The same director that gave us the excellent movie The Captain (2019) is also directing this drama, and some of those cast members also returned to work on this project. As I had previously loved The Captain, I thought that Chinese Doctors would likely be a good movie too and I was not disappointed!
This is a pretty good medical drama of a real event with a lot of tense moments that gives the audience a feel of how the atmosphere was like in Wuhan during China's first COVID-19 outbreak there. It also illustrates pretty well all the logistical hoops epidemic outbreak management have to go through and the pressure that medical front line workers undergo during such crisis, not to mention the effects that the outbreak had on ordinary people.
Realism is given high priority. The Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital and the main character of this movie, Zhang Dingyu, really exist and, yes, Zhang Dingyu does suffer from ALS in real life too. I commend the scriptwriters for going in-depth with their exploration to accurately recreate the events that happened. For those who have some knowledge of Chinese, it's also a nice small detail that the doctors kept their regional accents; for example, the doctor Tao Jun speaks Mandarin with a Cantonese accent, because he's from Guangdong; I felt that these regional accents (which are often omitted in Chinese movies) gave more authenticity to the setting of this movie.
Basically, if you love stories based on real life crisis events wherein professional staff have to work under extreme pressure to save the day (which I do), then this type of movie is definitely for you. Lovers of pandemic movies will also enjoy this movie, as it is based real events that happened during a real pandemic. I read from another reviewer that the Soviets have designated for this type of movie about "social interacting between people who works in particular industry or professions" a particular genre called 'Proizvodstvennaya'; while I've never heard of that genre before, I fully agree with the sentiment that we need more of that type of movie, because I love this!
