The Battle At Lake Changjin. (15.)
Directed by Kaige Chen, Tsui Hark and Dante Lam.
Starring Jing Wu, Jackson Yee and Yihong Duan. Available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital Download from Trinity CineAsia from 16th May. 176 mins.
Spider-man: No Way Home didn’t just save the movies by getting the masses back into the cinemas, it also managed to save America from a massive loss of face. Such was its runaway box office success that in the few weeks before and over Christmas, it managed to become the top-grossing film globally in 2021. It just pipped this and spared Hollywood the indignity of the world’s biggest film being a patriotic, propaganda heavy Chinese war film for the second year in a row. In 2020, when The Eight Hundred broke a century of American global box office dominance, its success could be explained away by Covid. The Battle at Lake Changjin though had held off James Bond, a couple of Marvels and a Fast and Furious, and had done so almost entirely on the returns from the Chinese market.
All of which would make you think that this might be a film worth catching, but it’s a long old drag considering the talent that went into it and certainly nowhere near the standard of The Eight Hundred.
It's 1950 and from his ceegeeyi warship, General MacArthur has sent his army of ceegeeyi planes and ceegeeeyi tanks north of the 39th Parallel to try and reunify Korea and cement his Presidential ambitions. In China, Chairman Mao decides that the threat of imperialistic US forces marching up the peninsula towards their border means sending in the red army to support the North Koreans. (Though technically a film about the Korean War, Koreans look to be entirely absent from proceedings.) The ceegeeyi US imperialist invaders are about to be crushed by these plucky red army guys: they are as awkward and inaccurate with their weaponry as they are with their lines of English dialogue.
That Lake Changjin is distorted jingoistic anti-American rubbish is no surprise; the surprise is that it is just rubbish. The obvious comparison here is Pearl Harbour, both in terms of the bombast of the rhetoric and the execution. Money has been thrown at the production but for all the explosions and all the extras running around trying to make it look epic, it all looks a bit tinpot. All the action scenes are too computer reliant to thrill and most of them look to take place on sound stages rather than on location.
(Apparently, it needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible but there was little chance of that in this country as its cinema release in this country was brief and announced at short notice.)
Even then, I kind of doubt it would make much difference. The opening scene where our hero returns to see his parents with the ashes of his brother has some criminally fake-looking CGI. There is one good sequence early on where the platoon get caught out in the open, walking across what looks like a field of rocks as US fighter jets fly overhead. As they try to stay completely still and hope their camouflage uniforms make them blend in with the rocks to avoid detection, there is real tension. For a moment you are connected with theses characters and care about their plight.
The film has caused alarm as being a sign of China's move toward an insular, anti-western worldview. (Its box office success, almost entirely domestic, can be seen as a mark of the effectiveness – last year anyway - of China’s zero Covid policy.) Still, before we start to beat ourselves up about this red dawn and the inevitable decline of the west, maybe we should take comfort in the evidence that cinematically the nation appears to be going backwards. Back in the nineties, fans and reviewers would marvel at the energy and invention of east Asian action films. They seemed so much swifter and more efficient than their often oafish, meatheaded Hollywood counterparts. But compare this to something like 1917, Dunkirk, or even Saving Private Ryan and it looks decades behind, technically and aethetically. Generally, western audiences now respond to war-is-hell war films that allow them to experience the suffering and fear vicariously. Battle at Changjin Lake though is hokey heroics, sentimental and uninvolving. It's John Wayne stuff really. Ironically, given which army they are fighting for, the focus is on moments of individual, action-hero grandstanding, rather than the collective effort forging the triumph.
Directed by Kaige Chen, Tsui Hark and Dante Lam.
Starring Jing Wu, Jackson Yee and Yihong Duan. Available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital Download from Trinity CineAsia from 16th May. 176 mins.
Spider-man: No Way Home didn’t just save the movies by getting the masses back into the cinemas, it also managed to save America from a massive loss of face. Such was its runaway box office success that in the few weeks before and over Christmas, it managed to become the top-grossing film globally in 2021. It just pipped this and spared Hollywood the indignity of the world’s biggest film being a patriotic, propaganda heavy Chinese war film for the second year in a row. In 2020, when The Eight Hundred broke a century of American global box office dominance, its success could be explained away by Covid. The Battle at Lake Changjin though had held off James Bond, a couple of Marvels and a Fast and Furious, and had done so almost entirely on the returns from the Chinese market.
All of which would make you think that this might be a film worth catching, but it’s a long old drag considering the talent that went into it and certainly nowhere near the standard of The Eight Hundred.
It's 1950 and from his ceegeeyi warship, General MacArthur has sent his army of ceegeeyi planes and ceegeeeyi tanks north of the 39th Parallel to try and reunify Korea and cement his Presidential ambitions. In China, Chairman Mao decides that the threat of imperialistic US forces marching up the peninsula towards their border means sending in the red army to support the North Koreans. (Though technically a film about the Korean War, Koreans look to be entirely absent from proceedings.) The ceegeeyi US imperialist invaders are about to be crushed by these plucky red army guys: they are as awkward and inaccurate with their weaponry as they are with their lines of English dialogue.
That Lake Changjin is distorted jingoistic anti-American rubbish is no surprise; the surprise is that it is just rubbish. The obvious comparison here is Pearl Harbour, both in terms of the bombast of the rhetoric and the execution. Money has been thrown at the production but for all the explosions and all the extras running around trying to make it look epic, it all looks a bit tinpot. All the action scenes are too computer reliant to thrill and most of them look to take place on sound stages rather than on location.
(Apparently, it needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible but there was little chance of that in this country as its cinema release in this country was brief and announced at short notice.)
Even then, I kind of doubt it would make much difference. The opening scene where our hero returns to see his parents with the ashes of his brother has some criminally fake-looking CGI. There is one good sequence early on where the platoon get caught out in the open, walking across what looks like a field of rocks as US fighter jets fly overhead. As they try to stay completely still and hope their camouflage uniforms make them blend in with the rocks to avoid detection, there is real tension. For a moment you are connected with theses characters and care about their plight.
The film has caused alarm as being a sign of China's move toward an insular, anti-western worldview. (Its box office success, almost entirely domestic, can be seen as a mark of the effectiveness – last year anyway - of China’s zero Covid policy.) Still, before we start to beat ourselves up about this red dawn and the inevitable decline of the west, maybe we should take comfort in the evidence that cinematically the nation appears to be going backwards. Back in the nineties, fans and reviewers would marvel at the energy and invention of east Asian action films. They seemed so much swifter and more efficient than their often oafish, meatheaded Hollywood counterparts. But compare this to something like 1917, Dunkirk, or even Saving Private Ryan and it looks decades behind, technically and aethetically. Generally, western audiences now respond to war-is-hell war films that allow them to experience the suffering and fear vicariously. Battle at Changjin Lake though is hokey heroics, sentimental and uninvolving. It's John Wayne stuff really. Ironically, given which army they are fighting for, the focus is on moments of individual, action-hero grandstanding, rather than the collective effort forging the triumph.
