This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Many people see Red Cliff as Hong Kong actioneer John Woo’s return to form. I’m not one of them. John Woo has never once made a film I’ve liked, though he has made at least one I’ve detested. For me, Red Cliff is not John Woo returning to form, but entirely redefining himself, transforming both his narrative and aesthetic style into something seldom even hinted at in his earlier work. Red Cliff is a visual masterpiece of both epic sweep and intimate detail. In ways both palpable and intangible, Red Cliff is like a mid-20th-century Hollywood period spectacular — brimming with narrative optimism, thematic confidence and the courage of its three-dimensional characters. Sun Tzu had it right; indeed there is an art to war.

Red Cliff takes place in 208 A.D. and highlights a battle that heralded the end of the Han Dynasty’s vice-like grip on mainland China. Power-hungry prime minister-turned-general Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) is the real power behind the impotent Han emperor Xian, a leader too young and terrified of his advisor to assert the crushing power his office bestows. Seeking to gobble up the southern provinces, the last holdouts against his geographical appetite, Cao Cao makes up a story of treasonous warlords and convinces the emperor that a military expedition must be launched at once.

Realizing that the full weight of the emperor’s massive army is about to be brought to bear on their peaceful realm, the southern warlords, Lui Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen), unite to repel the invaders. Spearheading their resistance is Bei’s military strategist, Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who has an intuitive understanding of warfare as well as a keen empathy with nature, and General Zhou Yu (Tony Leung), who commands a small but powerful army at Red Cliff, a dramatic mountain range spilling into the Yangtze River. It is here that the southern warlords make their stand against an army and naval armada 10 times their size. The outcome of the battle will decide not only their fates, but the fate of an entire nation.

Red Cliff, the most expensive Asian-financed film to date (and also one of the most profitable), was originally envisioned as a single film, but when the final cut ran nearly five hours in length, it was split and released to Chinese audiences in two parts. These two parts, totaling 280 minutes, were reunited and then gutted of 2 ½ hours to produce the 140-minute release in the West. As such, large sections deemed too convoluted for those unfamiliar with Chinese history are now gone, prompting Woo to add a lengthy and dense narration to several of the opening scenes. Rather than hobble the film, however, the narration sounds as if it is taken from an erudite historical text and actually ends up doing exactly what it was intended to do — simplify the players, their enormous stage and the context for the pending belligerencies.

Most war films, especially those that take place in a time when warfare invariably meant close-quarter, hand-to-hand combat with blade weaponry, love to offer their viewers breathtaking aerial views of opposing armies massed in perfect formation, colliding, surging into each other’s ranks, and quickly becoming an indistinguishable mass of slashing swords and flailing limbs. Red Cliff’s first battle sequence falls into exactly this category and sets the viewer up to believe that the rest of the film will follow suit. But the filmmakers have a surprise up their sleeve. This is the first and last time we will see a clash of that nature, for this is a war film in which the most important muscle is the brain, not the biceps. When you are drastically outnumbered, you win not by sheer might, but by outwitting and outsmarting your opponent. In modern combat parlance, you fight smarter, not harder.

Red Cliff is like a cinematic approximation of a game of Risk, full of stratagems, tactics and carefully plotted campaigns. In this movie, even an innocent tea ceremony is a premeditated battle tactic. Undercover spies gather information about the enemy and relay it in tiny satchels strapped to white doves (this is a John Woo film after all; you didn’t seriously think there wouldn’t be doves?). Commanders use the information to plan complex and intricate counter offensives, carefully delineating battle formations and the movements of their war machines.

Rather than surprise us with exhilarating twists in the midst of battle, Woo grants full access to the war cabinet. Like invisible generals, we stalk the room, peering at leather maps and figurines representing troop movements. We know exactly what will happen and when. Instead of undercutting the tension, this ploy actually heightens it. We feel as if we have as much invested in the outcome of the battle as the characters on screen. We know how the good guys plan on defeating the bad, but not if they will be successful. There are times when the plans work out so precisely (a scene in which the military strategist Zhuge Liang undertakes a mission to replenish the army’s impoverished cache of arrows being a perfect example) that the audience cannot help but whoop and holler in euphoric support.

Red Cliff is about beauty as much as it is about war. Indeed, there are times the two mirror each other so precisely, one cannot tell which is which. Battle sequences are not just shot to be aesthetically beautiful ballets of carnage; they become so chiefly because we know they are so much more than the haphazard clash of well-armed men; they are elegantly plotted machinations that either succeed or fail based on happenstances too numerous to count. Woo is as masterful at portraying vast tactical maneuvers as he is at close-quarters combat. He is not afraid for his film to take the time to be beautiful (a trait all the more evident judging by the original running time). He suffuses his work with intimate, elemental close ups and populates it with the sort of rich and textured macro-photography not normally associated with cinema. Oddly enough, the only incongruities appear when Woo reverts to his old tricks, moments in which he celebrates the exaggerated physical prowess and superhuman grace of his warriors and the bloodbath they leave in their wake. But even this is forgiven, partially because it only occasionally breaks the film’s spell and partly because it is an example of an aesthetic Woo has refined to an admittedly exhilarating art form.

But being Woo, he is also not intimidated by grand gestures. There are scenes of grandeur here that would make Akira Kurosawa proud. Red Cliff is also layered with great swaths of computer-generated imagery, which Woo is not embarrassed to luxuriate in. We don’t simply sweep over naval armadas surging down river or clustered together at port, we linger on them for minutes at a time, invited to allow the breathtaking images to sear themselves into our memories. Woo, who was granted the use of 100,000 Chinese soldiers, seamlessly combines the real and the imaginary to create an intoxicating illusion of awe-inspiring sprawl. Where Red Cliff gets excessive (and it does), it becomes something akin to pure poetry.

What is perhaps more amazing is that Woo, known for his fetish with expressing violence, should so gracefully handle the well-roundedness of his main characters. His main characters are observably the best of men (and women), honorable, upright and virtuous. We watch them in the best of times loving each other and caring for all those around them. They are admittedly without flaws, and while this representation is, of course, unrealistic, it is a concession Woo makes across the board. The tyrant Cao Cao is perhaps one of the least caricatured villains in recent memory. There are times we almost mistake him for a decent man. And his assignment as the villain in no way dampens his intellect. Quite the opposite. He is every bit as perceptive as those he seeks to crush beneath his thumb. For every stratagem they devise, he too conjures one to match. While we never forget he is the reason for all the misery in the film, we also find him profoundly human. A scene in which Zhou and Zhuge play a musical duet together on a guqin, an ancient stringed instrument, becomes the perfect metaphor for this point/counter-point. The music surges and escalates, growing into something unmistakably beautiful yet also frenzied and urgent, both melodically hypnotic and violently aggressive. Both men are masters of their instruments and in their hands, they produce divine music.

Rarely has so much history, strategy and culture been crammed into one film. Red Cliff is an ambitious, visually stunning, sensationally entertaining epic, the offspring of a filmmaker both at the height of his powers and remolding himself into something far greater than what came before. Red Cliff takes its place in the pantheon as one of cinema’s the truly great epics.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.