Review of Red Cliff (2008) by Carlo B — 16 Apr 2010

This is my review of the International Version of Red Cliff (sold in the U.S. as parts 1 and II) (the cover art you see is for the U.S. version).

The five hour international version of Red Cliff is a fantastic film!

The two hour 30 min U.S. release is a two and a half hour piece of junk in contrast. Even my mom liked the 5 hr version, and she generally doesn't have patience for longer films. The pacing is much better in the intl version.

Highlights: new intro (is that real or cgi, I can't tell!), more character development, more humor, better action scenes and in the additional hours of context Zhao Wei's character isn't as ridiculous as she is in the truncated U.S. version, more scenes of Zhao as warrior/clown, and now the brilliant strategist played by Takeshi Kaneshiro is embedded in a film worthy of his character.

Now let me get this out of the way. I'm a little bit partial to Zhao Wei, I like seeing her in movies, she has an endearing plain girl next door look. And on top of that I always like female warrior characters, so put those together and you have a kung fu kick to my brain which makes me almost predestined from before birth to watch this movie, although I have to admit that I wish that Zhao would have been better trained for this film, Woo shoots her fights well but as a seasoned action movie fan you can see where he cuts around her weaknesses. But then again she doesn't have too much onscreen fight time, but I wish she had more and I wish she kicked butt like Uma, but she doesn't so in that sense Zhao Wei as Sun Shangxiang is a bit of a let down, but I still like her in the film.

Negatives: even though this is now the most expensive Chinese movie ever made some of the naval sequences still look dis-pleasingly fake (yes there is pleasingly fake cgi, but this is not it), some of the editing is still too choppy, digital army replication technology still hasn't reached the point where its convincing or breath taking in a Kagemusha or Lawrence of Arabia way, and the tiger hunt scene is a let down because while Woo did a great job he didn't fully commit to using a real tiger the whole way in one scene, so as a whole a major character turning point looked fake and failed to convince and carry any weight to it.

But that said I love the film, I love the character of Cao Cao (the movie's arch villain) and feel even more pity for him in this version, he gets poisoned by the woman he's loved all his life, but at another turn he breaks the heart of another by treating her as a mere proxy to the other girl, and the nice thing is that there are several new scenes in the international version in which all of this plays out. There is also an additional scene with Cao Cao which is a brilliant illustration of incompetence, I laughed and then felt sorry for him and praised the scene immediately afterwards.

Red Cliff the international version has a few loose rocks down its edges, but it is still an experience that is worth taking. A marvelous film. :-).