Movie Review: Red Cliff

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My Rating for this movie : 7.5 of 10

From Wiki: Red Cliff (?? chi bi) is two-part movie directed by John Woo to bring back story on the Battle of Red Cliffs and events during the Three Kingdoms period in ancient China. stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi, Chang Chen, Hu Jun, Lin Chi-ling and Zhao Wei. With an estimated budget of US\$80 million, Red Cliff is the most expensive Asian-financed film to date.

I can say that story telling is superb and describing war strategy in quite a good way. This movie first part is pretty long: 2 hours and 10 minutes, but all casts are in there in their own enough screen time. From perspective of non-Three Kingdoms-novel-reader, I think you will not get lost in the story, it describes each character quite well until you can learn them more from wiki or history book. Some parts of this movie has subplot you can watch in Three Kingdoms movie about General Zhao (played by Andy Lau).

What a failure of this movie is at its cast. Besides Tony Leung, Zhao Wei, and Chang Chen, I think cast for Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Guan Yu and Zhang Fei is disappointing. I prefer cast at Three Kingdom (Ressurection of the Dragon) as it is more realistic. Also this movie stuntmen are all not screen friendly, fighting scene also lose to some other epic movie. Another lack is music, as far as I know there is no themesong in this film.

Just cannot wait for the second part of this movie, which is expected to screen on January 2009.