Red Cliff - Session Times And Movie Reviews

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Red Cliff

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In 208 A.D., in the final days of the Han Dynasty, shrewd Prime Minister Cao Cao convinced the fickle Emperor Han the only way to unite all of China was to declare war on the kingdoms of Xu in the west and East Wu in the south. Thus began a military campaign of unprecedented scale, led by the Prime Minister himself. Left with no other hope for survival, the kingdoms of Xu and East Wu formed an unlikely alliance. Numerous battles of strength and wit ensued, both on land and on water, eventually culminating in the battle of Red Cliff, where the course of Chinese history was changed forever.

Rated:	[ MA ] Strong battle violence
Cinema release:	23 Jul 2009
Director:	John Woo
Running time:	149 mins
Stars:	Chen Chang, Yong Hou, Jun Hu, Tong Jiang, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung Chiu Wai
Links:	IMDb Rotten Tomatoes

What we say

The art of tea

Paul Stock, MovieFix
3 star rating

If you fancy making a movie with epic battle scenes involving the better part of a million soldiers, clearly China is the place to do it. And it's not too difficult to convince yourself that "Red Cliff" might've had a corresponding number of extras on the payroll in what's become the most expensive Chinese-language film ever made.

Director John Woo's ("Face/Off") first feature film to be shot in mainland China depicts the Battle of Red Cliff in 208 AD, where 50,000 soldiers of the East Wu and Xu kingdoms confronted the 800,000-strong army of the Han Empire.

It's not quite as implausible as the ratio of Spartans to Persians in "300", but the odds of success would still seem pretty formidable without some nifty strategising on the part of Xu military advisor Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and East Wu viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung).

Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu pit their wits and meteorological skills against the imperial aspirations of the Han Empire's prime minister, Cao Cao (Fengyi Zhang). Cao Cao, as it turns out, also quite fancies Zhou Yu's wife, Xiao Qiao (Chiling Lin), almost as much as he'd like to unify China under his administration.

The battle scenes in "Red Cliff" are not perversely stylistic like Zack Snyder's "300", and neither is the hand-to-hand combat quite as surreal as in Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". In fact, the massive battles border on the realistic, particularly if you ignore the red cordial blood splatters and the model navy anchored in the middle of the Yangtze River.

In contrast to the anarchic battles, though, there's a contemplative slowness at various points in the film. Even still, some of the rationale for the political machinations and plot twists seemed glossed over in favour of zither slide-guitar duels and tea-making ceremonies.

But it's the human scale of "Red Cliff" that impresses, particularly if you like your historical epics littered with warring bodies in period costume and organised in ancient battle formations.

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