Red Cliff, a tiny little place at the approximately center point of the Long River (Yangtze River) of China, has never been a city, a town or a village. It is so small that even today, historians are still debating about the exact location of the cliff. Even though, Red Cliff has become very famous nowadays, only because there was a battle, in gigantic scale, occurred at the place exact 1800 years ago. On the river, the alliance of two southern warlords, Sun Quan and Liu Bei, defeated the much stronger northern warlord Cao Cao. By the end of the battle, Cao’s might fleet was burned to ashes and his land-based troops were completely crashed. Soon after, the mighty Han Empire collapsed and three kingdoms were established by Cao’s oldest son, Liu Bei and Sun Quan.

Most people know about the battle because of a well-written and not very historically accurate novel Romance of Three Kingdoms. The novel has become very popular ever since it was published in the 14th century and has been the basis for countless opera plays, movies, TV series, comic books and even video games. Probably because the size and the complexity of it, Battle of Red Cliff had never been featured on the big screen until John Woo decided to do it, if my memory is correct.

Because the story is very long, it has to be cut into two episodes when released in east part of Asia. Of cause, a much shorter one-piece version will be released in the rest of the world. Judging from Episode I, John Woo’s Red Cliff is much closer to the novel than the history and it also contains plots, which are neither based on the history nor found in the novel. And yes, there are pigeons, white pigeons, lots of them, whether you like it or not.

The story starts with Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), Prime Minister of Han Empire asking, or more actually, demanding the practically puppet emperor to approve his plan of marching the troops to the south. A minister who dares to challenge Cao’s ambitious plan was executed immediately, a sign showing Cao is the actual man in charge. Cut to the first war scene, Cao’s soldiers are pushing forward and Liu Bei’s (Hou Yong) troops are making a last stand, just to allow the people, over 100,000 civilians to retreat. Liu’s generals, Zhao Yun (Hu Jun), Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, are fighting tirelessly to slow down the enemy advance. The first war sequence, which is very well crafted and a second war sequence, much bigger in scale, will come toward the end of the episode.

Both sequences features arrow flying, horsemen falling, blood bursting (so much blood, which has to be CG) and animated overview of soldiers marching, which are commonly seen in many war movies nowadays. What really makes them stand out are Chinese martial art, commonly known as Kung Fu, and battle formation. Red Cliff has very decent kung fu fight scenes, thanks to the mind of John Woo and multiple stunt masters, like Corey Yuen and Dion Lam. You have to see to believe. Formation, in simple words, means arrange your soldiers, swordsmen, archers, cavalry men and so on, into a complex formation, which is used for defense, attack or both. Whether such formations work or not, or whether they exist or not, you also need to see to believe.

Now, back to the story. With the life of so many soldiers, the refugees barely escape. Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the top strategist of Liu Bei, volunteers to ask lord Sun Quan (Chang Chen) for a military alliance. But Sun just could not decide whether he should make a stand or simply surrender. Only one man, Zhou Yu (Leung Chiu-Wai), Sun’s the top military commander, is able to persuade him to fight for it.

Ever since being announced many years ago, John Woo’s Red Cliff has been under countless scrutinizes. People enjoy Three Kingdoms are asking for a faithful adaptation of the novel and international fans of Woo’s hayday movies are hoping for an epic more Hard Boiled and less Windtalkers. John Woo knew he should and he had to come out a story, which can make everyone happy. Script was written, re-written, re-re-written and re-re-re-written. Four writers, including Woo himself, are credited for the final script, not including writers associated with discarded scripts. The result is something may not please everyone but everyone would be pleased by at least one part of it. Generals should be commanding their troops, but instead, they are fighting against hundreds of enemy soldiers alone. The fight scenes look very exiting but also make the movie less like a realistic war epic. Woo is very careful not to make a brainless war movie. He spent lots of screen time to show us how the military alliance is formed and how the alliance prepares for the coming war. Unfortunately, it makes the movie slow. Every major event and every major character in the original novel are depicted here one after another to make it a faithful adaptation, but for audiences who are not familiar with the story, it looks a bit out of focus. The script is written in safe mode, which makes actors, like Leung Chiu-Wai, who can act, acts not so well, and on the other hand, makes actors, like ex-supermodel Lin Chiling, who cannot act, acts just okay.

So far we have only seen the first half of the east Asian version of the war epic. The other half, which would show the final battle, with hundreds of warships engulfed in flame, apparently that is what the whole movie all about. The first half is 145 minute long, and if the second half is as long as the first half, in total the complete movie is 290 minute long (almost 5 hours!). For countries outside of east part of Asia, if it is shrunken to about 100 minutes, the standard length, about 2/3 of the movie will be chopped off. I would predict, that a large number of minor sub-stories and characters would be diminished or removed completely, making the shorter version of Red Cliff a fast paced, action packed war movie.