The Longest Movie I've Ever Seen: Red Cliff (2008)

A few days ago, my friend brought the John Woo film Red Cliff to my attention. Once I said I wanted to see it, he immediately went out and bought the blu-ray for us to watch. It is so long that it's actually split into two parts. It's also the most expensive film made in China to date, and was the first movie to gross more money at the box office than Titanic in China. The main reason I wanted to see this film so much is because when I was a kid, I used to play the Dynasty Warriors series of games on Playstation for hours on end, and these movies depict the same historical events that the games did. More of my thoughts after the jump.


The story follows the leaders of the three major factions of the Han Empire. The Prime Minister Cao Cao has plans of domination in mind and convinces the Emperor that the leaders of the various lands of China are rebelling. This allows him to attack and destroy them, adding their land to his own. The film actually takes place near the end of the Han era, just before the time of the Three Kingdoms of Wei, Shu, and Wu. Cao Cao is the leader of the Wie; Liu Bei leads Shu; Sun Quan rules Wu. In this movie, Cao Cao leads his troops against Liu Bei, driving him back, and forcing him to make an alliance with Sun Quan to join forces against Cao Cao who is perverting the Emperor's words. Cao Cao is leading an army of 800,000 men against them, but even together their troops only number around 100,000. It will take the sharp minds of their leaders, and seemingly endless wisdom of the strategist Zhuge Liang if they are to have any hope of driving the power hungry Cao Cao back.

Cao Cao has plans for domination

The problem with the stories of battles between the Three Kingdoms leaders is that they're extremely complex and drawn out. Luckily, John Woo knew this and his massive film is approximately 480 minutes long in total. That's about 4 hours and 40 minutes!! And get this, the film only covers 3 major conflicts out of that era. That's not to say that there isn't plenty of other things going on.

A lot of the movie is needed to set up the situations, gradually get you introduced to the gigantic cast, and familiarize yourself with the politics involved. Then of course there's all the training, spying, and the battle scenes are truly massive!

Production values on this movie are through the roof! Everything looks dead on for the period

Almost everything about this movie is crafted to perfection. All the actors look the part of the historical figures they play, all the costumes and armour, sets and locations are fantastic, and even the special effects are pretty damn great. The sense of scale is often over the top and gives you a really good picture how big these battles really are.

The fighting and action is also really good with soldiers getting stabbed with spears, shot with arrows and sliced with swords all to good effect. There's quite a lot of  blood, but none of it is really gory or too graphic, keeping the violence of the battles just real enough, but not too terrible that it would turn people off.

The scale of the battles is enormous!

Being that I knew the stories of the battles already thanks to the games I played as a kid, I knew all the characters instantly and of course knew the out comes of the battles as well. This makes me wonder though, would audiences be able to keep up with the story if they didn't have that knowledge ahead of time. It's sort of impossible to know (unless someone out there can tell me) but I don't think it would be an issue because they seem to spend plenty of time with decent to good character development. Perhaps the only sticking point as far as understanding the story goes, is that the sub-titles seemed to go by quite quickly. I'm pretty used to reading sub-titles, but those who aren't could have trouble keeping up, which could interfere with their movie viewing.

I found the effects to be quite good and I really enjoyed the climactic battles

Both films (part1, and part 2) were paced really well and always managed to keep my attention, even though I already knew what was going to happen. Something to be complimented on especially considering the overall run time. Not only were they paced and balanced well together, but also if you were to consider them as individual films. I wouldn't think of the like that though, as at the end of one, it even says "to be continued in part 2" and leaves you on a pretty big cliff hanger with the big battle with Cao Cao still looming on the horizon.

If you like those grand Chinese historical movies, and you like the work of John Woo, you'll probably love this movie. I definitely thought it was a great movie, with only the run time being a bit of a daunting factoid that might keep you from watching it. You'll probably have to set aside an entire afternoon if you want to watch the whole thing in one go like we did, but since it is split into two parts, it is possible to just watch them on different occasions without much trouble. The Blu-ray that my friend got had both parts in the one case so you don't have to worry about finding them both separately. Anyways, I definitely recommend checking it out. Now I just have to fight my urge to go out right now and buy Dynasty Warriors 7 on PS3!