Review: Based on a true story, Eight-One Film Studio took 3 years to produce, shoot and finally release the movie in Chinese theaters. With such a long time of production, it is surprising to see that the movie is not that good, especially with the very self-elaborating theme that the filmmakers tried to exploit.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of disappointments here. All along, you can’t find any deep feelings in their supposed revolutionary movie. It is true that it’s quite different from past mainland productions, as they used advanced techniques more than they ever did before. However it is regrettable that you still can see they used an old and traditional way to shoot the film and also edited it in this way. It just looks like a movie coming from the ‘70s.

Visually the movie is far from impressive, but this doesn’t excuse the bad acting. They probably didn’t make a good decision with their choice of actors. Besides Hou Yong, all of the other main actors are not soldiers or don’t have any real combat training background and it’s apparent in the movie. For the foreign actors, a lot of them are foreign students from Beijing universities. They should have known better than to choose amateur actors for use in a very serious-toned movie. Even though they went through hard training courses given by the real marine’s corps before the shoot of the movie, it was not enough for them to be excellent Special Forces. They simply looked like a band of uncharismatic beginner soldiers. This aspect makes the movie look unreal and strange as they are supposed to be the best soldiers of their respective country. Enthusiasm alone cannot make a movie look right.

Comparing recent American war movies to this Chinese production would be a bit unfair, but it’s obvious that there is still a huge distance for China to catch up to the quality of American produced war films. Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and Black Hawk Down are all based on true stories with actors playing real soldiers that all looked realistic. Why this movie can’t show us how a real war should be and how the real soldiers should be is beyond me. Whether it’s the fault of the director or the actors is anybody’s guess.

The whole story happened abroad of China and most of the characters are foreigners. This means that everybody in the movie is supposed to use English or at least their main language. However, the movie was produced by a film studio owned by the military department of China and was meant to be a Chinese production, not a foreign movie. So they dubbed all the voices of the actors in mandarin. It sounds extremely strange, as it just doesn’t feel right when you are watching the movie and it’s just another factor that lessens the viewing experience. We can understand the reason why they did this, but it’s not helping the movie look credible, that‘s for sure.

The action is not really exciting either. A bit of training mixed with shooting against the local drug mafia, but the action just looks like it’s coming from a direct to video movie. One single bare hand fight with one of the Chinese guys against a foreign soldier was interesting, but except for that there’s not much else this movie can offer to action movie fans.