John Woo Does Braveheart

Included with the HD package I have is the channel HDNet Movies, which once a month shows smaller or lesser known films that only come out in a VERY limited release. This has allowed me to see good films (The Girlfriend Experience, Burning Plain) and not so good films (The Mutant Chronicles). Last night, I got to see the Chinese language film, Red Cliff.

Red Cliff is an epic, Braveheart scale historical war film directed by John Woo, King of the Hong Kong action film scene of the nineties. And the film looks like an epic, Braveheart scale historical war film directed by John Woo.

The story revolves around the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history, when the Emperor's Prime Minister Cao Cao had basically taken over, and decided to conquer the two kingdoms to the south and west, ruled by Lord Sun Quan and Lord Liu Bei. Cao Cao attacks them with a vastly superior force, driving the Lords to the fortress at Red Cliff, and the large, final battle.

The main characters (and thus heroes) of the film are not actually the Lords, but Sun Quan's Viceroy Zhou Yu and Liu Bei's strategist Zhun Liang, who meet Cao Cao's staggeringly massive forces with clever strategies, formations, and plans. What's odd about these two being who we follow most in the film, is what happens in the large battles.

Despite how many thousands of soldiers are fighting, and no matter what the formation or strategy is, Sun Quan's and Liu Bei's generals always find a way mid-battle to take on and take out dozens of soldiers and showcase what big badasses they are. In the middle of a war film where our leads are praised as and prove to be brilliant strategists, these scenes seem out of place, and contradictionary to the rest of the film. It's intelligence that is supposed to matter most, not brute strength.

Also, these fight scenes look and seem like Dynasty Warriors: The Film, with one General killing soldier after soldier who's armed only with a little pike, slowing down only when the other side's general needs to be killed (yes, I know the Dynasty Warriors video games take place in ancient Japan, not China, before anyone corrects me), and they just seem too unbelievable in the reality of this film.

Speaking of the massive fight scenes, Woo tries way too hard at times to make them cool. He adds overdramatic, unnecessary zoom-ins and close-ups, the quick cuts and edits can sometimes make the action hard to follow, and the soldiers of the opposing sides can often be indiscernible mid-battle, making it difficult to know who to root for.

This last issue is intentional, and Woo's been doing it for years. In the bloody, brutal gunfighting sequences of Hard Boiled and The Killer, you only really know who the "good guys" are in the end because they're the ones with Chow Yun Fat. This is supposed to show the oneness of humanity, and that we're all brothers, and violence is never good, which Woo suggests in both of these films and Red Cliff. Here's the problem (and I've had for years with Woo films): how can you argue against glorifying violence, when you're glorifying it in the same film? In Red Cliff, Woo even has Zhou Yu argue for the greatness of lasting peace, while implying that this can only be achieved through bloody, costly war.

Two more, niggling complaints: the ultimate action scene, like a Harry Potter novel, takes up about the final fourth of the film, and just feels way too long before it finally stops; and the CGI used to portray the shockingly large number of soldiers in these armies does not always blend as seamless as it should, so the film looks too digital at points.

Despite all these faults, I really did like this movie. Woo does a good job with most of the epic war scenes, the characters are likable and well-played, and the film brilliantly manages to focus on both a war taking up hundreds of thousands of lives and the three men at the center of it all. And it's fun in the way films like this can be, when you find you're enjoying yourself, despite (or maybe because of) how serious the characters are taking the situation.

So, go look for Red Cliff directed by John Woo, or I'll go all tortoise formation on you (if you see the film, you'll understand why that doesn't really make sense).