| Feb 01 2008 |
THE BATTLE OF RED CLIFF, budgeted at US$80 million, and in production since April 2007, is John Woo's last stand. His most recent hit movie was 2000's MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2, which was little more than a highly successful series of slow motion shots of Tom Cruise jumping and falling, and since then he's had his big budget WINDTALKERS bomb as did his medium budget PAYCHECK. His style has been parodied so many times it doesn't even feel like his style anymore, and if any single director feels like yesterday's news, it's John Woo. Casting difficulties plagued the massive BATTLE OF RED CLIFF, with Chow Yun-fat jumping ship during production, Ken Watanabe stepping out of the cast and Tony Leung Chiu-wai leaving and then returning. It's a movie so big that it's been split into two films and now the trailer is online and you can judge how it looks for yourself.
Woo's first period martial arts movie in almost 30 years has got most of the familiar tropes of the current crop of them, and while there's some of Woo's expected slow motion action as well as a totally random appearance by a dove at the end, but otherwise it doesn't look too shabby. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, sporting major eyebrows, plays one of the three military strategists of the story, Zhou Yu the brainiac who won the battle, while Takeshi Kaneshiro plays another, Zhuge Liang, known as the Sleeping Dragon for the fact that he was consistently underestimated. Zhang Fengyi of FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE plays Cao Cao, the Chancellor of Han who had the most number of troops and all the strategic advantages and yet who still managed to lose the engagement.
Reading accounts of Red Cliff I'm not sure how Woo plans to wrest drama out of a battle that seems to mainly consist of soldiers dying of disease and drowning, and I have no idea where the two dance numbers in the trailer fit into the thing, but there you have it. John Woo's comeback film looks pretty good, all things considered.
(A big thank you to the sharp-eyed reader who sent this in)
(The trailer again, just in case you missed it )
(And an account of the battle itself)
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And the dove was just baffling; something you'd expect from a fan made parody.
The manga Souten Kouro did a fucking epic version of this particular battle, and this just can't possibly live up to that...
Whether his style has been parodied to the point of irrelevance or not, he certainly has an internationally recognized visual style which is more than a lot of directors can say for themselves. Of course, it has been mocked so much that you're right, it's kind of silly when you see it out of context like that.
Didn't look amazing, like you said, but interesting nonetheless. Want to see if Kaneshiro can be convincing as one of the most brilliant tacticians in history.
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