Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Bereamic Awesome Movie

donahue-1 Red Cliff is a superficial entertaining martial arts movie that had the potential to be much better but failed to come close to Kurosawa's Ran or Kagemusha in storyline or depth of character. Even the Korean Film - The Admiral - Roaring Currents (2014) was much superior in storyline - acting and special effects. If you enjoy watching folks doing unbelievable aerobatics and slicing and dicing twenty armed opponents this film is for you. If not - watch this once and then donate to your local library.

chaos-rampant This probably joins the list of great battle movies on just the scope it was conceived, though not really for what you'll see in this first movie. You actually have an option to watch a condensed version of the two movies (titled Red Cliff) or the two separate ones. If you decide on the latter, the epochal battle takes place in the second installment and here we have the setting up of lavish stage with characters walking in to assume their place in the epic.None of that even remotely interesting as storytelling. It's all filmed from the outside looking into actors on a stage, cleanly separating good from evil, every crucial point mouthed by characters and everything neatly reduced to platitude, nothing embodied or allowed to be inferred as anxious machinations of life; it's opera, something the Chinese know well from their own tradition.And nothing is allowed to breathe in a cinematic way that creates pace and rhythm, allowing each moment to have its own natural resonance dictated by itself, everything forcibly cluttered in pretty much the same way, every frame packed. It's one thing to film war this way, it seems like war would dictate that as its own rhythm, but scenes of dialogue with a cut every two-three seconds?It comes to mirror something else; so, a man of ruthless ambition mobilizing thousands on the field, moving ahead with his scheme to write epochal narrative, no one else allowed any control of their fate. And this is also the filmmaker, exercising control over the cinematic field where he orchestrates thousands to make history in such a way that nothing escapes from that control - you'll notice that almost every shot is a pan, zoom, cut, crane move to what he wants us to see. I haven't felt such overbearing control over my eyes (and put to such daft use) in a long time. People sometimes ask about badly directed movies. This is one.

Leofwine_draca I recently caught the Westernised version of RED CLIFF on television; there was no way I was going to pay to watch something that had been butchered down from a two-part film series into a single movie. I was entranced by what turns out to be an extraordinarily lavish, big budget war spectacle, with events and action taking place on an absolutely massive scale. If John Woo has made a few mis-steps in his directing career over the past decade, RED CLIFF is a film that more than makes up for them. But why oh why was it butchered so badly? I still hope to get hold of and watch the original movies one day, so my complaints here are more to do with the editing-together process rather than the movie itself. From what I can gather, pretty much all exposition and characterisation sequences have been excised from the Western release, so we're left with battle after battle and little reason to care or get involved in the lives of the participants. It's a crying shame, because with the likes of Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro on board, I'd imagine the non-action scenes are as involving as the battles.As for the warfare stuff, it's splendid. It starts off on an epic scale and only gets better from there, with huge fight scenes of crushing intensity. The only film I can think of that manages to rival the scale of these battles is LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING. CGI is used pretty heavily to animate various things, but it's doesn't ruin the film, rather supplementing what's already on screen. The martial arts-infused fight scenes are spectacular and inventive. In many ways this film reminded me of an old video game series for the Playstation 2 called DYNASTY WARRIORS, and that's a good thing; it takes you by the throat and throws you in the midst of a blockbuster ancient battle in a way that few films manage.

Sean Lamberger John Woo helms an ambitious, crowded interpretation of the large-scale military actions that plagued China at the end of the Han Dynasty. While its epic, sweeping scale might be the film's greatest strength, I was often too preoccupied with following the encyclopedically long-winded subtitles to appreciate the visuals as much as I would have liked. Even at a long hundred-thirty minutes, the plot seems breathless and anxious as it hurries through back story, character moment and closed-door strategic debate at a breakneck pace. There's just so much story to tell here, with none of it deemed dispensable by Woo, that even two lengthy motion pictures don't seem like enough space to contain it all. While the planning and execution behind Red Cliff's sublime fight scenes (much of which boil down to a Dynasty Warriors-style plan of "just send one man to wipe out the infantry") is flashy and memorable, I found more value in the thoughtful musings and observations of the calm, collected diplomatic envoy Zhuge Liang. His carefully considered strategic suggestions are profound and moving, like a delicate flower growing amidst the ruins of a spent battlefield. Though one-sided in nature, with an enemy master as vaguely evil and simple as they come, it still leaves us with the perfect setup for what I can only presume will be the mother of all epic-scale scuffles. Deep and dedicated, it's often more verbose than it needs to be.