Introduction: traversing between Hollywood and martial arts cinema

The latest Star Wars instalment Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) has become a new sensation in cinematic and popular arenas. Star Wars is plausibly the most compelling title in the history of the science-fiction genre, successfully att racting a broad cult following all over the globe. The movies become fascinating cultural texts of which are anchored myriad user-generated practices of cultural production. Star Wars devotees eagerly poach, edit, and rework the imagery from the cinematic texts and share them in the fan-based circuits. As the seventh ‘saga’ film, Rouge One is the first standalone feature from the Star Wars series that is set prior to the events of the 1977 episode (Lee 2016). The blockbuster features an international cast, including the Mexican Diego Luna as Cassian Andor, the British-Pakistani Riz Ahmed as Bodhi Rook, and the Chinese Wen Jiang as Imwe's loyal friend Baze Malbus, vindicating the ongoing ambition of the Star Wars franchise to access the global audience. Part of the spotlight of both English- and Chinese-language media rests on the exceptional appearance of Donnie Yen, a top Chinese martial arts star, as one of the Jedi knights. Ranked as the sixth most influential Chinese celebrity in the Forbes’ 2011 list (Xu 2011), Yen is one of the most prolific and bankable actors in Hong Kong cinema, gaining currency in the border-crossing market. Rouge One casts Yen as Chirrut Imwe, a blind benevolent monk, a character that Yen describes to American press, USA Today, as ‘definitely an important guy’ (Truitt 2016) who purportedly possesses the paramount fighting dexterity in the galaxy, or as what Yen simply puts, ‘the best fighter’ (Lee 2016). The description readily makes audiences expect to see Yen's superb acrobatic skill. Att ention also points to the martial arts actor who beats out the peer candidates who have been prominent in the US, for example, Jet Li, Tony Leung, Stephen Chow, Chang Chen, Daniel Wu, and Leehom Wang, to win the role, becoming the first Hong Kong action star to perform in a Star Wars narrative (Baxter 2015).