TripDingo

I spent much of my time watching The Warlords / Tau Ming Chong remarking about how much fatter Jet Li seems to have gotten. I spent much of Assembly / Ji Jie Hao sniffling, wiping away tears, and trying not to break down and start wailing.

The movie follows Captain Gu Zidi (pictured above) through the tumultuous decades following World War II. Though the movie depicts both the Chinese civil war between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists and the Korean civil war that involved both the United States and China, this movie wisely avoids becoming a propogandic political statement and stays intensely a human story. This is not a movie about which side, or ideology, is right or wrong. This movie is about the tragedy that war inflicts upon men and the men that “survive” it.

I haven’t cried this card since Michael Bay’s Armageddon.