Musa (film)
2001 film by Kim Seong-su
Musa (Korean: 무사; RR: Musa), released as both The Warrior and The Ultimate Warrior in English-speaking countries, is a 2001 South Korean epic action drama film directed by Kim Sung-su, starring Jung Woo-sung, Ahn Sung-ki, Joo Jin-mo and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. The semi-historical story follows the adventures of a Korean peace delegation as they try to get back to Korea through the inhospitable deserts of northern China.
The film is regarded as being one of the biggest motion pictures in the history of South Korean cinema. At the time of its production, its budget was the largest ever for a Korean film. It features a high degree of historical accuracy in period costumery, props, settings and most unusually, language; that is, everyone speaks in their native tongues or through an interpreter conversant in a lingua franca. The film was the eighth highest-grossing film of 2001 with over two million tickets sold.
Plot
In 1375, a small diplomatic mission from the Korean kingdom Goryeo travels to Ming China to meet the Hongwu Emperor, but they are arrested in retaliation for the death of a Chinese diplomat in Goryeo. They are put in chains and taken across a desert. However, Mongol raiders suddenly show up and kill the Chinese soldiers transporting them, while killing some Koreans in the process. The Mongols ride off, leaving the rest of the Koreans to die of hunger or thirst.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Musa (film)” as 2001 film by Kim Seong-su. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2001 film by Kim Seong-su. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q488321. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001 and 1375.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Musa (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.