The Crossing

Almost twenty years after James Cameron's Titanic broke cineplexes with its combination of blockbuster spectacle and heartrending emotion, John Woo is hoping to do the same with The Crossing. Based on the real- life sinking of a Taiwan-bound steamer that claimed 1,500 lives (approximately the same number lost aboard the RMS Titanic), Woo's latest epic boasts three times the romance and, one would think, three times the heartbreak and drama. In theory, anyway. In actuality, splitting the movie into two means that there's no sign of the titular journey in this first installment of The Crossing - for that, you'll have to wait for the sequel, due in cinemas in May 2015. What you do get is plenty of occasionally soggy backstory for the film's three star-crossed couples, as they meet and fall in love against a backdrop of world and civil war.

In the midst of World War II, General Lei Yifang (Huang Xiaoming) bravely commands his troops against the Japanese, while signaller Tong Daqing (Tong Dawei) captures Yan Zekun (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a Taiwanese doctor conscripted into the Japanese army. When the war ends, each man finds love: Yifang marries heiress Zhou Yunfen (Song Hye-Kyo); Daqing forms an unexpected connection with nurse Yuzhen (Zhang Ziyi), a complete stranger who plays his wife in a family photo so he can get more rations; and Zekun pines after Noriko (Masami Nagasawa), his sweetheart who has since been repatriated to Japan. But their lives change again when the civil war erupts: suddenly, the men are called back into battle, to fight against people they fought with and for just a few years ago.

There's no denying it - at its worst, Woo's film plays like two hours of filler. It meanders in episodic bursts through the lives of these six characters, never quite making a convincing argument for its existence. We know it's meant to create emotional stakes for the sequel, but a great deal of the drama that unfolds in this film could be condensed by a canny screenwriter into a few minutes of narrative context.

It doesn't help that Woo doesn't fully deliver on either the military or the romantic aspects of the film. The opening battle feels like it was shot a few decades ago: the blood splatters are gory and unrealistic, while the action beats disappear amidst the carnage - the last thing you'd expect from a Woo movie. It recalls Michael Bay at his most boom-tastic, which isn't really a compliment. The relationships play out in stilted, somewhat soggy fashion, told as much through voice-over as actual interaction: a barefoot Yunfen somehow waltzes away with Yifang's heart, Zekun must hastily disguise his sketches of Noriko's eyes during an art class, and Daqing pays his fake wife in noodles that aren't salty enough for his taste.

And yet, this installment of The Crossing is not entirely without merit. Stick with it long enough, and some of its scattered episodes and ideas will prove more affecting than you'd expect. This comes primarily from Woo's surprisingly even-handed treatment of the civil war that breaks out within China: neither side is vilified; indeed, we're shown what happens when brothers-in-arms find themselves returning to war on opposite sides. There are moments of quiet comedy - three starving soldiers find a rabbit in the woods - and others of devastating betrayal, when true allegiances are revealed. For a big-budget release clearly targeting the Chinese market, it's interesting that Woo doesn't downplay that element of Taiwanese resistance, instead folding the people, their language and their strength into the film.

Woo's all-star cast is competent, but not quite strong enough to save The Crossing when it's determined to, well, sink. Zhang is blessed with the meatiest role. It may be predictable - poor, illiterate nurse struggles to earn enough money to buy a ticket to Taiwan to find her true love - but she imbues it with plenty of grit and desperation. Tong treads a fine line between comedy and tragedy as Daqing, shifting from comic relief to unexpected war hero as circumstances spin out of everyone's control.

The other actors fare less well. Kaneshiro and Nagasawa are little more than an afterthought, turning up briefly and thus far inconsequentially throughout the film, while Huang and Song are saddled with the most dismally boring of love stories. The former, so charming in other movies, has apparently decided to play his role with an arrogant sneer almost permanently stuck to his face, which can make for somewhat disconcerting viewing.

There are, of course, financial reasons galore for Woo to split his epic into two films. But are there any creative ones? It's possible to charitably grant him and his producers the benefit of the doubt - there's nothing wrong, per se, in dedicating an entire film to building up to an event that will only take place in the sequel. But it's hard to believe that box-office considerations didn't play a part when the final product is less hit than miss, a bundle of moments strung together with little subtlety and not enough care. The first installment in a franchise should leave you hungering for more - The Crossing, at best, creates a sense of mild but hardly overpowering curiosity about how everything will shake out.

I can only say that the director thinks too much. Multi-line narrative, but the whole story was cut apart. There are too many roles involved, too many complicated plots, too many side details to be cut off, and the result is that the slow pace makes people fall asleep. The camera language tends to be exquisite, trying to show rich feelings, and actually more procrastinating.

The previous episode, as a foreshadowing story, focuses on depicting several groups of characters whose fate is entangled in the context of the great era. The story still makes sense, but the texture of the epic has not been made.

just like what director woo did to his "red cliff", an absolutely long and dreary movie that had to be divided into two parts, this pathetic movie, "the crossing", was inevitably piled up into two parts. i often thought that if a director got enough conscience, even he got lot of money from the investors/producers, he would never waste so much money on those totally unnecessary scenes. we often thought a movie that good or bad was totally relied on the director, but actually it's not, the fundamentally important necessity coming first for a good or a bad movie is from the 'screenplay' that would forecast the success or failure of a movie. then, the second important factor to the movie is the work of the director who served as a good editor like what a publisher provided the author to fine tuned the novel before printing, working with the screenplay writer(s), point out the blind spots, the mistakes, the ridiculous storyline/scenarios, the illogic plots, those areas where the writers might not have noticed during the writing, and demand them to be corrected, omitted, deleted and to be rewritten. by the length of the 'red cliff' and 'the crossing', woo obviously not only didn't do anything of the above-mentioned necessity as a good editor titled as a 'director', he might even have asked the screenplay writers to lengthen and to prolong the movie manuscript since he got too much production budget to spend. if the screenplay is too concentrate and has been squeezed into a tighter one, then he lose the opportunity to spend it all, or even worse, to ask for more money to complete a well-ballooned project.

based upon such premises, we then clearly see why these two movies had turned out to be such a long and diluted products. unnecessary scenes of battles, banquets, dancing, crowded interior and exterior segments, unnecessary teasing, flirting or hostile close-up or pan-out scenes between or among the main characters, expensive settings and costumes.....and all of them actually could be omitted, yet a self-indulgent director, on the contrary, would not have the least intention to do the opposite. therefore, just like some of the self-important pompous western directors who often generated more animosity with the movie production companies and the producers, woo did it again and again in such extravaganza formula and style.

an international well-known director, when asked the casting agency to call up some hot actors to participate his new project, most of them if not with on-going projects, would never like to lose the opportunity to jump on the money train to do the stunts. so what we got here are bunch of renown actors signed up with woo to benefit both for each other. yet this unhealthily swollen film only made these actors become shallow puppets in this film, doing a lot of ridiculously unnecessary scenes that in the first place, should be cut or omitted. they just kept changing custom-made new costumes like models on the runway of a fashion show, appeared in so many unnecessary parts of this diluted film to become part of the generic medicine prescribed by the director.

trying so hard to imitate the epic movie 'titanic' with the Chinese turmoil time of Japanese invasion, the insurgent Chinese communists controlled, manipulated by the soviet communist party from Russia, the struggling nationalist party's army that did the actually battles against the Japanese invasion forces, then came up a backdrop of a ship of fools trying to run away from the dangers and migrate to an island, then sunken to the bottom of the strait. a movie based upon a sunken vessel full of war-torn refugees who were then used as the fictitious ingredients of an absolutely no-big-deal, totally unimportant and pointless so-called historical saga, forcing the audiences to waste almost 5 hours in darkness facing a silver screen, well, is not what a well-paid-and-well-rewarded satisfying experience, unless they are die-hard fans of those actresses and actors; otherwise, it's a torture.

when the pointless first battle was over, the Chinese soldier lit up a big cigar and puffed it....can you believe it?! a Chinese soldier smoking a cigar? in the 1940s? on the Chinese battlefield? mr. woo, are you kidding me? this is a Chinese movie, not a American western movie, not a gunslinger like clint eastwood did after a gun battle. be serious, will you?

what i'd like to add are the review titles from IMDb's reviewers of some other movies that usually turned out to be so shallow, so ridiculous, so laughable and so pointless:

"All style and no substance" "Action movie, not "realistic" "Garbage movie - designed to make money for (both director and leading actors)" "Waste of time and money" "Movies today are money, not quality, acting, directing, dialog, story & plots are all in the toilet, past the septic tank and into the weeping bed. Movies today simply suck. "

that's about it.

Not my kind of movie, but this one didn't bored me as hell as Titanic did. I've read people complaining about complexity of the trama, I only can say that way is the american public: they want all fast and easy, they don't want to think too much. But if you like a bit more complex tramas, give The Crossing a try.