Movie review "Assembly"

[Woodard]

I just finished watching the Chinese movie "Assembly". The movie is about the Chinese civil war, and is the big new Chinese war movie. If any of you saw all that hoopla over "I am Legend" not being shown in China, its because they are trying to build up thier film industry and temporarily stopped showing foriegn movies. This is a good example of a fairly well made Chinese movie, the special effects were as good as anything in Band of Brothers or Private Ryan. In fact, you can tell that whoever did the combat scenes had been watching recent American war movies a lot. It was a welcome change from other Chinese war movies. All the action is in the first half or so, and the plot can be a little hard to follow if you aren't used to foriegn movies (or even if you are, for that matter). There's a tiny scene in Korea where it looks like the main character gets killed, but once again he miracaliously survives and it isn't explained very well. After that the plot revolves around the guy trying to find out what happened at the battle, and prove he is who he says he is. Like I said, the action is in the first half.

I noticed a few farby things, the M-1 steel helmets with 80's chinstraps were really bugging me, that was the main thing. Too many Soviet SMG's in the Civil war part, but one guy had a Johnson rifle, which I thought was a nice touch.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0881200/

If you want to watch it you can see it in four parts on Tudou.com (aka Chinese youtube). The quality isn't great and the subtitles can be a little hard to read, and the last part jumps in one or two places, but it's a free movie that just started playing in theatres a week or two ago.

Part 1
www.tudou.com/programs/view/38uG1g8TJZs/

Part 2
www.tudou.com/programs/view/32djtMgbM64/

Part 3
www.tudou.com/programs/view/ZTu1PzFESC4/

Part 4
www.tudou.com/programs/view/GWyseIFfjRc/