Film Festival 09 - Red Cliff
Red Cliff
Chi bi, China 2009, 148m [International version]
Director: John Woo
Festivals: Sydney 2009
"Action maestro John Woo returns to Chinese soil and his finest
form with this historical epic (the biggest budget Chinese-language
movie ever made) in which heroes and villains are equally complex,
battle sequences are thrillingly visceral, and the spectacle is
lush and abundant. Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), the scheming prime
minister to the Han dynasty Emperor, leads a massive Northern army
to quell the 'rebel' warlords of the South. He severely
underestimates the wisdom of the Southern warlords and their
strategists - heart-thumping performances from Tony Leung (In the
Mood for Love) and Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers) -
and it is the friendship between allies, as much as the action,
that drives Woo's extremely satisfying International Version of his
5 hour, 2 part Chinese original." - Clare Stewart, Sydney Film
Festival
"The multinational production resources utilized for this cinematic
recreation are unprecedented in Asia, but it is director John Woo's
level-headed ordering of narrative sequence, his skill in devising
kinetic live-action to off-set technical ostentation and his vision
of how to turn epic into entertainment that propels Red Cliff to a
thundering climax&
The climactic battle lives up to popular expectations of epic
filmmaking, with over 30 minutes of sophisticated military
maneuvers, special effects and human drama in one continuous
movement. The wooden galleys are magnificently constructed.
Visceral explosions and close-ups of human carnage, combined with a
few well-placed panoramic CGI shots of the fire's domino effect on
the connected fleet comes close to Titanic in achieving a sense of
catastrophic grandeur." - Maggie Lee, Hollywood Reporter
In Mandarin with English subtitles
