Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

What a beautiful movie!

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Chi Bi (Red Cliff) was at the time the biggest budgeted Chinese film ever made. Directed by Hong Kong action legend John Woo, this film tells the story of the Battle of Red Cliff, the famous battle where a force of around fifty thousand soldiers and sailors beat an armada and landing army of nearly a million.It is ancient China in the year 208 AD China. During the waning years of the Han Dynasty, power mad prime minister Cao Cao bullies the weak Han emperor to unite all of China through. He demands and gets a war against the Xu, a kingdom in the west and against the Wu to the South. The two weaker nations then are forced into an uneasy alliance. The main characters are of course the military leaders from these two nations, who brilliantly outwit and outmanouvre their greater foe. Their victory was a turning point in Ancient Chinese history, and this resulting movie is an action war classic.

This is basically of the same genre of 70's silly Kung fu movies which were produced by kilos for brainless audience, albeit with an inflated budget and -of course lots and lots of computer animation which will make you puke.The acting is theatrical and too pretentious. They can't even act a still dead person convincingly enough. The plot is paper thin to the level of non-existence. The character development is a bad cartoon job. The war scenes are utterly silly and unrealistic looking more like unedited cuts from cheap video games. Thousands of warships on the river stick out too much as an amateur computer animation. The final straw is the scene about several generals slashing each others' throats while troops look on peacefully on the sidelines... This is beyond ludicrous.The whole project looks less of a history movie based on a true story than a regressive glorification of war which would certainly serve well in 30's Nazi Germany but too primitive if not childish in today's norms.

Seems like US$80MM still went a long way in China back in '08, especially if the 1500+ PLA extras (and their CGI clones) weren't even working for scale. The medieval tale the film's based on has been called "the Chinese Iliad," and there are definitely some similarities—the baddie, Cao Cao, chief minister to a puppet emperor, starts a war b/c, among other things, he covets a rival official's wife, "the most beautiful woman in the world," and the big battle scenes mainly consist of the alphas on both sides hacking their way through swarms of enemy troops until they come face to face. (The Helen of Troy character's so confident of her powers of distraction that she turns up, alone, at Cao Cao's HQ on the eve of battle.)The spectacle, of course, is all that it should be—the fortresses and stockades, the massed troop formations, Cao Cao's flotilla of virtual warships that stretches to the horizon…. There's also a lot of the kind of filler you'd find in an old-school Hollywood epic (or a vintage Soviet film like "Aleksandr Nevsky")—PG love scenes, coy romance and comic-relief characters, in this case a loud, whiskery general, a feisty warrior princess and a goofy enemy soldier she falls in love with. Tony Leung, as always, has tremendous presence, and Takeshi Kaneshiro is effective as the Chief Strategist, a legendary sage who invents a rapid-fire crossbow and does some Taoist weather witching that's crucial to the outcome; most of the human interactions in the film that don't involve combat are fairly stagy and uninvolving, but their edgy bromantic friendship is really quite charming. Part I of the complete version is a bit slow-moving, and some of the Sun Tzu–style military trickery (reflective shields that dazzle the enemy horses… ) seems way over the top, but Part II really gathers momentum as it moves toward the final battle. To put it in Western fanboy terms, if Part I's "The Hobbit," then Part II's almost in the same class as "The Return of the King." Did I mention that the complete release is almost five hours long? Available on two disks from Netflix.

"Red Cliff" is a film about an episode of Chinese history little-known in the West, the Battle of the Red Cliffs in 208-209 AD, during the decline of the Han Dynasty. It is, however, a familiar story in China, being told in "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", one of the classics of Chinese literature. At this period the effective ruler of northern China was the Imperial Chancellor Cao Cao, the actual Emperor Xian being a mere puppet. The country south of the Yangtze River was controlled by two warlords, Sun Quan and Liu Bei. Despite the weakness of the ruling dynasty, the imperial army was still strong, and in 208 Cao Cao launched an invasion of southern China in order to reunite the country and to break the power of the two warlords, who formed an alliance to resist him. The defeat of the imperial army by the allies at the Battle of the Red Cliffs was eventually to lead to the fall of the dynasty and the division of China into three separate states during the so-called "Three Kingdoms period".The villain of the film is Cao Cao, portrayed as a cruel and arrogant despot. The heroes, however, are not so much Sun Quan and Liu Bei, but their subordinates, Liu Bei's adviser Zhuge Liang and Sun Quan viceroy Zhou Yu, who lead the allied armies against Cao Cao's invasion. (Given the Chinese Communist Party's determination to maintain centralised control over the whole of China, it is perhaps surprising that the film should take the side of those who in the past resisted the imposition of such control and whose victory led to a partition of the country, albeit a temporary one). The two main female characters are Sun Quan's sister Sun Shangxiang, who infiltrates Cao Cao's camp as a spy, and Zhou Yu's wife, Xiao Qiao.The film was directed by John Woo, best known to Western audiences for action dramas like "Hard Target" and "Mission Impossible 2". "Red Cliff", however, is a quite different sort of film to those. The nearest equivalent in the Western cinema would be the sort of classical epic which Hollywood used to produce in the fifties and sixties, films like "Cleopatra" and "Spartacus" which dealt with the Western contemporaries of the characters portrayed in this film. (The Han dynasty lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD, so was roughly contemporary with the Roman Empire).Like "Spartacus", "Red Cliff" juxtaposes spectacular battle scenes with scenes showing the private lives of the main characters, and like that film it deals with a seemingly unequal struggle in which the heroes are greatly outnumbered by their adversaries. "Spartacus", however, is a tragic drama which ends in the heroes' defeat, whereas here they are victorious, using guile and strategy to offset the numerical superiority of Cao Cao's army. There is a particularly memorable scene where Zhuge Liang tricks the enemy into shooting over 100,000 arrows into a fleet of boats covered in straw, thus enabling the allies to replenish their supplies of ammunition which were running dangerously low.One thing this film does have in common with some of Woo's earlier efforts is the use of highly stylised, choreographed action sequences, something exploited by other Chinese directors such as Ang Lee in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and Zhang Yimou in "House of the Flying Daggers". The difference, of course, is that whereas in those films this style of film-making was used in the context of individual hand-to-hand combat, here it is used to depict large-scale battle scenes between two great armies or navies. (The Battle of the Red Cliffs was fought both on land and on the river).I should point out that I have only seen the version of the film released in the West and which runs to some 150 minutes; Woo's original two-part version, totalling over four hours in length, was only released in Asia. I can, however, say that the shorter version is an excellent film, combining (as did the best of the Hollywood epics) brilliant spectacle with an intelligent, thoughtful script. When I reviewed Baz Luhrmann's "Australia", I concluded that the epic spirit is alive and well and living in Australia. On the basis of "Red Cliff" I can add to that conclusion "…. and in China". 8/10