Dang kou feng yun

A good plot, more engaging than normal for the genre, did not have flights, dances in the air during the fights, but good fights, with all the charm and lightness of the Orientals ... A little long, which makes it a little tedious, because the plot is good, but it's not that impressive... Among the antagonists I highlight the character and the performance of the Pirate Samurai, great ending...

It is a great movie, accurately telling the history between Japan and China in Ming dynasty. I especially love the 1-1 fight scene of General Qi and Commander Kumasawa and the languages were spoken in both Mandarin and Japanese. It also showed the characters of Chinese and Japanese. If you know nothing about the history, you might get bored, but you will enjoy this movie very much if you know a little bit of the story.

This is a very traditional way that Chinese movie makers kept doing. Slow tempo, wasted lot of money on settings, costumes, attire accessories, uniforms, weaponry....formatted dialog, predictable scenarios.....rigid 1 dimensional acting, no-brain directing, etc and etc.

But among all of these clichés, the worst in this film is the pathetic soundtrack. The first viewer has already pointed out this awful arrangement, but the problem of the western styled music is not just that bad, it's problem the music director or soundtrack supervisor used a music that got nothing to do with every scene, it just repeatedly played on and on; in fighting scenes, in the camp, during dialog, it just played on with the same tune, same tone. It's the soundtrack that bothered me so severely, so I just have to quit watching. What a stupid and boring movie. Another living example how the Chinese movie makers never understood how to spent the budget wisely. The fighting scenes are okay, but they were ruined by the emotionless soundtrack.

God Of War is a pretty solid period war/action movie from director Gordon Chan(who directed some of my favorite movies, Fist Of Legend and Beast Cops). This is probably the best acting performance to date from leading man Wenzhuo aka Vincent Zhao. He is brilliant in the fight scenes and there is quite a bit of battle action to go around in this picture. The choreographed action looks great and is very fluent, but complex. The film also looks very sharp and has good character development and pacing. Sammo Hung appears only briefly, but has a memorable cameo and good chemistry with leading man Wenzhuo Zhao. The legendary Yasuaki Kurata gives a powerful performance as Japanese general and gives a lot of empathy and insight to the Japanese side of this historical conflict. This film has elements of Red Cliff and Warlords, but most reminds me of Korean movie The Admiral Roaring Tides. All above are quality productions and highly recommended and I am very impressed by this excellent film.

This Japanese vs. Chinese war film is action packed, never a dull moment.

There are shades of Kurosawa, I dare say, in the way we get the character development entwined with the action in a perfect blend.

My only problem is that I'm American, and I have a hard time figuring out who is who, and which side is which side. Yet even I caught the significance of the characters. I'm just not really sure which ones survived along with the ones who obviously survived.

I'd probably just have to view it again. It's a very incredible epic film, and there isn't one boring second in this. Even the dialog is exciting., and I was listening to dubbed dialog and reading subtitles. When a film can defeat translation problems this well, it's a smash.