This is an excellently produced, written, and acted film that tugs mightily at the heart-strings even as it mesmerizes with action sequences. Indeed, it borders on emotional exploitation at times, as one character after another meets a gruesome and tragic end. The unfortunate thing, and the reason I can't give it 10 stars, is that the whole spectacle is in service to a fairly transparent ideological agenda: that one must sacrifice, property, happiness, loved ones, and even oneself in service to the vaguely-defined "revolution" that will bring "prosperity to 400 million people." To put it a little more bluntly: the life of an individual is worthless except when sacrificed for the good of the society. To be sure, this isn't the explicitly pro-PRC type of trashy propaganda that rarely even makes its way to America, and the revolution in the film is not the one that toppled Nationalist China and brought Mao to power (although it's not hard to see how one stands in for the other in the minds of the creators, and probably many viewers in the PRC). On the other hand, the film is actually worse than the typical hack-job because the message is diffuse enough that many western viewers (and seemingly many reviewers here) won't even catch it.
A troubling movie on many levels, but it's hard to find anything wrong with it as a piece of cinema. Hardly a bad way to spend two hours, but know what you're getting into.
A troubling movie on many levels, but it's hard to find anything wrong with it as a piece of cinema. Hardly a bad way to spend two hours, but know what you're getting into.