An absolute waste of money

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A Chinese film with subtitles. It starts with troops from the Eighth Route Army (former Red Army and future People's Liberation Army) arguing with a Nationalist unit over possession of a train. The Eighth Route Army man insists they give it up, part of the price for the anti-Japanese alliance. In the same spirit, he insists that they be polite to a female reporter from a conservative Chinese newspaper whose attitudes are often irritating. (And romance later blossoms, as you'd expect in a film.) You see realistic problems of command and combat. The troops are shown as brave but sometimes ignorant: they have only a hazy idea about how aircraft work and refer to a Japanese air base as a 'nest', as if these were magic birds. They also have to figure out if the base can be attacked, and make mistakes which alert the enemy and make the task much harder.It's probably much more like real war than most war films. And is supposed to be based on a real incident. It should have more background – that the Nationalists and Communists had been at war a few years back, and that it was mostly expected that they would fight again if Japan were defeated, as in fact happened.