Though labeled as a war epic, Assembly is not a war. It is a soldier's story, how he managed to survives the war one after the other, and during the peace time, how he tried to dig out some inconvenient truth about the war, which everyone seams prefer to forget. The movie works because the story is not about a war but about the men who fought in the war.

 

The movie started in the winter of 1948, during the climate of the blood Chinese Civil War, which broke out shortly after the end of WWII. Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu), a captain of the communist Liberation Army, leads his 9th Company to sweep through a narrow street with an unknown number of Nationalist soldiers hiding inside ruined houses. Their call for the Nationalist to surrender is unanswered and Gu ordered his man to sneak in, not knowing they are working into a trap. Then the quiet street suddenly turns to hell. Rifles and machine guns start firing, pre-planted dynamites are ignited and an artillery starts shelling on the crowd. They push hard, enemies shooters are terminated one by one, and by the time the cannon is knocked out, the Nationalist soldiers finally decide to surrender.

 

Then probably because he just lost more than half of his men including his political officer, who served much like a deputy plus secretary, Gu refuses to accept the enemy surrender. His action leads to the death of a Nationalist soldier and brings him some jail time. His cell-mate, or more appropriately a barn-mate, because their jail is an empty barn, is Wang Jincun (Yuan Wenkang) a political officer and an ex-teacher, from another unit. He is facing possibly firing squad for showing cowardice during combat. To make up for his mistake, Gu accepts a new mission from his regiment leader colonel Liu Zeshui (Hu Jun). He is ordered to lead his remaining 46 men to defend a coal mine located at key point of the defense line. They must hold the mine by all cost and would only be allowed to retreat once they hear the assembly call. Before marching to the mine, Gu asks to assign his barn-mate as the new political officer. The reason is probably Gu needs someone to write letters for his largely illiterate soldiers.

 

Waves of attacks with artillery shells, machine guns and even tanks, are pushed back and they fight from morning to midnight. By the time there are less than ten still alive, everyone, except the new political officer, claims they all heard the assembly call, but Gu, literally deaf due to shell-shock, decides to follow his order and stay. By the end, everyone dies and Gu is the only one lives.

 

Gu is captured by his own troops and sent to a hospital for the POWs, because he is wearing a Nationalist uniform. He claims he is the captain of the 9th Company and insists the uniform is just a cover-up for getting something to eat. But nobody believes his story and according to the record, all his men including himself are only missing-in-action. Lost everything, even his identity, Gu rejoins the Liberation Army by pretending to be a gunner and makes friends with Er Dou (Deng Chao) the commander of an artillery unit. Then the story jumps to 1951, during the starting days of Korea War. Gu saves the life of Er Dou, who steps on a mine during an infiltration mission.

 

When peace finally comes, Gu returns to the coal mine with two medal and a blind eye. He has one more mission to complete – to dig out the remains of his 47 comrades to prove they died in action, not missing-in-action. With the mine entrance is no where to be found and the government has just received mountains of requests for finding missing soldiers, Gu realizes he has to fight very hard against the red tap and bureaucracy. With help from Er Dou, now has been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and Sun Guiqin (Tang Yan), the widow of his replacement political officer, Gu is making some progress, though painfully slow.

 

Director Feng Xiaogang is brave enough to try telling a civil war story from a brand new angle, and he is also smart enough to make this film pleasing everyone without offending anyone. In the past century, Chinese movies made to feature the civil war (1946 – 1949) are more or less for propaganda purposes. Tone of these movies is always the righteous communist side gloriously defeating the not-righteous Nationalist side. The Liberation army soldiers are shown as innocent and brave; while the Nationalist soldiers are portrayed as cowardice, stupid and sometimes bad. Battle scenes often feature of hundreds or even thousands extras "fighting" in fields or ruined streets filled with artilleries, tanks and explosions. Feng really does something different this time. The communist soldiers are no longer always fearless, and when they are fighting, they do not carry communist ideology in their minds. They often get confused and disoriented while under attack. The nationalist soldiers, though still very much faceless, look equally brave and well trained. Most battles scenes are shot with handheld and the camera is visibly shaking whenever there is an on screen location. The shots are graphically violent with lots of blood and broken limbs. Colors of these scenes is deliberately made dark and color-less It is not difficult to figure out of the above are influence from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The on-location special effects and makeup are handled by a South Korean team involved in the production of Taegukgi, a Korea war movie also heavily influenced by Saving Private Ryan.

 

The contrary between the first half of the film, filled with almost non-stop actions, and the second half of the film, filled with almost no non-stop actions, is visible. I would rather to see the story starts in the peace time with the wars told in a series of flashbacks. But his kind of editing would definitely confuse some audiences and subsequently push them away.

 

As what I have said, this is not a war movie, at least not entirely a war movie. It is a story about a soldier during war and peace and the soldier, Captain Gu Zidi. The film is based on a short story, which is inspired by, not based on, a true story. In real life, there is no such person named Gu Zidi and the story is completely fictionally. However, it is also not difficult to find someone with similar experiences as Gu. Unlike the characters in such films like Saving Private Ryan, Flag of Our Fathers and Platoon, who are once civilians, living in peaceful and simple life, suddenly find themselves in the middle of hell, soldiers in Assembly have seen lots of death and have been in countless battles. The history of China in the first half of the 20th Century is full of wars and miseries. Before the civil war, there was the Japanese invasion, before that, there is more civil wars and more foreign invasions; and if there was no war, there was famine and natural disasters. Gu is such a person who grew up while starve mort of the time, joined the guerrilla while the Japanese was still advancing, and became a company leading during the civil war. Seen lots of death and knows death is inevitable during combats anyway, he rarely shows emotionally about the death of his men, unless they died meaningless. This explains why in the beginning of the movie he orders not to accept those remaining Nationalist soldiers' surrender because he believes they should surrender early on to avoid death on both sides, especially his side. This also explains why he keeps his men at that coal mine until all of them are gone and then during the peace time he repeatedly asks the authority to recognize his men are martyrs not missing-in-action. The plot is not completely fictional. In fact, there are a large number of soldiers are still listed as missing-in-action and no doubt, many of them died during the war, only there are no proves.

 

Gu Zidi is play very impressively by Zhang Hanyu, who only had small roles in many movies and TV productions. For box-office concern, Zhang was once not the prime choice for the role. Director Feng Xiaogang once considered giving it to Andy Lau or Ge You. It is so fortunately that Feng takes a gamble of casting Zhang, who really make the character believable and standout. The rest of the cast is also strong though their characters all seem underdeveloped a little bit. There are several soldiers of the 9th Company are designed as supporting characters for Gu but before we could know more about them, they are all dead. Of cause, if this is a story of a soldier fighting a lonely war first on real battlefields then against the red-tape, the soldier has to be given more screen time.

 

Feng has been directing box-office successful movies for the past decade, knows a war movie with Private Ryan approach would please today’s movie audiences in China, mostly young people, and would bring in revenues in a big number. He wants to say the communist soldiers are also humans with weaknesses and has been very careful not to make the message too negative, which would definitely lead to state censorship of the film. Captain Gu meets some red-tape bearcats but he also receives helps from some other officials. The Nationalist soldiers are shown either in mass number or in the background, nothing really negative. One scene makes fun of an American tank officer (who is played by Phil Jones, the film’s visual effects supervisor) but the joke is very much acceptable. And, the South Korean, in fact, only their uniforms show up. No wonder the film was first premiered during Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea and its rights in Taiwan, controlled for half a century by the Nationalist after losing the civil war, have been secured. A release in the US is also likely, at least on DVDs.