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Red Cliff
Red Cliff comes to Australian screens with quite the pedigree. In its original form, it was released as two separate films that totaled over four hours in combined length. It was also the most expensive Asian financed film ever made and also had the biggest box office ever in Mainland China. To say it is an epic film is to understate the matter.
While the version we get to see has been trimmed to a single film of 148 minutes long (this includes some of the longest final credits ever) it has been supplemented with additional information to help the story make more sense to our western minds.
The film is based on the battle of Red Cliffs, a real life event that took place during the end of the Han Dynasty. While based on real events, director John Woo takes quite a few liberties with reality and injects the story with warriors with super human abilities and strategists that can see clearly into the future. With this approach, the film becomes much more an exercise in fantasy as a clinical retelling of historical events. This adds to the enjoyment of the film immensely as a note for note accurate retelling of the story would be overwhelming in its brutality and gore. As it is the film is still very gory and by film’s end the carnage does become a bit much.
The film never looks less than amazing and the costumes and sets are suitably grand in both scale and appearance. While the reduced storyline isn’t difficult to follow, it still fills the mind with a different time and place to our western culture and ways.
The blurring between reality and fantasy gives Red Cliff the ability to transcend the war movie genre and become more of a story of heroics and valor filtered through flights of the mind as much as the flights of arrows and spears. It is violent and carnage does reign but it has a lot more going for it than just the bloody warfare.
Rob Hudson
www.redcliff.meiah.com
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