The Eight Hundred

You know it's an odd year for cinema when the 2nd highest earning film of 2020 is a Chinese war movie most people in the west haven't even heard of. It's even odder when you realise it's sandwiched between Sonic The Hedgehog and Bad Boys 3.

The year is 1937, 2 years before start of the Second World War. Japan and China have a head start on the rest of the planet when Japanese forces invade Shanghai and lay waste to all before them. The battle rages on for 3 months until eventually, having suffered catastrophic losses, the Chinese army is forced to retreat. 452 soldiers of 524th Regiment, 88th Division led by Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan (Du Chun) found themselves under siege in the huge Sihang warehouse with encroaching Japanese on 3 sides and the Suzhou River on the 4th. Across the river was the Shanghai International Settlement, an area of the city filled with foreign merchants, civilians and journalists. The Japanese army's fear of disrupting trade agreements with the west & the proximity of this settlement saved the building from being simply bombed and gassed. Taking down this warehouse and the men in it would involve face to face combat and the Chinese soldiers inside weren't ready to die just yet.

If you see a more shameless slice of propaganda this year I'll be surprised. This one has it all. Glorious slo-mo, heroic sacrifice, defence of the flag at all costs, awe inspiring speeches, placid faces smiling beatifically despite impending death, the constant reminder that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. It's China using cinema as a reminder to the rest of the world that they are not to be messed with. It's a real life story that started as a morale booster before becoming part of the country's mythology and in it's latest film incarnation it's been given the full bells and whistles treatment, one epic in treatment and where every penny is onscreen. There's battles and gunplay in here that would make John Woo weak at the knees, moments of self sacrifice that would turn Chow Yun Fat and Jacky Wu green with envy and action choreography that would make Tsui Hark and Donnie Yen skittish and nervous. But despite it's technical brilliance and massive scale you'll leave it with a bad taste in your mouth.

French director François Truffaut once famously proclaimed “there's no such thing as an anti-war film" and with a couple of exceptions he was right. Each and every one of them ends up being thrilling and exciting and here it's the moment when a small group of Japanese soldiers going full ninja, armed only with knifes, sneak into the warehouse to attack. It's full blooded, vicious and yes, exhilarating and it's only when you see the carnage filled aftermath that you'll start feeling shitty about what you've watched. Entertainment built on the back of real suffering. And worse again is it just a faceless, nameless horde because The Eight Hundred is not a film that does characterisation well, if at all. We get to recognise a handful of the men, the few the film can be bothered to sketch out. Yang Guai (Wang Qianyuan) the old grump who loves his fags, Duan Wu (Oho Ou) the gung ho teen, Little Hubei (Zhang Junyi) the young boy who's lost everything, Lao Tie (Wu Jiang) the coward turned hero and Xie the noble leader but everyone else is just meat for the grinder. 

Meat. There's a lot of it on display here. Meat, sinew, veins, viscera. You'll be hard pressed to find a more violent 15 certificate movie out there. It's brutality starts with a decapitation in the first 2 minutes and continues for another 148. By the end of the first hour you'll be as numbed by all the headshots, dismemberment and disembowellings as the crowds of civilians watching the battle take place in the safe civilian zone. At first they're horrified but slowly start to drift away or become engrossed in other things, only returning as the situation changes or when they sense an end is near. It's a nod to our relationship with modern day news telling and 24 hr coverage and as blunt as it is it feels like silky subtlety compared to the bombast of the rest of the film. Then the end comes and with it the old Chinese cinema trope of heroic bloodshed. But here it will drop your jaw for very different reasons than the fun action films of old.

The Eight Hundred is in selected cinemas around Ireland now. It's a well made film but it's not a good one.