Popular reviews

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  Review by Mateus ★★★★ 67

  These people keep giving low scores to Chinese and Russian war movies because "propaganda"... What a joke.

  In the US you can't even TOUCH military uniforms and props for a movie without the Department of Defense pre-approving your script.

  They can't stand non-Western people taking control of the narrative.

  White savior complex.

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  Review by Reilly Pehling ★★★ 3

  effectively identical to the average american GWOT propaganda movie, but with a 4000% increase in ownage, so it's better by default. xi stays winning

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★ 3

  the people's cinema, directed by committee.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★

  The Battle at Lake Changjin has the good sense to stick to a combat picture and the action is consistent pretty good, well-staged and packed with impressive moments. The human drama is minimum and dull as expected, the scenes showing the American side are very amusing at least at first (there's a bit too much cutting to people running the war on both sides when the real good stuff is very much on the front). From a dramatic standpoint, it has the smart idea of framing the battle as reactive and let the movie flow from that. It is clearly designed so it is no one personal expression, but it does suggest Dante Lam's work more than either Tsui Hark…

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  Review by Darren Hynes ★★★★★ 2

  The amount of cope by Sinophobes on this site. Delicious.

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  Review by evilbjork ★★

  What makes this movie interesting, besides the fact that it's one of the only movies I've seen about the Korean War, is how the perspective being told is purely Chinese. It's from a Chinese point of view with the American army being portrayed as simple monstrous murderers. It's propaganda that I've seen dozens of times in American war movies, but now the tables have turned. The way that the Americans are portrayed makes it clear how unconcerned with appealing to USA audiences this movie is, and I really like that part about it. It's also one of the top 100 highest grossing films of all time it doesn't seem to have been a problem at all. It made for an incredibly unique viewing experience.

  Besides that, it's a pretty simple war propaganda movie that looks like a video game basically the entire time.

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  Review by Gozu ★★★★ 17

  Wenn China die Muskeln spielen lässt und zum Mega Blockbuster ruft, dann hat man nicht nur 3 Regisseure und 6 Kamera-Legenden...

  Auf dem Regiestuhl:
  Dante Lam (Operation: Red Sea, Beast Cops)
  
  
  Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine)

  
  
  Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China)

  
  Hinter der Kamera u.a:
  Peter Pau (The Killer, Tiger and Dragon)

  
  Luo Pan (The Sacrifice)

  
  Horace Wong (The Killer, Hard Boiled, Bullet in the Head, A Better Tomorrow Trilogie, A Chinese Ghost Story, A Moment of Romance, Peking Opera Blues, Operation: Red Sea)

  ...,man hat auch den erfolgreichsten Film des Jahres. Weltweit. Und das völlig zu Recht!
  
  
  The Battle of Lake Changjin ist eine Action Schlachtplatte wie man sie leider nur aus China geboten bekommt. Operation:…

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  Review by randy2themax 2

  How do I make sure my fourteen dollars and ninety-seven cents go directly to President Xi?

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  Review by Sudhakar Kumar ★★★

  It is technically accomplished but bombastic and lacks a human story.

  The film is a propaganda piece filled with historical inaccuracies and bankrolled by the Chinese government to incite deeper patriotic feelings among the country’s younger generation.

  In its propaganda-through-scale theme it reminded me of Triumph of the Will, another movie existing to inspire its own country and intimidate others through production value alone, throwing so much money at the screen that you cannot help but feel impressed.

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  Review by Andy Karr ★★★ 1

  Fitting that my first theatrical experience in China was a movie about Chinese troops whipping American ass. It's propaganda, for sure, but only in the exact same way American war movies, and British war movies, and Japanese war movies and war movies from everywhere are propaganda. Lake Changjin even tries a little bit to humanize the American troops, and it might have worked if the American performances hadn't been horrific playing against the generally strong Chinese cast.

  This is a three-hour behemoth of a movie. The 80 minutes of war action are strong, and there's one spectacular close-quarters fight sequence in the middle that I loved. But the tone of the rest of the movie changes so abruptly, drastically, and…

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  Review by john semley

  Sort of long and boring. No more propagandistic than Captain Marvel, or Saving Private Ryan. Makes sense that this is the second-most profitable movie in the history of the medium. When the Chinese troops, hundreds of real extras, start storming down the slope into the reservoir, and the one guy goes "DINNER IS SERVED" then blasting mortar fire at those American slobs (shown eating a heavy Christmas dinner just a few scenes earlier, while the boys gnawed on cold potatoes), I was hooting, hollering, and even cheering at home. That's socialism with Chinese characteristics, baby!

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  Review by Séamus Malekafzali ★★★

  China finally gets its own $200 million blockbuster war epic, one that finally means to rival countless American ones, and it does a pretty good job at it.

  A whopping 3 directors are at the helm of this one, each with pretty different sensibilities when it comes to action, romance, and depicting warfare, and it's definitely a mess because of it, but just as well each director's strengths are able to come out in a project like this.

  The war scenes, much of which is done on giant sets with thousands of extras, are something I wish American movies would go back to doing, because it was something to behold on screen when they finally came around.