jon-832

Definitely missed a lot of what this film was going for, which is definitely partly on me. A fair bit lost in translation, and it sounds like it would be helpful to be familiar with Ozu as well. Watching this dead tired at 11pm on a Sunday night likely didn't help comprehension. Was a big fan of the cinematography, especially the couple that keeps walking by. Excellent score for this film as well.

Most of the review here are calling this pro-Chinese propaganda. I however, would like to suggest that this is actually anti-Chinese, whatever the intensions of the writers were. Throughout this movie, the only people who are worse than the Chinese special forces are the Chinese mercenaries. The special forces, and the even more elite special forces walk into trap after trap, and are beaten very easily by the international mercenaries. The PLA looks completely incompetent, save for the main character, who just happens to be the director of the film. Whether he made the rest of the special forces look useless so he would look better in comparison, or if the writers just have no idea of any sort of tactics that might be used so just have people run headlong into gunfire is unclear, but it does stand out.

Other aspects of this film are equally poor. The acting and writing are terrible, even accounting for things that are lost in translation, and cultural nuances I might not have picked up on. The sound is also bad, with sound effects I'm pretty sure I've heard used in podcasts incorporated here to represent are character being kicked. The CGI hardly even needs to be mentioned, as I wasn't expecting much from it, but a scene with dozens of wolves attacking soldiers does stand out as especially bad.

To say something positive about this film, the stunts are impressive. No, not the highly promoted martial arts, but there are a lot of explosions in this film which looked like they were very close to the stunt performers, so I want to give kudos to them and the stunt coordinators.

Overall, this film is not worth watching if you're in the West. It is just bad, and not even in an entertaining way. At best, this might give people an idea of how certain Hollywood films look to international audiences, but that is about it.

This film presents the story of the filming of Maria Chapdelaine in 1934 in the town of Péribonka, Québec. This is one of the most famous events in the history of the town, and the film has managed to gather together a number of people with first- or second-hand accounts of the film shoot, as well as historians from the region. The film discusses various locations that the film was shot, and most interestingly has a pair of siblings who were alive and old enough to remember the film production. The director has also managed to track down a relative of the woman the character of Maria Chapdelaine was allegedly based on.

While I found much of the film to be interesting and informative, I thought it was unfocused in its narrative. There did not appear to be a theme running through the various stories told in the film, and was mostly a recounting of the events. There perhaps could have been more discussion of the effects on the town, or other towns with similar contexts where movies filmed. Many documentaries can take very specific stories such as this, and make them appealing to a broad audience by choosing presenting the story as a universal theme or lesson. Unfortunately, without this focus, this film will likely only appeal to those interested in the original novel or film, or who are from the region.