I admit that I have never read the book nor know much of its stories so perhaps my appreciation for this movie will be different. Not to mention my local cinema brought in the shorter version (120 minutes long as compared to the 150 minutes in neighbouring Singapore – 30 minutes is a lot of scenes discarded) and I will eventually watch again on DVD, but until then, here’s my review – one from a point of view with no historical backgrounds.

First the good. The cinematography and art direction warranted the title of the most expensive Chinese movie ever made. There was one shot where a white dove flew from Red Cliff across the water and eventually reaching the enemies’ ships and I’m sure that shot itself could have financed another smaller movie.

The adapted screenplay had enough to properly tell the story without the feeling of rushed, unlike the previous Andy Lau’s Resurrection of the Dragon. John Woo took his time with characterisation; howevever, some characters still felt loose. And this could be because of the deprived 30 minutes or John Woo mistakenly felt that these are iconic characters and need no further characterisation.

And that affected the acting. Main characters like Kaneshiro’s Zhu Ge Liang, Zhang Feng Yi’s Cao Cao and Tony Leung’s Zhao Yu felt “incomplete”. Their emotional performances felt like they were without appropriate depth for a character that has lived through many wars. And I don’t understand why Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro had to be dubbed over. Both their Mandarin should be good enough, with practice they shouldn’t need to be dubbed. That was also distracting.

I’ve been told reliably that Lin Chiling’s scenes were some of the deleted scenes so that will be left for another day. Zhao Wei and Chang Chen’s performances were limited but instead felt more “complete”.

But Chang Chen had a scene hunting a tiger, and I’m very surprised that with such a huge budget they couldn’t have Chang and the tiger together in the same frame. That stuck out irritatingly and once again showed the limited capacity of a Chinese movie.

And while the aforementioned dove flying with the camera was spectacular, the beginning of the sequence where Zhu Ge Liang seemed to be talking to the dove before setting it off, and the end of that sequence never tied back together. It not only lost me completely but again, showed the inconsistency of Chinese movie-making, where effects are favoured so much more over storytelling.

There were a lot of corny bits as well. Something I wasn’t expecting from a seasoned director like Woo. Most noticeably when music was incorporated in to indicate a change in tone, the transition was unfortunately too apparent.

There was a scene when the alliance used reflective shields to blind their enemies, if you counted the number of times Woo showed the similar scenes over and over, there were probably ten times and after the first few, it just felt overly done.

So overall, I have to say I very much disagree with Woo’s direction in this one. I was also missing his proficiency in action scenes. But this is a piece of history story that should not be missed.

Rating: 6 / 10

(all images from moviexclusive.com)