Philadelphia Film Festival 2009

Master filmmaker John Woo’s Red Cliff has been one of the most anticipated big canvas battle films in recent film history. Initially a nearly five hour film—at $80 million the most lavish Chinese language film ever made—this edition, specially edited by Woo, is two and a half hours of thundering hooves, massive armies, costuming that should show up on Fashion Avenue, noble warriors, and more color, light, love, war, envy, jealousy, power and terrible beauty than a body’s got a right to see in a lifetime. Thematically in Woo and other big canvas Chinese directors, it’s always the few overcoming the many—as dependable a hook in the Chinese mindset as boy meets girl in France. In Red Cliff, a noble alliance of Southern cantons forms to resist the forced unification sought by the tyrant in the North. Woo may have set his big picture in the third century, but it’s hard to miss the implications 18 centuries later.

It is, however, only a movie—a gorgeous one at that, in no small part due to cinematographers Lu Yue and Zhang Li, The Orphanage FX team and composer Taro Iwashiro. With a cast of warriors as far as the Yangtze and then some, all led by Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung, Taiwan-Japanese hunk Takeshi Kaneshiro, Mainland star Zhang Fengyi, Taiwanese super-model Lin Chi-ling, You Yong, and Mainland sprite Vicki Zhao, Woo has fashioned a thrilling epic that just may live up to its billing as “The Decisive Battle of All Time.” At least until the next one. –Harlan Jacobson