Years after the release of Blue Gate Crossing in 2002, Fran Martin compared the film with Taiwan New Wave Cinema in an analysis of that which she terms ‘(trans)national Taiwan cinema’. She concludes that Blue Gate Crossing has successfully detached itself from the New Wave Cinema's ‘rigorous and austere esthetics’, which are characterised by ‘the challenging long takes, implacably static framing, departures from classical narrative form, and ruthless hyper-realism’. By comparison, Blue Gate Crossing is said to be marked by an ‘up-beat and accessible style’.

The accessible style can be problematic if interrogated with respect to national identity. To elaborate her point, Martin writes:

Undefined, the adjective ‘generic’ appears twice in the quoted passage and has been used by Martin in two senses. On the one hand, it indicates qualities that are generally shared rather than specific, as in ‘a generic East Asian city’. On the other, it refers to cinematographic expressions that conform to conventional formulae, as in ‘a soothing and generic fantasy cityscape in the more or less international language’. In either case, Martin suggests that genericity has bred a compromised depiction of the local reality, within which lies the key to Taiwan specificity.