Assembly

I gotta say that in the first 40 minutes of the battle show, I did spot scenes from Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and the Korean: Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386064/). Actually, I'm not surprised at all, I mean who (the directors) wouldn't do the same thing? Some directors might curse Steven Spielberg for not leaving them much room to shoot a different war movie after Saving Private Ryan, and indeed this movie has, in my opinion, in no way transcended the 1998 war masterpiece. Still, I'd like to give credit to this Chinese director for his guts to do such a Chinese war movie that well handles battle scenes with great details, tells the audiences the past without being necessarily affected by current Chinese politics, and touches a lot of people simply because most of the story feels just down to earth and so damned real. I won't go any further on these points, because there's one more significant thing about this movie, i.e., it's the first of this director's works that could be appreciated by all the audiences other than those from mainland China only.

The director has been a big name in Chinese movie industry by the end of last century, bringing Chinese fresh outlooks about domestic movies. However, one could probably better understand the director and his previous movies only from a "Chinese" perspective. And when I say "Chinese", I mean you'd better be living in mainland China, excluding SARs like Hong Kong. But this time, as I said, it's quite different since anyone could understand and appreciate the story. It's a good shot to see how far Chinese movies can go internationally without the presence of Kongfu and male characters with long braid at the back of their heads, without the setting in a remote and underdeveloped Chinese countryside, and without bold and overused sexual scenes.

I read about this movie on the internet for the last few days, and it was this piece of information from a Chinese blog that drove me to watch it, and I quote and translate this information as follows: "... at 23:00 when the movie Ji jie hao ended in a Beijing's big movie theatre tonight, with no presence of any of the directors and actors with the movie, the audiences were unwilling to leave their seats, and along with them was only their tears and standing applause."

With no stars in this movie, it was reported that the box office hit 2,000 million Chinese dollars 2 weeks after the premiere in China. I will definitely encourage both Chinese and non-Chinese to watch this movie. And for those who might be interested in our ancient country, I recommend two other quality movies: Huozhe ("to be alive" 1994) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110081/; and Ba wang bie ji ("farewell, my concubine" 1993) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106332/.

Besides all the positive reviews about its realistic visual style, the shaky camera and all the "Private Ryan" stuff, it really deserved compliments from Chinese people, while we can see the true differences between Chinese people and Western people in a cultural perspective.

I've read some reviews criticizing the Assembly for it being too "western", and has significantly less character development in the entire movie, but to state in short Assembly is a movie purely shot from the angle of Captain Gu, who is the main man in the movie. It is very unusual to portray any war from an individual perspective for Chinese, even not in recent years. However, once someone wants to try it, it will come out with some side effects bound with Chinese culture. 1, Captain Gu's character is very "north-Chinese", which means he takes everything personally and with high dedication. Usually, he takes his men more than brothers. When brothers die, he cares about their bodies and believes they will be reincarnated. This is very typical Chinese man-man relationship in a near-modern china. Plus, the supporting characters are not memorable enough due to the magnitude of this Chinese civil war. China has the largest population in the world, which means one or two lives are not significant. And even the director strives to focus on individuals, such reality still rule the whole story.

2, Captain Gu's has a significant pursuit over the comrades' honor they deserved. However if you were Chinese, you would feel the motivations behind this action are strongly related to Chinese beliefs. Gu has strong emotions on his men, but he never accepted the truth that they are all gone. He'd believe they wouldn't rest in peace because the earthly honor unattained. Besides, director Feng Xiaogang apparently deviated from the typical Chinese war movies' atheism tune and communism campaign injected by political needs. This is to note the fact that very few man purely completely accepted atheism, even in a Communism China.

Well done. This is a Chinese war movie about the wide gray scale in the war and in China.

2, Captain Gu's

indeed,i agree this is a very powerful movie: chapeau to mr feng Xiaogang for this tour de force ! recent years war movies the like of "flags of our fathers", "saving private ryan","iwo jima" are certainly (and always will be) violent but with lesser gratuitous effects and they dealt very justly with the myriads of war consequences, first on the soldiers and the rest of us. i salute the initiative of mr feng. here, i am not comparing his 'the assembly' to the previous film titles, for no war is alike and comparable. but his courage in depicting a period of profound political disturbance in his own country make us all stop and ponder, and this is on a personal note since i am vietnamese and having lived through much of my own country's war, what are the tragedies of fratricide between brothers of same origins, beliefs and values. mr feng showed us the strong sides and the various weak sides of soldier in this part of the hemisphere. by that process, he erased those past clichés of Asian cultures in the practice of that belligerent art. is or are there any morality stemming out of this movie ? mr feng will be more apt to answer than myself. finally, i wish someone in my own country could have courage and integrity ( and resources !) to make this kind of movie for future generations to learn from our past. mr feng has carved himself an indelebile mark in Chinese filmaking. bravos...

Assembly is a gripping film about the Chinese civil war and its aftermath, recounted through the story of a doomed company of Communist soldiers and the subsequent struggle of their commander, Gu Zidi, to win recognition for their sacrifice. Hanyu Zhang is superb in the role of Gu Zidi, carrying the memory of his lost and forgotten comrades, and is the focus for a film that is by turns brutal, moving and provocative.

The opening battle scene is Assembly is startlingly violent and throughout the film the portrayal of modern weaponry and its effect upon human bodies is truly frightening. The battles are impressively staged and meticulously detailed, from the soldiers' uniforms to the networks of defensive trenches. There are some eye-opening details about the nature of warfare in the Chinese civil war, including the deployment of 'political officers' to encourage Communist troops to act in line with Party doctrine.

Admittedly, much of the film's appeal stems from its foreign origins. The Chinese civil war and the subsequent war in Korea are not often portrayed in the cinema, and it is even more rare to get a Chinese perspective on these events. Certainly this makes it difficult to find a point of reference by which to assess the success of Assembly. Nevertheless, I did have some reservations, including the camera-work. The battle scenes cut frantically between different shots, unlike, for instance, the opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan, where the action relentlessly tracks the soldiers' landing on the D-Day beach. This repeated cutting and changing conveys some sense of the chaos of warfare, but I feel that the shaky camera-work was overplayed and found this a bit irksome after the first few battle scenes.

A more general problem is that this film focuses almost exclusively on the actions of the Communist soldiers. It would have been interesting to learn more about the Nationalist Guomindang soldiers, but they are barely afforded any speaking roles. Although Assembly is written from the perspective of the winning side, it does not begin to examine why the Communists were at one time so short of munitions and especially men in fighting the war against the Nationalists. The story of Gu Zidi's company of men is a battle against the odds, but the film does not delve into the root causes of their desperation.

But although Assembly is a portrait of one side in a long military conflict there is surprising depth to this portrait. The film does not follow a straightforward triumphalist narrative about Communist war heroes, but instead builds a complex tale of an individual (Gu Zidi) who struggles for the posthumous recognition of individual soldiers who made an individual sacrifice. These were soldiers who were scared and sometimes balked at the dangers before them – as would anyone – but they made the ultimate sacrifice and Gu Zidi strives to have their efforts recognised as a unique contribution to the war effort. That it is such a great struggle for Gu Zidi to secure a memorial for these fallen comrades is at least partly an indictment of post-war society and government in China.

Assembly achieves a remarkable amount in less than two hours. It is a vivid reconstruction of struggles during and after the war and is moreover a deeply moving experience, especially in its final frames. And if part of the appeal lies in the fact that this is a foreign film about a little-known war, then that is all the more reason to seek it out.

"Saving Private Ryan" it is NOT, but certainly it is as equally worth viewing for any fans of military/warfare film. And for any "westerners" unaccustomed with China's history, it may give some insight to tiny part of her modern part some 50+ years ago events that led to fall of Chang Kai Shek and rise of communism under Mao Zhe Dong's.

The story line is compelling, similarly to "SPR" we have some well drawn all-human characters and their war story laced with brutal, bloody and yet so mesmerizing scenes, an insight to mankind at its worst.

The acting is excellent, even the supporting actors and extras performed all great or at least sufficiently enough to make us believe the scenes we are watching could have happened exactly as they are portrayed on the screen.

Why then I gave it 9 instead of 10? Well. Firstly. The film, although officially not the production of "1st of August Film Studio" (official Chinese communist party's propaganda flicks maker), it still suffers a bit from their propagandist influence. The red comrades are nicer than their nationalist foes and - according to this film's tones and "between the lines" messages - they fought for their country (implying that the Chang Kai Shek's nationalists were traitors). Like the hundreds of millions Chinese murdered later by the China's Communist Party during the years that followed have never happened, hmm. But, of course, for the characters shown in the film, it is their future. They don't know it yet - OK, I can believe that. But why PLA's foes (the Nationalists) are basically the shadows in this film? For a "humane warfare film" (as this film is pretending to be about) it is very unhuman depiction of 'the other side' - and I didn't hear anything about Mr. Xiaogang Feng plans to make a sequel about them... (like Clint Eastwood did with "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima") Second. While the fighting scenes and visual FX are great, the sets weren't prepared as equally. And I really mean it. The hand-held camera actions, the gory, the over-all realism of the brutal warfare scenes are almost as great as the ones in "SPR". But unfortunately the set decorators more often than not were skimping on the realism of the set. So-obvious spray-painting black patches on the walls (to masquerade them as burnt-out or post-explosion marks) is so evident failure of completing the film's realism to me (and I'm not even mentioning those PLA soldiers wearing US helmets - after all it *may* have happened somehow). Yes, I understand that most of the film-viewers wouldn't even notice it, but since so much energy, so much attention to other details was paid during the production of this film, why oh why they couldn't close it complete in every detail?