Rhapsodies

I hadn’t done Wuxia for a while (to be honest I’m not sure if I’ve really done it at all the one time I did it I technically had it labeled under tragedy. This time I decided to go truly epic with John Woo’s Red Cliff,  the story of the climactic battle of the Chinese classic The Romance of The Three Kingdoms.

This was a two parter, so technically counts as a double feature but truthfully it doesn’t feel like one.  For the most part it feels like one solid five hour film that it took me two nights to watch… but in a good way.

In the first part of the film chancellor Cao Cao bullies the emperor of the Kingdom of Wei into making him the general of the kingdoms army to attack the “rebels” Liu Bei of the Kingdom of Shu-Han and Sun Jian of the Kingdom of Wu.

Terribly outnumbered much of the half consists of the two trying to put together a coalition army that will stand against Cao Cao’s  juggernaut of an army.

We end with them gaining a temporary victory against one of Cao Cao’s battalions using a “tortoise” formation. (Which consists of them creating a rats maze out of soldiers and shields that divides and crushes the other army.) but while this was good for the southern coalition’s morale it is made clear this is just a minor set back for Cao Cao and we end our first part with the north’s huge fleet of ships ready to cross the Yangtze river to attack the southern camps at Red Cliff.

The second part starts a little slower going back and fourth between the two camps as both sides prepare for the inevitable. We are shown a lot of Cao Cao’s  day to day preparations through the eyes of a spy. And on the southern comic relief of several of our bad ass warriors spending their down time practicing their calligraphy and teaching children.

We have a real cool sequence of southern strategist Zhuge Lange “collecting arrows” by taking a group of boats out in the fog in order to bait the northern archers to shoot at them into the haystacks the boats are lined up with until they return to the camp with 10,000 arrows.

But all this pales before the final conflict as the southern army makes it’s move and attacks Can Cao’s forces!

This was a fun movie. I was endlessly impressed by the sheer scale and pacing and the two hour and change length of each part didn’t seem two long at all. For all of it’s epic quality it was surprisingly low key keeping the “romantic” elements of The romance of three kingdoms relatively restrained to the point I almost forgot that this was a Wuxia film. But then badass warrior Guan Yu shows up and reminds us by defeating twenty soldiers single handed.