La bataille du lac Changjin

Commissioned by the Chinese Communist Party to commemorate their 100th anniversary, The Battle at Lake Changjin pours an entire nation's jingoistic fervour, anti-US sentiments, blatant propaganda & more into a 3-hour long war film that's no different from majority of Hollywood war films in its fact distortion & history revision but it's a tad too simplistic & predictable to deliver on the storytelling front.

Directed by Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark & Dante Lam, the story is a fictionalised retelling of the battle that unfolded between Chinese soldiers & American troops during the Korean War and is crafted in a manner that's meant to provoke nationalistic pride in its intended audience. While the first hour is uneventful, things do get better once the battle is on and the film does well to make sure the interest isn't entirely lost from thereon.

The mass battle sequences do deliver the goods but only when it's being waged in close-proximity. Still, for a $200 million production, the CGI is an absolute cringe and prevents several scenes from making their desired impact. Further weakening the ride is the narrative approach, awful dialogues, cardboard characters, excessive runtime, repetitive action, weak performances & overdone sentimentality. It is a state-sponsored picture and it shows.

Overall, The Battle at Lake Changjin has moments of spectacle and the swift pans & camera manoeuvres add the necessary cinematic touches to its action sequences but there is a lot in here that could've been further improved. The caricature depiction of US forces isn't really a complaint since most American war films do the same. However, the extreme flag-waving on display is so forceful & overpowering that it often kills the film's unabashedly entertaining aspects.

I looked through some of the comments of other people, including some who claimed to be history students. The history he studied may be just a profile.

First of all, it is really not a propaganda tool. I am sorry to say that the resistance of many Westerners to this movie. In real time, this is basically the real Chinese understanding of that period of history. Perhaps this reflects a huge difference in cognition.

Whether who won or lose, for the Chinese, that war is iconic. Before China was involved in the war, the Chinese government did repeatedly (15 times in my impression) not to cross the 38-degree line. However, no one listened to China's warnings. That's the in real history, and China have to engaged in the war which they did not want.

In the historical memory of the Chinese people, the general trend of the war is consistent with the movie. The mainstream view in China does not believe that China won the entire Korean War, but that China in that barren era achieved its strategic goals by virtue of its tenacious will.

And whether these characters are completely equivalent to the plot of the movie, we don't have to take it seriously. But for the Chinese, that war gave birth to many heroic deeds. These heroes and veterans will certainly magnify some facts in their memories, but they do represent the will of that era. But to a large extent, we can understand these plots as the Chinese collective memory of this period of history.

Friends who study history, if you really go to Afghanistan to see what happened there, you will find that they have their own historical memory. I think that in fact, no matter whether a country wins or loses, there are heroes. These countries and people should be given a chance to write their own heroes. In fact, many heroes may be just small people. Maybe they have gone through a certain period behind the flashlight. They are just the epitome of the times. If there were no movies and literary works, they might have been forgotten long ago.

What needs to be emphasized is that if you really understand China, China is very disgusted with war. China has experienced too many history and feelings that Westerners are not familiar with. On the contrary, China has great sympathy and empathy for countries and individuals who are in war or suffering.

Aside from this, the movie itself has a basic performance in addition to the mentally handicapped special effects, whether it is individual or as a whole.

Regarding the issue of actors, in fact, most people in China do not understand the meaning behind the expressions of foreigners, so they cannot judge the acting skills of Westerners, just like the Chinese faces in countless movies do not hinder Western judgments.

Maybe to you, the story of this movie is meaningless. But the story here does express others' understanding of the same period of history.

All those 1-star review bombs are exposing the current climate of McCarthyist sinophobic hysteria in the west pretty accurately.

For anyone not suffering from McCarthyist hysteria, this is a decent movie with well-crafted, tense, and dramatic action scenes. It also does it's job of illustrating the theme of ordinary people being capable of extraordinary heroics feats and self-sacrifice when under existential threat.

Also, a good choice to feature Mao Anying's participation and death in the narrative. It showcases that the social class he was born in as Mao Zedong's son mattered nothing, because death is equal to all when fighting a war.

Less well done were the scenes of the American side. The directors and script writers did provide at least a couple of scenes of American soldiers talking about home life, and I thought this was a good choice to provide the American side with some humanity. But the actors were really chewing the scenery here, especially in their line delivery, which was unfortunate. I think, however, that this can mainly be attributed to the fact that these actors are far from being A-listers. Unfortunately, China still has not build up a decent pool of ethnically non-Asian quality actors, so I foresee more of this happening in the future.

Now a bit of historical context here on China's motives for partaking in this war: A few decades before the Korean War, China had been brutally invaded by imperial Japan through the Korean peninsula, which started off the theater of WW2 in the Far East. Given that this history was still fresh in the minds of the Chinese at the time, China was very sensitive to any happenings on the Korean peninsula. For that reason, they warned the American side multiple times not to cross the 38th parallel or they would force China's hand. The Americans thought the Chinese were bluffing and crossed that line anyway. This (and the American fleets that had gone to the Taiwan Straits in the summer of 1950) convinced the Chinese that the USA would try to invade and colonize China after taking control of the Korean peninsula. To preemptively stop this threat, China decided to set up the People's Volunteer Army to defend against the existential threat.

As a Chinese, I don't like this movie at all. This movie is kind of typical of Hollywood.

It's not a good movie to tell the history of the battle of Lake Changjin or the history of the war to resist U. S. aggression in Korea.

The movie didn't tell clearly that before Chinese army attended the war, the U. S. Navy's seventh Fleet had sailed into the Taiwan Strait on the orders of President Harry Truman. At that time, both Chinese government and Chinese people didn't want to attend a war again. But we have no choice.

The movie seems to blame MacArthur for all these faults. But at that time, the U. S. government itself also supported attacking NORTH Korea and even China. China warned the US not to cross the 38th parallel, but the government's leader Truman ignored it and thought China wouldn't send troops. These weren't made clear in the movie.

How the Chinese generals direct their soldiers to fight were not shown clearly in the movie. How the Chinese solders used wisdom and courage to defensed the tanks were not shown clearly in the movie either. They even let the main character use another tank to defense. That cannot be true.

Even at the end, the director arranged for American officers to salute the dead Bodies of Chinese soldiers. I'm not sure wether an ordinary soldier would do it, but I'm quite sure those who led the armies to attack Chinese People's Volunteers would not. It's really ridiculous.

The story about Lei was really great. He knew how to lead the soldiers to defense with wisdom, he knew to take advantage of the terrain, he also knew a soldier's sacrifice needs to be worth it. I cried when he died, especially when I heard the song of Yimeng. The Chinese sacrificed a lot in the war of liberation but now they need to fight again, to fight against the US army.

Who started the war first? Who amplified the war first? Who is invading? OF COURSE, not China.

Some people may think, the film is a propaganda tool for the Chinese government. This is ridiculous. This movie didn't even tell the history of the battle of Lake Changjin in a good way. Can it be propaganda? It wasn't nearly as much propaganda as Transformers, which showed off the U. S. military.

Do not assume every Chinese film as a propaganda tool, to be honest, the Chinese directors weren't good at propagating politics as American directors.

There are too many distinct inferior positions for chinese to respond the war,but if they make a concession,the war would have to be undertaken by their children.