Imagine popping into a multiplex and diving into say, an “Avengers” or “Star Wars” movie. Imagine doing that in Papua-New Guinea or some place far removed from the “universes,” cultural tropes and long-beloved characters in those films and not having a clue what’s going on, for big chunks of the time.

“Capes? Tights? Hammers?”

That’s akin to any Westerner checking out an Indian, Japanese, Korean or Chinese myth turned into cinema. However well you know the universal templates such tales lean on, how much you remember from your Joseph Campbell, you’re going to be a bit at sea in a “Journey to the West” or “Creation of the Gods,” both Chinese epics so sprawling they required Harry Potter length “installments” to tell.

“Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms” has that Roman numeral in its title, so we know that two a half hours is just the beginning of this Chinese eye-candy epic.

It’s a tale of tyranny and magic, of nobility trying to overthrow the monstrous King Zhou (Kris Phillips, aka Fei Xiang) — with a little divne help from “The Immortals” — set during China’s first documented dynasty, the Shang.

There are grandiose sieges and battles in icy, wintry fog, intrigues, dragons and demons and beheadings and “interventions” and a murderously tempermental king from whom his own kin aren’t safe, especially after he falls under the spell of the enchanting “daughter of a traitor” Su Daji (Naran), aFox Demon.

Self-sacrifice is preached — “What is a king if not the bearer of all the Earthly sins of his people?” (in Mandarin with subtitles) –and sometimes even practiced.

The picture is state-of-the-art dazzling in its effects. The scope and scale of some sequences, digitally-augmented or not, is almost overwhelming.

But as storytelling, it’s a movie that gets lost in endless exposition, a parade of intertitles naming this or that figure in the “plot” and their relation to this or that king, as if that really helps.

It’s a cluttered narrative that might be better served as a simple sweep through myth and history rather than anything as literal as this. Mongolian director and co-writer Wuershan (“The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman”) is better at action than trying to explain it all.

There are a few characters to latch onto, some epic fights and even a hint of humor, here and there amidst the spectacle. And as is usual in the lesser epics of this genre, there’s an awful lot of shouting.

“Think you can kill ME?” “SAVE Fa JI!”

One of the immortals is a bratty child (Yafan Wu) who jets into scenes, intervening with his elders, via flaming flame-powered feet. Another, played by Li Xuejian, is a whimsically earnest sage, while a third (Bo Huang) serves up dark magic with a tongue-in-cheek touch.

That’s where the movie should lie, with the immortals and everything else just playing out inviting their interference. Burdening the picture with legions of mere mortals makes it hard to follow for anyone who didn’t grew up with the 16th century mytho-historical novel  Fengshen Yanyi.

It wasn’t just the pricy effects that slowed this years-in-the-making first film of a trilogy down and caused production to shut down at one point. Surely there was somebody lobbying for something more streamlined, that focused on the core story, the “hero’s journey” and those divine interventionists playing their games with mere mortals, the way gods always do.

“Kingdom of Storms” “Dazzling to look at,” sure. But the ungainliness of this lumbering, over-populated narrative has one often wondering, “Wait, where’d the Fox Demon go?”

Rating: unaated, acton violence

Cast: Yosh Yu, Huang Bo, Kris Phillips, Naran, Li Xuejian, Quan Yuan, Li Xuejian, Le Yang, Yu Xia and Yafan Wu

Credits: Directed by Wuershan, scripted by Jian Rn, Ping Ran, Cao Sheng and
Wuershan, based on a Ming era novel by Xu Zhong Lin. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:28