Ba bai

This is a Remake about a historical event. It may be a bit hyped and exaggerated and has quite the nationalistic take (pride wise) to it - something US movies also like to do to the same degree. Hopefully you don't have an issue with that, otherwise you'd deprive yourself of quite the intense and harrowing movie! And visually ... I mean wow, just wow.

How it all was built, the amount of preproduction it took, the stunts and so many other things make me want to say "great job". The violence is quite vivid and there is a lot of blood and brutal depictions of injuries and death. Amongst all that there still is character development (and some cliche and over dramatized things too of course)! That is not an easy feat to achieve ... but the movie does it. And even with 2,5 hours (and an odd 15 minutes missing or so probably will be forever lost, since the director had to cut them to get a rating in China) the movie never feels like it is too long ... very well done indeed!