The biggest enemy to Hong Kong movies is boredom. Our creative strength should lie in diversities, not in similarities.

The recent successful movie is The Last Dance (破地獄). It is a 2024 Hong Kong drama film which explores themes related to Hong Kong’s death care. It is also about the conflict of a wedding planner who enters the funeral industry through a partnership with a traditional Taoist priest. Their dispute is about the meaning of life and death through the funeral rituals which they provide. What escalates the movie to stand out is it not being “one-of-a-kind”!

Many jokingly comment that there are now only 3 kinds of movies available in Hong Kong. Cops and robbers films(警匪片), social issue films (社會議題電影) and Mainland Chinese films (內地電影) are the common kinds. Is the decline of Hong Kong movies as a falling star obvious and imminent?

Some pinpoint the severity of the situation by saying that the films currently made are like a “trap-neuter-return” program (放生計劃) ! The program is that when an animal is protected, it is also sterilized and prevented from reproducing. It is finally returned to the wilderness. They draw an analogy that if Hong Kong repeats producing the above usual movies with the financial support from the Government for survival, this will actually sacrifice an opportunity to make a film of another creative new kind which may commercially sustain the out-flowing audience.

Against the above background, Hong Kong film Back to the Past (尋秦記) is surely refreshing. It is a complex but interesting story that weaves together special characters and themes into an exciting movie which goes against the established story pattern of a Hong Kong movie. Back to the Past is a 2025 historical science fiction action film. It is a continuation of the 2001 television series, A Step into the Past (尋秦記), which was based on Wong Yi (黃易)’s novel. The 2025 film stars the original cast members of the TV series including Louis Koo (古天樂)、Raymond Lam (林峯) and Jessica Hsuan (宣萱).They reprise creatively their roles from the television drama.

The story is about a modern-day cop Hong Siu-long who managed to travel back to the Qin Dynasty (秦朝) (around 221 BC to 206 BC) through a time-machine. The Qin Emperor faced a lot of violent attacks. The situation became out of hands. Hong used his present-time tricks to remove weights off the Emperor’s shoulders!

The film is filled up with imaginative and amusing ideas. As Hong is a modern man and obviously out of tune with the ancient people in Qin Dynasty, his awkward circumstances created a lot of laughter and thrills for the audience.

When people in Hong Kong feel overwhelmed, the present trend of searching for nostalgia naturally acts as a good mental reset. We tend to idealize the past and forget the negative aspects of what happened. We recall the beautiful memory of watching the TV drama of this story in 2001. The Hong Kong TV drama in those days proudly dominated Asia. This explains why Back to the Past has turned into a box office smash hit in Hong Kong when many of us miss Hong Kong’s good old days and do feel the accountability to support such a big-budget Hong Kong movie!

The wistful nostalgia of Hong Kong is like a book; and Back to the Past is certainly a wonderful chapter of its contents in 2026!

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