Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

If you prefer brutal realistic war movies than action hero Hollywood garbage then this is a movie for you.Gives you a depressive view of the Imperial Japanese occupation of Namkin in China showing what war can do to men and does not pick sides. Highly recommend this movie about a highly forgotten part of the start of WW2.

One of the best war films I ever seen. Being a Chinese film is amazingly balanced. Its very difficult to maintain neutrality confronted with such a savage and cruel event. Nanjing! Nanjing! is absorbing and the black and white photography is superb. During the film you can watch how the inner forces of each character unfold. Some bring the evil within some the love and compassion within. War bring up the worst and the best of people. As Psychologist Phillip Zimbardo states; everybody has the potential to be evil given the right conditions. The film encourages us deeply to value life. As one of the Japanese characters says in the movie: "Life is more difficult than death."

The city is Nanjing, then capital of China. The time is 1937-38 when Japanese forces occupied the place. The story is the horrific consequence of that occupation for Chinese soldiers and civilians alike. The film is dedicated to the 300,000 victims of the atrocity, a figure that is still debated. The executions, the hangings, the beheadings, the burning, the bayoneting, the burying alive, the rapes - all of which happened - are all shown, but not overly dwelt upon. Instead young Lu Chuan, who both wrote and directed, tells a human story, focusing on a limited number of individuals, not all Chinese. This 2009 work was originally shot on colour film and then desaturated into black and white and the cinematography by Yu Cau is very impressive.We are offered politically correct depictions of the bravery of the Chinese soldiers and the nobility of Chinese civilians, especially the women, but the focus on the international safety zone brings to the fore the role of John Rabe, often called the German Schindler, and other nationals. Surprisingly, however, Lu gives an important role to a (fictional) young Japanese officer called Kadokawa who is shown as compassionate and horrified by what his fellow soldiers are doing - a characterisation that understandably proved controversial in China.When I was in Japan, where they talk of the 'Nanjing Incident', at the Memorial Museum in Hiroshima of all places I found that the Japanese are still downplaying the scale of this slaughter. When I was in China, where they call it the 'Nanjing Massacre', not least during my time in Nanjing itself the history was still live and feelings remain raw. I wish that this film could have been seen as much in Japan - which has still not faced up to its wartime crimes in the way that Germany has done - as in China and indeed Europeans and Americans should know more, as they would by viewing the film, about the rape of Nanjing.

This is one of the most compelling, horrific, thought provoking and shocking movies I have ever seen. It is doubtful that even a documentary could show the horrors of war so succinctly and clearly, as presented in this movie. The characters humanity and in some cases, in-humanity are vividly drawn, adding to the realism and the nightmarish atmosphere, where just like in a nightmare, there seems to be no escape. The cinematography is amazing, and the contrast by transposing the violence of man over the beauty of nature (with the sound of a gentle breeze) is so very effective. I'd read about the "Rape of Nanking" a long time before, and started watching this movie half expecting it to be so depressing, to get only halfway through before switching it off. Wrong. It was gripping from the start and introduced characters I wanted to survive no matter what, and to characters I hoped would die - violently. The movie had such an impact on me that by the end of it, I'm ashamed to say, I was wishing they had dropped a lot more than two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War 2 in the Pacific. Don't get the wrong idea, this is not an anti-Japanese film, more an exposition of what the human animal can do at its worst - in this case the Japanese in 1937. I know that many other atrocities have been committed by other nations since, and unfortunately, will be in the future. To plagarise from another reviewer - we should forgive but not forget.