Director – John Woo – 2008, 2009 – China, Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 139m + 135m
*****
As a warlord seeks to crush opposition in Southern China, its two kingdoms join forces to defeat him, with the deciding battle taking place at Red Cliff – plays as part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024
China, 208 A.D., around the end of the Han Dynasty. With the puppet Emperor more interested in talking to birds than the nitty-gritty of ruling his kingdom, his Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) talks him into a commission to subdue the rival Southern warlords Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen).
After a battle against the former’s forces in which his a loyal soldier is unable to prevent Liu’s wife getting killed but manages to get their baby to safety by strapping it on his back prior to single-handed combat, Liu’s advisor Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sets out to persuade Sun Qian to join them in an alliance against the aggressor.
Despite unanimous opposition from his ministers, who would prefer to surrender to keep the peace, Sun agrees to fight along with his frontline commander Zhou Yu (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and, because she insists on joining them, his tomboy sister the Princess Sun Shangxian (Zhao Wei).
Learning that Sun intends to stand against him, Cao sends an advance party who are lured by the princess towards and into a circular troop formation (a ‘bagua’ which is here visually compared to a tortoise), inside which they can be picked off in isolated numbers. Cao encamps his forces in his fortress at Red Cliff, while the forces of the two Southern forces pitch camp on the other side of the water.
On her own initiative, the princess sneaks off as a spy to the enemy camp (which is pretty much where the first film ends), disguised as an enemy soldier, so as to send messages and intel back via carrier pigeon.
Cao, who is described as a man without friends, enlists two conquered admirals to run his enormous fleet and promotes Sun Shucai (Tong Dawei), a player of cujo (an ancient Chinese game not dissimilar to soccer), to battalion commander, who befriends and helps the princess without knowing who she is or that she’s a spy or even a woman.
When a plague of Typhoid decimates a hundred of his men, Cao puts the corpses on boats and sends them down across the water, hoping to infect the Southern forces. Southern leader Sun, who earlier conceded that the worst thing about his lands were its treacherous winds, concocts a plan which involves sending burning ships toward the enemies’ own bolted together, anchored ships, where the fire will be blown by a forecasted wind blowing in a particular direction onto the enemy ships, causing havoc…
Although further intrigues involve additional characters, that’s the broad outline. What impresses fundamentally is the scale of the thing. Unlike Woo’s smaller scale Hong Kong movies and similarly intimate US movies – Hard-Boiled (1992) is about two cops going after a gangland boss, Face / Off (1997) is about a cop and a criminal who exchange faces – this one is about the collapse of an historical dynasty with armies numbering in the thousands crossing continents and doing battle.
Yet while Woo paints this stuff on the largest imaginable canvas, he still manages to boil his essential drama down to a small number of characters, sneakily delivering the best of both worlds and retaining his trademark intimacy. This is not an action movie where the stunts come first and the performances are perfunctory; there is a strong feel for character throughout.
That said, what seems to fascinate Woo are military tactics on both the broad scale and the smaller scale. He’s also as concerned with the planning and the arguments as about the execution of them on the battlefield. So one scene memorably involves the dissenter on the bagua plan voicing his disapproval by picking up the tortoise from the scale model battlefield and dropping it into a vat of water to show it sinking like a stone.
But then, you get into the battle, and it’s full of detailed like the soldiers protected within the bagua formation behind shields poking out spears to impale the enemy or, at foot level, equally long hooks to cut their ankles. Or the enemy wrapping spiked cylinders on chains round the massed shields of the bagua formation to lethally cut through it.
Equally, the characters of Sun’s commander and the Princess are set up in a terrific tiger-hunting scene in which one character unexpectedly gets mauled. After this, you know that both or either would be good people to have around you in a battle.
Such set-pieces in part one are matched if not superseded by, those in part two, highlights including the mass float of boats carrying infected bodies down river to the Southern forces and those forces’ use of those same boats, packed with straw men, to both considerably boost their supply of arrows with those fired at them by the enemy with no casualties and to sow doubt in Cao Cao’s mind as to the loyalty of his two admirals, who he has put to death.
The final hour or so, where the Southern fleet, prows ablaze, moves on the Northern forces with the hard wind blowing the flames at the enemy, is a tour de force of pyrotechnic stunts. CG is used to augment the whole into a cast of thousands of people and hundred of ships, but the practical stunt work shows the Chinese film industry at the top of its game.
The sweep of the whole thing, the vast, epic scale, carries you along. And yet, the characterisations give it a gravitas and Woo is able to inject deeply satisfying emotional moments both within and without the conflict, from a character using a succession of spears pulling them from recently impaled combatants to insert into others, spear by spear by spear, to tender scenes between a wife and her husband informing him she’s pregnant, to the whole subplot in part two about the Princess and the cujo player which firstly provides light, quasi-romantic, almost comic relief and later pays off in tragedy on the battlefield.
With tremendous production design, impressive cinematography and a sumptuous, moving score on the soundtrack, the whole thing is an extraordinary achievement, a welcome addition to an already impressive body of work. In the US and UK it was released in cinemas as one film, a standalone 148m version, but this longer two film original is the one to see.
Red Cliff plays as part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024.
Teaser Trailer (for standalone version):
Trailer (for standalone version):
Trailer (for Red Cliff II, no subtitles):
Season Trailer: