of the country.
Fortunately, the film doesn’t take the idealistic, sentimental route; tragedy is not prevented this easily even if you have a reset button. It’s easy to condemn murderers and harass their families, but how do we change society into a less repressed place where these highly stressed-out characters can have some support and respite?
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing
Jade Mountain (玉山) — Taiwan’s highest peak — is the ultimate goal for those attempting a through-hike of the Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道), and that’s precisely where we’re headed in this final installment of a quartet of articles covering the Greenway. Picking up the trail at the Tsou tribal villages of Dabang and Tefuye, it’s worth stocking up on provisions before setting off, since — aside from the scant offerings available on the mountain’s Dongpu Lodge (東埔山莊) and Paiyun Lodge’s (排雲山莊) meal service — there’s nowhere to get food from here on out. TEFUYE HISTORIC TRAIL The journey recommences with
RSS