In the very brief span of just nineteen months, between multiple Oscar wins for The Deer Hunter in April 1979 to the disastrous financial and critical failure of Heaven’s Gate in November 1980, Michael Cimino went from being a celebrated Hollywood darling to a pariah in the filmmaking industry. The director wouldn’t attempt (or wouldn’t be allowed to attempt) a comeback for another five years. Unfortunately, his chosen project, Year of the Dragon, didn’t do much to rehabilitate his image.
If less of a bomb than Heaven’s Gate had been, Year of the Dragon was another box office disappointment that took a beating from many critics and most of the entertainment press at the time. Much of its poor performance can be attributed to the controversy that surrounded the film for its alleged racism.
I say “alleged” with many mixed feelings. On the whole, I feel the charges of (to use a euphemism) racial insensitivity are valid and merited. At the same time, I don’t believe Cimino set out to make a racial statement, but rather just to make a crime thriller set against an exotic cultural backdrop. I also think the movie is mostly a pretty strong piece of filmmaking from a talented (if misguided in this case) artist. Nevertheless, watching it today, in 2026, during such a terribly fraught political moment where abusive law enforcement are terrorizing minority communities across the United States in real life, is even more uncomfortable than it may have felt to audiences in 1985. I might go so far as to say that right now is almost the worst possible time to revisit Year of the Dragon. I didn’t quite understand or expect that when I pulled the movie off my shelf.
| Title: | Year of the Dragon |
| Year of Release: | 1985 |
| Director: | Michael Cimino |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
The film starts off on shaky footing with an on-screen disclaimer more or less promising that the movie isn’t meant to be racist on purpose. That’s obviously not a good sign, and will immediately put many viewers in a defensive posture. Based on a novel by author and former NYPD Deputy Commissioner Robert Daly, the story follows a white police captain, literally named Stanley White (Mickey Rourke), who transfers in to take over New York City’s Chinatown district for the purpose of cracking down on the rampant crime there.
This assignment is, in part, a sham by Stanley’s superiors, many of whom have backdoor deals with the old-guard leaders of the Chinese triads to let them operate their gambling and narcotics rackets unimpeded so long as they maintain order on the streets. That longstanding detente is disrupted when youth gangs run riot through the area, murdering established crime bosses right out in the open and (more importantly) shattering the tourist-friendly facade of the Chinatown neighborhoods.
Stanley arrives under direct orders to focus on the violent kids and get the streets back under control, but he has more ambitious plans of his own. Stanley is an old-fashioned ball-buster that even his own wife calls an, “arrogant, self-centered, condescending son of a bitch,” a description he finds flattering. He boasts that he can’t be bought, and wastes no time using an army of cops to wage war on the triads from the top down, intending to wipe all organized crime out of the city, starting in Chinatown and eventually branching outwards.
No question about it, this is a lot of macho, Right-wing posturing bullshit in which a Righteous White Avenger must exert his will and use any means necessary to impose order onto the chaos caused by filthy immigrant criminals. In retrospect, it might seem ironic that the film’s screenplay was co-written by Oliver Stone, who’d go on to become one of the loudest and most divisive of Hollywood Liberals. However, Stone’s actual politics have always been more complicated than his reputation suggests. Stone has long had a fascination with and admiration for strong-arm dictators, and his earlier screenplay for Midnight Express had similar issues with racial stereotyping.
To give it some credit, the movie makes a little bit of effort to acknowledge the contradictions of the ideas it’s trying to juggle. The script doles out a fair amount of exposition about Chinese history and culture, as well as the complicity and corruption of the city’s and the police department’s white leadership. Stanley himself is also never a particularly sympathetic character. He’s a bullying asshole who puts on a show about how torn up he feels when he wife leaves him, but also cheats on her at the first opportunity and treats both wife and mistress like total garbage. Always simmering just slightly below the story’s surface is a subtext that Stanley’s obsession with punishing Asian criminals is motivated by a desire for payback related to his experiences as a veteran in the Vietnam War.
I believe both Stone and Cimino probably meant for Stanley to be explicitly identified as a racist. Sadly, that got watered down by the studio’s need to make its top-billed star the undisputed hero of the story, and was also undercut by Rourke’s rugged good looks (a few years before the actor messed up his face) and magnetic charisma.
Setting aside all extra-textual problems and judging it strictly on technical and artistic grounds, Year of the Dragon is otherwise a well-crafted drama absolutely dripping with atmosphere in every scene. Despite being shot largely on soundstages in North Carolina, the Chinatown settings are perfectly convincing. Undeterred by the stories of Cimino’s out-of-control excesses on Heaven’s Gate, producer Dino De Laurentiis obviously threw a lot of money into this project anyway, and all of it is evident on screen. For his part, Cimino was reportedly well-behaved this time and managed to stay within both his schedule and budget with no off-camera drama.
The lead performances by Mickey Rourke and John Lone (who’d shoot to stardom a couple years later in The Last Emperor) as his main Chinese antagonist are compelling. Fashion model Ariane Koizumi took a drubbing from critics of the day for her role as a reporter who has an affair with Stanley, but some of that reaction was likely driven by its own racism. The actress herself does nothing wrong, and can hardly be blamed that her character is underwritten and treated as a prop (complete with flagrantly gratuitous nudity) by the filmmakers and screenplay.
Taken at face value, the main narrative is compelling, and the action scenes are exciting. As the plot expands to encompass the international drug trade, it’s clear that Cimino and Stone had ambitions to make this the next French Connection. That obviously didn’t work out as well as they hoped.
As a viewer watching four decades later, I feel conflicted about how to judge a movie like Year of the Dragon. I’m not naive enough to think that Chinese gangs don’t exist or that organized crime isn’t a real problem in places like Chinatown. I know that this story has some basis in reality, starting from a book written by someone who lived through it. Even that being the case, letting a bunch of white guys (the author, the screenwriter, the director) tell that story, with a white hero as the face of it, feels insurmountably tone-deaf, especially when we can see how the behavior and attitudes showcased here (often portrayed in a favorable light) would grow exponentially more toxic over time.
The Blu-ray
Year of the Dragon came to Blu-ray in 2019 as part of the Warner Archive Collection. The movie does not appear to have undergone any sort of extensive restoration at that time. Picture quality is flawed in a few significant ways, but is generally acceptable if you give it some time to settle in with it.
At a guess, I’d assume that the video master was scanned from an Internegative or Interpositive source. The 2.40:1 image is soft, sometimes distractingly so, and very grainy. Not helping matters much, cinematographer Alex Thomson (Excalibur, Legend) was often fond of soft and grainy imagery, limiting how detailed this film could look even in a best case scenario. However, as happened with Vinegar Syndrome’s recent 4K remaster of The Keep (also shot by Thomson), I’d bet a new scan of the camera negative would yield better results than this.
Even more problematic, this transfer has quite elevated black levels and flattened dynamic range. If watching on a standard 16:9 screen, the contrast against the pure black of the letterbox bars will make the whole movie look overly bright and dull, even faded. (That’s only slightly less of a problem for those few of us watching in Constant Image Height projection without letterboxing.)
In its favor, the transfer doesn’t look to suffer any noticeable Digital Noise Reduction, artificial sharpening, or other unwanted digital processing. It seems to be a faithful enough rendering of a less-than-ideal source element. Over the course of the movie’s length, the disc is watchable enough once you learn to accept it. Still, a new scan and color grading would be very beneficial should they ever happen.
The Blu-ray’s DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack is much more impressive than its video. The score by David Mansfield has an enveloping spread around the soundstage with some very satisfying bass action in the drums. The MGM lion roar at the opening and the many gunshot sound effects are strong and booming. Director Cimino also seems to have learned an important lesson from his mistakes on Heaven’s Gate, and almost all dialogue here is clear and audible. The few scenes where dialogue is intentionally drowned out by location sounds only occur when foreign languages are spoken and English subtitles appear on screen anyway. (Those subtitles are annoyingly large, but are positioned within the movie image, safe for projection viewing.)
The only bonus features on the Blu-ray are a trailer and an old audio commentary Michael Cimino recorded for a DVD release in 2005.
Related
- Michael Cimino (director)
- Oliver Stone (writer)
- Dino De Laurentiis (producer)
- Alex Thomson (cinematographer)
The Video File Blog 
I’ve been curious about this one for several years now. I believe the first time I heard or read about it was before the Ninja Turtles live action movie came out. I seem to recall reading that the city backlots used in Turtles were from Year of the Dragon.
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