Red Cliff [Chi Bi] (***½)
Directed by: John Woo Starring: Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi, Chang Chen, Zhao Wei, Hu Jun, Shidõ Nakamura, Lin Chi-ling, Tong Dawei, Hou Yong, You Yong
Seen: May 25th 2010
***½ Out of ****
With Red Cliff, John Woo effectively does with a budget of $80 million what Ridley Scott attempted to do (and dismally failed at) with Robin Hood and its budget of $200 million. Ridley Scott should bow down before John Woo, as Red Cliff dwarfs Robin Hood on every conceivable level apart from (American/Western) star-power. The epic scale of Red Cliff is impressive in every frame of the movie, from the initial smaller battles and training scenes to the eventual Battle of Red Cliff in the early years of the 3rd century between the Imperial Army of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the so-called rebels of the smaller allied forces in old China.
Prime Minister Cao Cao (Fengyi) leads the imperial army in an all out assault on pretty much the rest of China with the very reluctant and manipulated approval of Emperor Xian. They summarily conquer the southern province of Jing where, in the Battle of Changban, the warlord Liu Bei’s (You Yong) followers fight their hearts out to protect their fleeing refugees. A very impressive military play also rolls out here, the immaculately executed tortoise, which might be old, but turns out to still be effective. This is also where some mythology comes into play – as there are normal soldiers, and the heroes talked about in legend, the people who can, on their own, take on small armies and emerge victorious. And Red Cliff is the better for it, as not only are these heroes almost supernatural in their ability to do battle (not as supernatural as the characters in Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but still far above average), they also have a human side. This is evidenced in one scene where, while training his army, the Grand Viceroy Zhou Yu (Lueng) interrupts his training drills to stop a child playing the flute, but not to rebuke him; he takes the flute, makes a few modifications to it, and hands it back, fixed for a purer sound. The heroes fall in love and battle for that love, together with honour and patriotism and idealism that borders on the innocently ignorant.
Everything in Red Cliff is a focussed gauntlet running towards the last battle and the small things such as a cup of tea and the weather that influences this last battle’s outcome, and this increases the movie’s feel as a grand epic while making it feel slowed down on only a very limited number of occasions, for a little while only. To be quite honest, I would have been happy with another hour’s worth of plotting and clever devising of war strategies and wilful execution of brilliant deception of the enemy to gain the upper hand (or just slightly less of an underdog status). The final battle is of a scale only seen before in movies such as The Lord of the Rings, and this one is all the more impressive because of the fact that this is based on true events, and not fantasy.
Red Cliff is the last military base of the alliance, and the imperial army are headed towards it at full tilt. 800,000 soldiers coming down river in a nautical fleet so vast it beggars belief. In sight of Red Cliff, Cao Cao orders his army to set up base on the opposing riverbank, but the fleet is so colossal that it makes the gap seem almost insignificant. At this stage the strategists on both sides start their big face off, Cao Cao’s best military advisors against the legendary Zhuge Liang (Kaneshiro), who continuously delights the viewer with his clever plans to outfox the enemy in every possible way, his plan to acquire extra arrows for his army’s archers an especially ingenious one.
The final battle turns into one massive fire-fight, and its execution is glorious, as only the filmmakers in the east can make it – heroes almost flying to save the lady to fighting of small armies single-handedly and everything in between. The movie ends with a classic John Woo Mexican standoff – and by this time you are thoroughly pulled into the story, fully invested in what is happening on the screen. Red Cliff pays off in the biggest possible way, and taking the time to find this movie is not a waste of time. Red Cliff is a legendary movie.
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