The Flowers of War

Exquisite. Easily one of the most beautiful films ever made.

Moving, riveting, poetic, visually stunning, and dramatically gut wrenching.

Absolutely everything you could ever want a movie to be.

Poignant, poetic, full of beauty and life.

Not without moments of sentimentality, perhaps even, briefly, bordering on the saccharine. Still only those hardest of heart would be unmoved by this visual and emotional banquet.

If you are not moved by this film. You quite possibly may not be human.

An incredible mix of beauty and tension. Eye-dropping cinematography, heart pounding action. Yet full of life, humour and folly. Plays directly to your heart strings and plucks every chord with virtuosity.

In a just world this kind of film would be breaking box office records. But alas we prefer on mass to fix our eyes of adolescent spectacle. Consider how big the box office returns will be when Bale dons a bat suit this summer.

It's funny how a human interest story recreating events in history can be of so little interest to so many humans, the very ones who create history. It seems we would much rather gaze in wonder at our fantasies than contemplate our actions.

I urge anyone who loves cinema to see this film. It is a work of masterful craftsmanship.

I don't know whether or not you've heard about the Rape of Nanking, but everyone should know about it. Having captured the Chinese city, Japanese forces committed a near genocide against the population and devastated the city. Zhang Yimou's "Jīnlíng Shísān Chāi" ("The Flowers of War" in English) focuses on a Nanking church where an American (Christian Bale) takes up residence and then must protect the inhabitants from the occupying forces. The inhabitants are the schoolgirls, and also a group of prostitutes. Eventually, everyone faces a moral dilemma.

There are some very ugly scenes of the occupation. The Japanese occupation of China and Korea has never gotten the attention that the Nazi occupation of Europe has, but it was equally brutal (as was the Italian occupation of Ethiopia). The main focus here is on the events inside the church, but there is ample focus on the atrocities committed by the Japanese. The movie does a very good job in every way. It is always important to tell these stories so that they never happen again. I very much recommend the movie.

PS: Bale had previously starred in Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun", about a boy who gets separated from his parents in Japanese-occupied China. I also recommend that one.

Please watch this movie to get a glimpse of what it was like during World War II in China. My grandparents were in a different part of China that also got occupied where similar tragedies occurred. Though much much worse. Babies would be thrown in the air and caught on the bayonets as a game. There were killing games. My grandma can never tell her story without crying. The Japanese government deny this ever happened, they never apologized, and payed for their war crimes. They do not even have it written in their history books. All my grandparents want is for their story to be recognized as well as a formal apology. Thanks for reading.

Honestly,I am not the kind of people easily being touched so deeply as to cry, and I didn't cry much during the movie indeed. I just walked out the movie theater,took a bus,got off the bus,bought a piece of bread, walked home while eating the bread,then all of sudden burst into tears.

Till now I still haven't walked out of it. There is so much to say, yet you don't know what to say nor how to say it. My only advice: you walk into the movie theater, forget whatever people said on the Internet, and just watch it with your own heart.

It is a great movie.

I am not really familiar with the details of the Rape of Nanking in the late 1930s. However, people from this side of the globe are very familiar with the suffering brought about by the brutal Japanese Imperial Army throughout Asia. In our country, many movies have shown Japanese brutality during the World War II. I thought I would be ready for this movie.

"The Flowers of War" tells the story of a roguish American mortician John Miller (Christian Bale) who was sent to a Catholic church/convent in Nanking to prepare the body of the priest for burial, who was then under siege by the Japanese. When he gets there, he found he also needed to take care of a group of convent girls led by the spirited Shu, a young caretaker boy George, and later, a gaggle of exotic prostitutes led by the classy beauty Yu Mo (Ni Ni). Everyone will go through a touching life-changing story arc that will show how even the most unlikely of people can become heroes in extreme adversity.

Director Zhang Jimou returns to form in this movie. He was relentless in the first half we are taken through a continuous barbaric carnage perpetrated by the Japanese soldiers. These parts are reminiscent of the frankly violent blood-spurting "Saving Private Ryan" beach scene. The terror is very palpable. While the scenes of soldiers being shot and killed were hard to watch, the several minutes of violence to children was even harder to bear!

The second half is more dramatic with a some contrived cheesy moments. The character of the kind-hearted Japanese officer Hasegawa was a nice counter-balance to their other heinous acts of atrocity. I also felt the long sequence when a couple of prostitutes sneaking out to retrieve trivial things in their brothel was a rather unnecessary long detour. There will even be a scene that will remind you of Gwyneth Paltrow's body wrap scene in "Shakespeare in Love." However, when the film reaches its climax, everything falls back into place and the noble message is delivered on point. This movie may be difficult to watch because of the scenes of violence, but this is worth watching because the story of heroism and redemption was very good, well-told and well-executed.