Well, we can agree to disagree on whether it's a good movie but I see this as pure propaganda that willfully distorts history to give a completely misleading impression. Pick anyone to become the subject of a film biography. What would you rather see, a film about that person or a film starring a friend of the person? Well that's what has happened here. Sun Yat-sen is the pivotal figure in the fight against the Qing Dynasty and, to get the desired result, Sun has to do a deal with Yuan Shikai. Huang Xing was an unsuccessful military leader trained by the Japanese who, in one or two campaigns following the Wuchang Uprising managed not to get beaten because Yuan Shikai did not think it convenient to beat his army. He was no more heroic than any other general of the Tongmenghui. Indeed, the whole movement later became the Kuomintang and lost every major battle until it was forced to retreat to Formosa. The real drama was in the politics and that hardly gets a look-in here. It's like saying China became communist because the Kuomintang lost the civil war. The fighting was really subsidiary to the politics that marginalised the people's support for the Kuomintang. You can't change a nation the size of China unless the people follow you. Only a few followed Huang Xing but millions followed Sun Yat-sen. He was the father of the China following the abdication of the Qing Dynasty.
If you want to go and see a film about warfare, pick something more interesting like Letters From Iwo Jima or Stalingrad directed by Joseph Vilsmaier and released to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the German defeat there. Now those are real films about history.
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