Last summer came the first part of the awaited movie Red Cliff, which was just one of several movies that year based on stories from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A 700 year old classical novel, describing the fall of the Han dynasty and the start and end of the three kingdoms and the beginning of the Jin Dynasty. The book is pretty complex, and features extensive name dropping, and I must admit that i didn’t finish Vol. 1 of this massive novel. Among other things I was continuously annoyed by the Wade Giles romanization of the names.
Red Cliff is a two-part movie and is one of the few movies from the Chinese mainland, that are released outside China. The movie is expected to gain substantial popularity outside China as well when it is released sometimes in 2009, but I am not so sure. I love the movie, and it is one of the best movies of 2008 (part 1, that is), but I’m am not sure i speak for the majority of westerners.
The movie is directed by John Woo, and that alone could bring a crowd to the movie theater. But the Recent Chinese movies that have gained popularity in the west is epic almost art like dramas. Crouching tiger was a hit, followed by Hero and the latest House of the Flying Dagger. Those movies were all an extreme beautiful mix of location, choreography and underlying music. The story in itself was not essential. With Red Cliff it is different. It has an action driven plot, and are very different from the traditional dramas so popular outside China. It lack the deep emotion appealing storyline which has been a trusted ingredient in Chinese movies from Zhang Yimou’s movies from the 80′ies and 90′ies to Ang Lees recent mainland movies. Last, it’s CGI is not on par with western expectations, which tends to be a big point of critique in the west. I could imagine this was why, the otherwise great movie The Promise failed to deliver (that, and the funny hats).
I look forward to see how the movie will do here though, when it is released somewhere in 2009.
August 26th, 2009 at 08:10
I just finished the book. It was pretty good, you should have stuck with it.
Volume 2 was better then Volume 1. A little bit like an Asian version of ‘The Decline and Fall of Imperial Rome’, apart from the frequent blatant superstition.