"The constant censorship changes the Chinese government insisted on to allow filming (it was the first US picture to shoot there) and the nightmarish amount of red tape during the shoot didn't help, nor did heavy prerelease cutting (De Laurentiis also prepared a longer TV miniseries version that never seems to have seen the light of day), but John Briley and Stanley Mann's script is such a dreary and truncated mess that makes so little sense to anyone who hasn't read the novel that it's no great surprise that veteran TV director Daryl Duke couldn't inject any life into it"
