The fact that Japan invaded China during the late 1930's is often eclipsed by the subsequent outbreak of WW2 a couple of years later. What happened during that assault, and particularly what came to be called 'The Rape of Nanking' - China's then capital - was to set the benchmark for Oriental brutality during the Pacific conflicts to come. There has never been an adequate accounting.
This movie is a much-belated and necessary piece of cinema, then. It is also of quite astonishing quality. A Chinese production with an estimated budget of just $12m, it is a tour-de-force.
By all technical standards, it compares extremely favourably with the best of the genre from Hollywood or Europe. Commercial Chinese cinema, like much of Chinese production, is on a steep learning curve in order to catch up to the long-established traditions and skills of the Occident. I wasn't expecting much. It came out of the local supermarket bran-tub. Yet here is a long, intricate and extremely proficient work. One is obliged to make allowance for cultural nuances. Some of the scenes detailing relationships are needlessly maudlin for my (British) tastes, though not particularly worse than Hollywood schmaltz. It is yet far more mature and less melodramatic than the German production of 'Stalingrad'. Shot in B&W, like 'Schindler's List', it instead describes a national holocaust rather than a racial one, and is therefore less inclined towards the moral brow-beating of Spielberg's overlong Oscar junket.
Almost all of the faces are unfamiliar (to me), and this lends the movie a genuine newsreel experience, like the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, or the Cambodian killing-fields.
There's nothing to spoil here. This movie is about exactly what it says on the box - appalling demonic cruelty and mass-murder. It's a missing page of history. But it IS cinema; it's not a documentary. It's harrowing and disagreeable viewing. It's flawed, but it's also highly competent and professional.
Easily a match for 'The Killing Fields' or 'Stalingrad', better than 'Enemy At The Gate', and only a step behind 'Schindler's List'.
Chinese cinema has definitely come of age. Recommended. The 'High-Fliers' DVD has English subtitles.
This movie is a much-belated and necessary piece of cinema, then. It is also of quite astonishing quality. A Chinese production with an estimated budget of just $12m, it is a tour-de-force.
By all technical standards, it compares extremely favourably with the best of the genre from Hollywood or Europe. Commercial Chinese cinema, like much of Chinese production, is on a steep learning curve in order to catch up to the long-established traditions and skills of the Occident. I wasn't expecting much. It came out of the local supermarket bran-tub. Yet here is a long, intricate and extremely proficient work. One is obliged to make allowance for cultural nuances. Some of the scenes detailing relationships are needlessly maudlin for my (British) tastes, though not particularly worse than Hollywood schmaltz. It is yet far more mature and less melodramatic than the German production of 'Stalingrad'. Shot in B&W, like 'Schindler's List', it instead describes a national holocaust rather than a racial one, and is therefore less inclined towards the moral brow-beating of Spielberg's overlong Oscar junket.
Almost all of the faces are unfamiliar (to me), and this lends the movie a genuine newsreel experience, like the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, or the Cambodian killing-fields.
There's nothing to spoil here. This movie is about exactly what it says on the box - appalling demonic cruelty and mass-murder. It's a missing page of history. But it IS cinema; it's not a documentary. It's harrowing and disagreeable viewing. It's flawed, but it's also highly competent and professional.
Easily a match for 'The Killing Fields' or 'Stalingrad', better than 'Enemy At The Gate', and only a step behind 'Schindler's List'.
Chinese cinema has definitely come of age. Recommended. The 'High-Fliers' DVD has English subtitles.