The other night I went to watch Red Cliff with a friend @ Pavillion (yet again).
If you are Chinese educated, you must have heard of “Battle of Red Cliff”. If you are English educated (or something else as long as its not Chinese), you can find out more from those translated story books because it is one of the best ancient Chinese stories around. Or you can simple go here for the Wiki documentation on the Battle of Red Cliff.
I am not going to bore you all with a 1,000 pages long Chinese literature, but I am going to share with you with my views about the movie. If you are interested in the synopsis, go to the Wiki page about the film to read about it.
Red Cliff is arguably one of the most important battles in ancient China that changed the history forever. So far, Red Cliff is one of the best Hong Kong production I had seen in years, if not the best. This is the first of the 2 parts installment for the complete story, and I can’t wait for the second part to come out.
The actors/actresses (except this Taiwanese girl/model. But she’s HOOOOOOT!) gave a splendid performance and the plot of the story is, well, off the book by some margin but it is understandable. Don’t be surprise if you know the story well and noticed that there were some major differences between the storybook and the movie. I guess John Woo, the director, had to edit some of the stories to make it more synchronized with the 2nd part of the movie. Also, who is their right mind would fit a 1,000 pages Chinese literature into a 4 hours movie? At least the crew and John Woo adhered to the major points of the story book.
On top of that, the setting, choreography and everything else was great (learn those terms from my production friend :)) and most importantly, even my English speaking friends (whom can’t understand a word of Chinese) enjoyed the movie as the plot was great, the strategies was awesome and the storyline was interesting.
I would definitely recommend it to everyone. Go watch it, because it is good!
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