Yi ge he ba ge

This film concerns eight criminal prisoners of the Chinese 8th Army and one unjustly accused commander, also imprisoned; the prologue to the film leaves no doubt as towards the culpability of the eight and the innocence of the one. The nine accompany the army as it is harried by the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Zhang Yimou gets an early credit as cinematographer. It's the earliest Chinese war film I've seen where the characters aren't flagrant personifications of revolutionary values. It has pleasant concessions to humanity whilst still banging the propaganda drum (only to the same extent as The Green Berets). Whilst it is propaganda, I'm in no doubt that there was heroic defence against Japanese aggression at the time.

There is to an extent a disconnect between some particularly exorbitant cinematography (you could freeze many great still photos from the film), and a story that doesn't really flow and feels like it has too many gaps. There is however genuine pathos in the movie and the journey the men go on is compelling. The source text is trying to point out that the exemplary acts of one individual can knock onto the rest, although its seeming conviction that innocence is self-evident and will always out could be seen as an obnoxious repudiation of many innocent dead from this period. Would bear interesting comparison to Aldrich's Dirty Dozen in terms of archetype.

This movie is based on the novel with the same title: one and eight.

Although everything depicted in the movie is extremely close if not identical to what was described in the original novel, the original novels is still much better.

Obviously, in a movie that is less than two hours long, you certainly can not expect the film crew would include every detail that is in the original novel, but there are still things the film crew could do to improve the quality of this film. For example, one obvious shortcoming of the film crew is its lack of technical knowledge, more gadgets were put into the movie for the visual effect, but some are not the products of the time, or the local region.