1911 : Révolution

I saw this film on Oct. 9th. 2011. It moves quite quickly at the beginning and there is a lot of war action portrayed in the failed attempts to overthrow the Qing Empire. Chartracters are all identified and that is the only part of the film that detracts from the viewing. The film is in Chinese and by the time you have read the subtitles the characters names are gone. The film is enjoyable if you know Chinese history of this period and if you don't it can be just a series of talking and action scenes and can be quite confusing. Sun yat-sen is the main character but Jackie Chan does get to be more than just an action figure. If you want to more about this period of Chinese this would be the movie to spur you on or illustrate better what was going on in China at this time. Yuan Shi-kai is one character who has appeared in a lot of historical films portraying this period and his actions are as always ones of greed and betrayal.

Considering this is only a little more than an hour and a half in length, "1911" does a pretty decent job of offering the viewer a look at the 1911 revolution in China that toppled the Qing dynasty and inaugurated the Chinese Republic. The movie is heavy on battle scenes as the republicans and monarchists battle - and some of them are pretty graphic. The movie also gives a substantial look at some of the internal politics of the republican movement, which was not exactly a unified movement, except in its overall goal of toppling the monarchy. There's a few reflections on the place of foreigners and on repeated foreign interference in Chinese affairs. Basically this is pretty well acted by everyone involved, and it plays it pretty straight, with only one scene that I can recall that descends into Chinese martial arts. The fact that it is so short means that while it offers the viewer a good taste of the revolution, it lacks any real depth. Obviously, the era was far more complicated than is portrayed here.

One thing that detracted from my enjoyment of the movies was the subtitles. I understand the need for them, of course, but there were two problems with them - first, they sometimes flashed by so fast that it was difficult to read them, and, second, there were many times when there were two different sets of subtitles on the screen - one translating dialogue, and one translating historical information that was being offered on screen. It was difficult to follow both, and the latter especially were written in a very small font.

The movie was produced in mainland China to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1911 revolution. Unsurprisingly, then, the movie pays homage in its closing captions to the Chinese Communist Party as the inheritors of the revolutionary tradition. Aside from that, though, this didn't come across to me as a particularly heavy propaganda piece, which I appreciated. (6/10)

A historic film that doesn't work out well. Despite its rigor and historical interest, it's a not-so-smooth, confusing and uninteresting film. It seems to me that they had problems in the editing and it's a shame because it has an intense and modern scenography in the battle scenes, good interpretations.

It looks like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are forced to fit together and don't quite belong there, resulting in a confusing picture. Who knows if because of having so many directors...

It could have been a great historical epic, but it's not...

Jackie Chan celebrates the milestone of the 100th film in his career with the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution, significant for ending the reign of the Qing Dynasty and ushering in a new era with the founding of the Republic of China. Simply titled '1911', the expensive historical epic sees Chan taking on the role of General Huang Xing, who was leader Dr Sun Yat-Sen's deputy and commander of the revolutionaries in several cities across South China.

Besides starring in the film, Chan also bankrolled the US$30mil drama and serves as 'general director' alongside TV director Zhang Qi- so let it be known that this is also Jackie's passion project. Nonetheless, good intentions do not a good film make- and '1911' is an excellent case in point. Meticulously researched and assembled to make it as authentic a depiction of history as possible, it is nonetheless underwhelming and lacking in heart, spirit and most of all passion. It is also less a film than a history lesson, and far less compelling than its peers 'Founding of a Republic' and 'Beginning of the Great Revival'.

Yes, it is ostensibly modelled against the latter two similarly big- budget historical pictures that have taken a momentous chapter in China's history and turned it into crowd-pleasing blockbuster entertainment with a who's-who list of actors in roles both large and small. But even with 'Founding's' screenwriters Wang Xingdong and Chen Baoguang, '1911' lacks the finesse of both its genre predecessors, attempting too strenuously to squeeze as many characters and plot lines as possible into its two-hour running time.

We have no qualms with the film's method of introducing its characters with on screen captions, but there are just too many in here to even matter. Indeed, the sheer number of them means that some like Jaycee Chan's Zhang Zhenwu, Yu Shaoqun's Wang Jingwei, or Dennis To's Xiong Bingkun have less than a minute of screen time, and disappear as quickly from their audience's mind. The objective of honouring these martyrs and their respective contributions to the revolution is admirable, but some judiciousness should very well have been exercised to ensure that those given mention do make a difference in the film too.

The consequence of portraying so many characters at once is also that the first half of the film feels extremely haphazard, fast-forwarding from one event to another with little continuity. In fact, this film probably takes the crown for being most heavily reliant on text throughout its duration to explain each and every sequence, and the ill- conceived technique results in a film that feels oddly like watching a history textbook unfold before one's eyes. It doesn't help too that editor Yang Hongyu likes to interrupt scenes just as they are building up with flashbacks or parallel yet unrelated events, effectively preventing the audience from engaging with the characters within.

And even though history is supposed to be an objective and dispassionate exercise, that is no excuse for the lack of any true emotion in the film. Busy juggling the mammoth cast and characters, neither Jackie Chan nor Zhang Qi seem to have paid much attention to the development of the key roles- Huang Xing, Xu Zonghan and even Sun Yat-Sen. Their definition here is essentially one-note- whether the wise intellectual (Sun) or the brave military commander (Huang) or the quiet yet strong-willed wife (Xu)- and you're not likely to feel any differently for any of the characters before and after the film. The only interesting character amongst them all is General Yuan Shikai (Sun Chun), depicted as shrewd and cunning in brokering the abdication of the feudal throne.

In truth, for all its promise of being a gritty war movie a la 'Saving Private Ryan', it is the political struggles in the last days of the Qing dynasty between the provisional president Sun Yat-Sen and Yuan Shikai that proves the most intriguing. Crammed into the last half hour of the film, this particular theme emphasises the challenge of instituting a new political regime which would replace a system more than 2000 years old. In contrast, the battle scenes lack intensity or any genuine thrills for that matter, often drowning in melodramatic music to demonstrate the heroism of the outnumbered and outgunned revolutionary forces against the Qing's military might.

And we suspect that Jackie Chan fans may be most let down by that, since we do expect much better from the veteran actor who's given us some of the most thrilling action movies in the 80s and 90s. Instead, Chan spends most of the time in the film looking old and aggrieved, with only a brief fight between Chan and three men coming close to the old Jackie we've grown to love. What's perhaps even more perplexing is that while Chan gets top billing, his role as Huang Xing is overshadowed by Winston Chao's Sun Yat-Sen and Sun Chun's Yuan Shikai- not simply because both Chao and Chun are better dramatic actors, but also because there is more screen time devoted to both.

Precisely because we are huge fans of the star, it pains us to say that Jackie Chan's 100th movie fails to live up to its expectations as a milestone film in his career or as a tribute to a significant event in modern China's history. Better suited as a TV movie on the History Channel than a lavish blockbuster epic, '1911' could be useful as educational material for those looking for an introduction to the founding of the republic- anyone else will likely be disappointed.

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I'm afraid I have to disagree with the other reviewers. I just spent $4.99 renting this film from Time Warner Cable and it was not money well spent. Having been excited by the splendid and creative resurgence of Chinese cinema in the reform period, especially in the 1980s when it burst on the international scene with classics like Yellow Earth (Huang Tudi), it was surprising to see such a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s. This is very much like The Opium War, though the battleship in this film is clearly not a model. In those days (the 1960s), western actors were not available, since China was closed to the outside world, so they had to use some of the few expatriate English language teachers. It looks like they have done the same this time, though surely Jackie Chan could have got anyone he wanted from Hollywood. The characterisation is one- dimensional. The dialogue sounds like it is from the history books, with the film merely providing visual illustration. There are lots of close- ups of Sun Yat-sen taken from below or with him standing in a presidential position, exactly like the shots of Mao Zedong in earlier films about the Communist revolution. This is understandable -- Sun has always been considered the "father of the nation" (guo fu) by both the Communists and the Guomindang, who warred for decades -- but Sun is too interesting a character to be treated to the standard Stalinist "cult of personality" adulation. He was not, after all, a Kim Jong-Il. He was a real politician. He wrote a development plan for China. He planned, but did not live to lead, a Northern Expedition to reunite China under a republican government. The style of the movie seems to be heavily influenced by pre-war Soviet films (not, though, those of the brilliant Eisenstein and Pudovkin). It is surprising that Jackie Chan co-directed it. Surely he could have injected much more of his own cheeky humour? this film is so old-fashioned. I agree it would not have been centenary- reverential to have had fast cuts and rap music, but the slow-motion sentimental flashbacks are so hackneyed. Politically, the film doesn't say anything interesting and blithely ignores the unconscious irony of Sun saying that the Chinese people can now choose their own leaders after two hundred years of monarchy. One hundred years later, they still can't.