The Eight Hundred

After enjoying the trailer, and being a fan of Asian cinema, I went to the movies to watch The Eight Hundred.

As the movie is based on a true story and true events, it was very interesting to see a different kind of war film that's not Hollywood-ised and the great high quality production certainly was impressive.

The movie is gripping, intense with solid tension building throughout the movie, lots of action guns and bombs with great performances that I believe the actors deserve great credit for.

The writing and direction by Guan Hu was very impressive with nice stylised cinematography.

My own dilemmas with the movie was the pacing, story beats and focus on the central story. The movie felt too split everywhere into different perspectives and doesn't focus on a singular character or group to follow the story properly.

There was no clear goal or focus for us as the audience to keep an emotional core building. The essence of Chinese patriotism is the front runner story but I felt it took away from my attachment to following a core protagonist/s with their story instead of the theme or essence of patriotism.

There's lots of invasion attempts and warfare action with some heartfelt emotional scenes, but not a clear storyline direction that makes it understandable to follow.

Make sure to give this movie a go, it's definitely an experience!

This movie creates a lot of emotion and makes you sympathize with the characters.

This movie is internationally known as "The Eight Hundred". It is based on true events during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, whereby the focus is put on the famous "Defense of the Sihang Warehouse".

The "Sihang Warehouse" is located directly next to the foreign concession of Shanghai. This means that all attacks by the Japanse army on the soldiers in the warehouse, are in direct view of all people watching from the concession. As such, many reports are available of the historic events surrounding this battle.

Since the movie often switches back and forth between different events, it is important to know how all events fit in the overall battle. It is therefore that - before watching this movie - I highly recommend you first read the Wikipedia article titled "Defense of the Shihang Warehouse". In my opinion, reading this Wikipedia article will not spoil the movie, but instead provide the necessary background for watching this movie. Amongst others, it explains why the chinese soldiers were dressed the same as german WW2 soldiers.

Due to the movie not having a main character, you as a viewer will have an additional challenge of understanding what's going on. During some events I had the idea someone was put center stage, all but to find out that he is not seen for the next 15 minutes or so... I think it would have been very beneficial if the movie would have for instance a voice-over - e.g. Someone who was there - whom explained what was going on.

One big plus of this movie are the extremely detailed scenes. It is just a 'feast for your eyes'. If you for instance pause the movie, you often will be able to discover details (in the background) which you wouldn't have seen otherwise. Overall, the result is a very convincing portrayal of Shanghai during WW2.

In coming to a conclusion, I think we have here a movie that misses some necessary ingredients to make the viewer fully understand what is going on. The director and writers were probably so accustomed to the historic events, that they assumed that everyone else would also be as aware as they are... Why on earth they did not chose for having a main character is beyond me. As such, this movie is often a challenge to watch. Especially the first 15 minutes, I personally was left in limbo of what exactly I was watching. Giving it a second try after reading up on Wikipedia helped me enormously.

Taking everything into account - including the fact that this movie learnt me quite some new and interesting things about WW2 - I decided to score this movie with 7.3/10. Resulting in an IMDb score of 7 stars, I think this movie could have easily gained 1 (or even 2) additional stars if more effort was put in guiding the viewer better in understanding the overall situation. I recommend to first read the Wikipedia article "Defense of the Sihang Warehouse"

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!

The Eight Hundred was the biggest grossing film of 2020 , beating Tenet but it's not surprising when you think about it. It was released during the pandemic and China has a population of over two billion , so in theory they could beat Hollywood every year.

Having said all that , this is a much better film than Tenet anyway .

It's the story of a group of Chinese soldiers and draft dodgers , in 1937 who put up a four-day defence of a Shanghai warehouse complex just as Japanese forces are overwhelming China.

This film looks amazing. As war films go it's right up there and i was surprised to see it only cost only eighty Million dollars. Perhaps that is because they didn't spent so much of the budget on actors wages as Hollywood , would normally ?

I have to admit the logistics had me confused at times. I would have liked more of an explanation as to why one side of the river was so different to the other and why people of all nationalities were just watching the chaos go on .

The acting was really good and i like the fact that they were not afraid to kill off main characters.

It's biggest problem is it's too long . In fact it's that long the opening credits were still playing twenty minutes after the start of the film. I did think at one stage that i might have to watch it in two parts but thankfully i manages to see it through and in the long run , it was definitely worth it.

I'm sure the Chinese people will have loved this. It does feel a little flag waving at times , almost as if it's a propaganda movie but i can forgive director Hu Guan for that because he has produced a stunning piece of work.