Red Cliff (2008)

The Age of Commercialism

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

For some reason, no easter film nowadays seems to escape the wuxia curse - whenever there is any sort of action, it needs to be over-the-top unrealistic action because of REASONS. Anyway, Chi Bi (Red Cliff, a film adaptation of the civil war of the Three Kingdoms period) is a pseudo historical film where there is much wuxia fighting while apparently something else also goes on. The film is three hours long. It's boring. it's slow. It's excessively melodramatic. The acting is always forced, there is no attempt at historical accuracy, so unless you are in the market for a three hour all you can eat of kung fu fights, why would you watch this film. Red Cliff isn't terrible, i suppose if you wanted some asian action, this film will do it for you. What it doesn't do, is have a sense of pacing with said action. Say, like The Matrix had. The story is very vague and serves more as a framing device for the good guys to beat up the bad guy, and hardly every moves forward. Combat is laughably unrealistic and without a set of rules laid beforehard, such as, say, THE MATRIX had. So you're just watching three hours of guys on strings shattering spears with their bare hands. Honestly, i'm done with this garbage. I'm not 14yo anymore. I was hoping the asian cinema was ready to come of age, but since the magnificent Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, it seems they have taken more steps back than steps forward. It's bad. I mean, it's not HORRIBLE, but i wouldn't recommend it. 5.5/10

The first part in a two-part epic clocking in at nearly five hours, John Woo helms one of the most breathtaking war epics ever made. Costing nearly a hundred million dollars to make just this first half, you see the production value from the first seconds. We open with a massive battle with great choreography and sweeping shots of scores of men. It's massive. From there we get into the plot, which includes tons of characters who the western audience won't know well, so it makes the plot confusing at points. That said, the gist is that Cao Cao is trying to take down rebels against the Empire as the Three Kingdoms era is being heralded in. The final battle will be at Red Cliff, where the rebels lay in wait.The middle of the movie isn't very action packed but very beautifully shot and interesting in how it is composed, showing the Asian insistence on beauty and aesthetic over moving the plot. It's quite interesting and you are still treated to many breathtaking scenes full of energy.The final battle is massive and absolutely amazing. The generals come out one at a time and kill dozens of soldiers like they're cardboard cut outs (making the Dynasty Warriors games seem like an inspiration or something). It's massive, it's kinetic, and entirely enjoyable.The film ends with a cliffhanger (of course) but you'll leave feeling pretty complete. It's an excellent piece of cinema. That said, I can see complaints about the insistence on things that don't matter at all. The soccer game at the end of the film? That didn't matter at all. The jam session an hour into the movie? The horse giving birth? But as a complete picture, it's a great foray into a world that American audiences rarely get to see.Sweeping, huge, and beautiful, Red Cliff Part One is definitely recommended.

"Red Cliff" is a film about an episode of Chinese history little-known in the West, the Battle of the Red Cliffs in 208-209 AD, during the decline of the Han Dynasty. It is, however, a familiar story in China, being told in "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", one of the classics of Chinese literature. At this period the effective ruler of northern China was the Imperial Chancellor Cao Cao, the actual Emperor Xian being a mere puppet. The country south of the Yangtze River was controlled by two warlords, Sun Quan and Liu Bei. Despite the weakness of the ruling dynasty, the imperial army was still strong, and in 208 Cao Cao launched an invasion of southern China in order to reunite the country and to break the power of the two warlords, who formed an alliance to resist him. The defeat of the imperial army by the allies at the Battle of the Red Cliffs was eventually to lead to the fall of the dynasty and the division of China into three separate states during the so-called "Three Kingdoms period".The villain of the film is Cao Cao, portrayed as a cruel and arrogant despot. The heroes, however, are not so much Sun Quan and Liu Bei, but their subordinates, Liu Bei's adviser Zhuge Liang and Sun Quan viceroy Zhou Yu, who lead the allied armies against Cao Cao's invasion. (Given the Chinese Communist Party's determination to maintain centralised control over the whole of China, it is perhaps surprising that the film should take the side of those who in the past resisted the imposition of such control and whose victory led to a partition of the country, albeit a temporary one). The two main female characters are Sun Quan's sister Sun Shangxiang, who infiltrates Cao Cao's camp as a spy, and Zhou Yu's wife, Xiao Qiao.The film was directed by John Woo, best known to Western audiences for action dramas like "Hard Target" and "Mission Impossible 2". "Red Cliff", however, is a quite different sort of film to those. The nearest equivalent in the Western cinema would be the sort of classical epic which Hollywood used to produce in the fifties and sixties, films like "Cleopatra" and "Spartacus" which dealt with the Western contemporaries of the characters portrayed in this film. (The Han dynasty lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD, so was roughly contemporary with the Roman Empire).Like "Spartacus", "Red Cliff" juxtaposes spectacular battle scenes with scenes showing the private lives of the main characters, and like that film it deals with a seemingly unequal struggle in which the heroes are greatly outnumbered by their adversaries. "Spartacus", however, is a tragic drama which ends in the heroes' defeat, whereas here they are victorious, using guile and strategy to offset the numerical superiority of Cao Cao's army. There is a particularly memorable scene where Zhuge Liang tricks the enemy into shooting over 100,000 arrows into a fleet of boats covered in straw, thus enabling the allies to replenish their supplies of ammunition which were running dangerously low.One thing this film does have in common with some of Woo's earlier efforts is the use of highly stylised, choreographed action sequences, something exploited by other Chinese directors such as Ang Lee in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and Zhang Yimou in "House of the Flying Daggers". The difference, of course, is that whereas in those films this style of film-making was used in the context of individual hand-to-hand combat, here it is used to depict large-scale battle scenes between two great armies or navies. (The Battle of the Red Cliffs was fought both on land and on the river).I should point out that I have only seen the version of the film released in the West and which runs to some 150 minutes; Woo's original two-part version, totalling over four hours in length, was only released in Asia. I can, however, say that the shorter version is an excellent film, combining (as did the best of the Hollywood epics) brilliant spectacle with an intelligent, thoughtful script. When I reviewed Baz Luhrmann's "Australia", I concluded that the epic spirit is alive and well and living in Australia. On the basis of "Red Cliff" I can add to that conclusion "…. and in China". 8/10

I recently caught the Westernised version of RED CLIFF on television; there was no way I was going to pay to watch something that had been butchered down from a two-part film series into a single movie. I was entranced by what turns out to be an extraordinarily lavish, big budget war spectacle, with events and action taking place on an absolutely massive scale. If John Woo has made a few mis-steps in his directing career over the past decade, RED CLIFF is a film that more than makes up for them. But why oh why was it butchered so badly? I still hope to get hold of and watch the original movies one day, so my complaints here are more to do with the editing-together process rather than the movie itself. From what I can gather, pretty much all exposition and characterisation sequences have been excised from the Western release, so we're left with battle after battle and little reason to care or get involved in the lives of the participants. It's a crying shame, because with the likes of Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro on board, I'd imagine the non-action scenes are as involving as the battles.As for the warfare stuff, it's splendid. It starts off on an epic scale and only gets better from there, with huge fight scenes of crushing intensity. The only film I can think of that manages to rival the scale of these battles is LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING. CGI is used pretty heavily to animate various things, but it's doesn't ruin the film, rather supplementing what's already on screen. The martial arts-infused fight scenes are spectacular and inventive. In many ways this film reminded me of an old video game series for the Playstation 2 called DYNASTY WARRIORS, and that's a good thing; it takes you by the throat and throws you in the midst of a blockbuster ancient battle in a way that few films manage.