MovieChat Forums > Chi bi: Jue zhan tian xia (2009) Discussion > One of the best antiwar films of the las...

One of the best antiwar films of the last decade


Completing the Red Cliff pair of films, Red Cliff II is a remarkable piece of cinema. Full of humour and wit in the first two thirds to create the appropriate emotional state in which to view the full horror of the final battle. This should be considered a classic antiwar film, demonstrating why wars are futile.

http://opionator.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/red-cliff-ii-or-chi-bi-xia/

reply

I don't see how the film is anything close to a anti-war film - many Chinese would be aware that in the long run, the war between the three kingdoms eventually did pay off in reuniting China under the Jin dynasty.


Let the world change the punishment for sexual-related crimes to execution

reply

OK, so what is an antiwar film? Perhaps the best place to start is with Francois Truffaut. He said that all films tend to make wars look exciting and so you can't make an anti-war film. Being practical, it's commercial suicide to distribute a film that depresses instead of entertaining viewers.

It's like the reflex to tap your feet to the beat of military drums. As a civilian, the spectacle and sound of parades is highly watchable. Yet, when it comes to how you show fighting on the big screen, the director does have a choice. War can be romanticised and filled with patriotic propaganda hiding the brutality and cruelty (think almost all the films made during and after World War II). Or you can be like Kubrick and make a film like Paths of Glory.

The reason for proposing this pair of films with a combined running time of just over five hours as being antiwar is that it has two key features:

1. All combat involves two sides — the traditional film picks one side (usually the winner) and shows how heroic the winners are. Of course it will show death but mostly this will be the losers and the film is structured so we don't care about them. But John Woo goes to great lengths to show us both sides to this conflict. When we see people dying, we potentially care about combatants on both sides. Here no-one is conquered and benign leadership installed. No state is freed from unjust tyranny. People are slaughtered indiscriminately and at length on the screen.

2. Wars usually have an ideological content. They are fought for reasons which we are able to judge on their merits. If Country A is short of food and Country B will not share, we can decide whether Country A is justified in invading to secure the means of food production for a united country. Avoiding death by starvation can be an understandable reason for war. Yet, from the outset, Cao Cao's motive for invading the south is tainted by his desire to see, if not capture, his lost love. He is prepared to spend as many lives as it takes to achieve his personal ends. If the Emperor will also benefit, this is accidental.

Thus, Joh Woo is inviting the audience to see that this war has no noble cause to justify it. At the end, everyone portrayed in the film walks away disgusted by the scale of death and you are invited to see that this conflict was an exercise in brutal futility. Hence, it's clearly intended as an antiwar film

reply

Very intersting, but you have to admit that there are a lot of pro war conversations and allegories, including the end title song's lyrics:

"Let the cries of war be our song; We are brothers in arms, and so to history our stories belong
Like the waves of the mighty Yangtze so long, seething, as such forever, our spirit remains in our hearts so strong
The cries of war are our song; the mighty waves that crack the cliffs are never wrong"

reply

Of course there are elements in every anti-war film that glorify war. That's how anti-war films work. Unless there are sweeping moments when we see the magnificence of one side's strategy or the remarkable heroism of individuals, there's less to react against. For without seeing how brilliant a general and how successful the troops, how can we appreciate just how effective war is in killing or maiming so many people? The more we see individuals exulting in killing, the more there is to find disgusting. To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So reads Newton's laws of emotion.

reply

I don't see how you can say red cliff is particularly antiwar without basically saying all war movies are antiwar. The movie and subject matter are pretty much the epitome of the glorification of war. Heroes wading into a sea of enemies and mowing them down. Strategists playing cunning games against each other. Brave warriors charging forward with five arrows sticking out of them. The whole movie is pretty cartoonish. Sure, there is plenty of death and destruction, but it's hardly portrayed in starker terms than other war movies.

reply

It's perhaps interesting to compare the triumphal, propaganda tone of films like John Wayne's The Fighting Seabees and Sands of Iwo Jima with, say, MASH and Apocalypse Now which capture the pain of war. Think about the surreal number of bullets that fly in Arnold Schwarzenegger's direction in Commando where the violence is a joke and Red Cliff 2 where we get to watch characters we know burn to death and get hacked to pieces. There are nationalistic films glorifying war and victory, and there are other war films where you come out of the cinema wishing we could solve problems without having to fight and kill each other.

reply

I think you're identifying a more narrow set of PRO-war/action movie niches rather than describing how Red Cliff stands apart. I have not seen "Commando" but I'm guessing it's a cheesey 80s action flick. I don't think this is what springs to mind for most viewers when they think of "war movies."

And there are older classic war movies that narrate war in a very sanitized, aww-shucks, gee-whiz, just-a-buncha-good-ol-guys tone. This is a fairly narrow set of movies today.

These are clearly anti-war war movies: Schindler's List (1993), Apocalypse Now (1979), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Life Is Beautiful (1997), Platoon (1986), The Deer Hunter (1978), Gone with the Wind (1939), Paths of Glory (1957), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

All of those war movies address the horrors of war very prominently and explicitly.

Red Cliff more clearly falls in line with these war movies: Braveheart (1995), Gladiator (2000), The Last Samurai (2003), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Troy (2004), Lord of the Rings

These movies were, IMO, ignited by Braveheart. Like Braveheart, they are very graphic in the portrayal of violence on the field of combat. And of course, they show mass death and destruction. But they all have traits glorifying war: showcasing wide shots of assembled armies, massive fleets, tactical maneuvers, prominent roles of individual heroes. Yes, they are antiwar in a generic sense, but really they are out to entertain through visual splendor and action.

Also, in response to another one of your comments above, I actually thought that Red Cliff was a fairly biased portrayal of the Three Kingdoms. Like the fictionalized novels, Cao Cao was nearly entirely portrayed as power-hungry, lustful, treacherous, and arrogant.

reply

What we are talking about here is our interpretation of each director's intentions. I remember seeing All Quiet on the Western Front back in the 1950s and thinking it boring. We came out of the cinema and walked home through streets still undergoing rebuilding after being bombed flat. We were surrounded by the practical results of war so it was actually quite amusing, if somewhat surreal, to see the John Wayne and similar propaganda films. Family and friends had lost limbs, one had a metal plate in his head, another used to lie in the bath, trying to soak pieces of shrapnel up to the surface to he could dig them out with his Swiss Amy knife. It colours my perceptions of films.

It's slightly odd to see it set out like this but, in principle, I think we agree. I accept the idea there is an intermediate class of film where violence is shown in a deliberately equivocal perhaps even nonjudgmental way. I might want to broaden this class to include smaller scale violence where we would haggle over how to classify A Clockwork Orange, The Wild Bunch, the original Straw Dogs, and more recent films like Fight Club, the Saw series, Hostel, etc. It seems to me the issue is whether the director has engaged the emotions of the viewer. When you see something in a dispassionate frame, caring nothing for the fate of the people shown, it's difficult to be upset by what you see. But when you come to care about the fictional characters, it's more moving when you watch their destruction. If you are upset, this tends to make you anti-violence. We should also acknowledge that other portrayals of violence may be pornographic or have quite different intentions than to create an anti or pro issue viewer outcome.

We can agree to disagree on the qualities of Braveheart. I simply thought it a bad film which changed history around on a whim to create a star vehicle for Gibson. We can also agree that the way Cao Cao is shown in the Red Cliff films is at the level of comic book. It's done rather better in The Lost Bladesman.

reply

Yea I wouldn't call this anti war, its probably falls in the cateogory of Braveheart and Gladiator of Historical/Semi Historical Epics. To be anti something, it has to be the agenda of the makers to put that message across; this movie is more geared at telling the history (probably with some embellishments) of the period. Do not tell me next you are going to tell us that Dynasty Warriors is an anti-war game.

reply

"To be anti something, it has to be the agenda of the makers to put that message across."

I don't agree. It's perfectly possible for the reaction of the audience to be completely contrary to the intention of the film-maker. Take unintentional humour as an example. The scriptwriter, director and actor may all think a scene is serious but everyone in the cinema may laugh and/or jeer. So you may choose to see a film as being mere entertainment, whereas others may see it as having an implicit message. Indeed, arguably, some see the history of the Three Kingdoms as romanticised historical fiction, whereas others see it as demonstrating the destructive quality of the chaos caused by incessant warring between self-interested leaders.

reply