The Warriors 勇士连
7.0
7.0
Set in May 1935 in northwestern Sichuan, the Red Army is fighting against Kuomintang forces. The latter have all but encircled the Communists, and the only chance to break out of the ring is to cross the Dadu River over the Luding Bridge. The difficulty lies not only in the fact that the bridge is fortified and guarded, but also in the 240 miles that lie before it, which the detachment under Liao Dazhu's command must cover in a tight timeframe, fighting its way through enemy checkpoints.
War dramas have always been one of the main pillars of Chinese cinema – a great many films and series have been made about every even remotely significant battle of the 1930s and 1940s, and the Chinese are ready to watch war stories practically without end, a love that extends to any format. In cinemas, as TV series or online films, it hardly matters, as long as on screen the Red Army shows the Kuomintang or the Japanese who's boss. But while war cinema used to mean talky dramas with a couple of battle scenes, today it is mostly full-blooded action films in which the action is a key part of the dramaturgy. The Warriors is the most vivid representative of this new style.
The film opens with a fragment of the final battle, which immediately hints that here people will mostly talk on the run and in commands. Of course, after the prologue the action rolls back and spends some time introducing the key characters, but barely ten minutes pass before the soldiers fall into an ambush, and from that moment The Warriors surge forward full sail. Closer to the finale, in a brief respite before the decisive attack, Liao admits that he cannot stand stops, because that is when the ghosts of those who died under his command come to him, and this is a surprisingly beautiful image that characterizes The Warriors better than anything – forward only, forgetting fatigue and pain, we will mourn the dead afterwards.
Budgets for online films are considerably smaller than those of theatrical projects, but you would never tell with The Warriors. The shooting and explosions here are powerful and generous, and only in some scenes, like the crossing of a bridge over chains stretched across a gorge, can you see that the shooting took place in studios against a green screen. That said, this never once throws you out of the film – the experienced director Luo Le works beautifully with the image, the action and the editing, without forgetting the seemingly small but important touches to the characters' portraits – thanks to them, every death is dramatic and emotional.
Wang Ting, who plays the lead, is an experienced and very charismatic actor; with just a few strokes he creates a vivid and human portrait of a soldier who diligently drives away everything unrelated to carrying out his combat mission. The Warriors as a whole maintain the same attitude – the authors do not ask who is right and who is to blame, they do not try to reason and reflect on the conflict between the Communists and the Kuomintang; it simply so happens that they have to shoot at us and we at them, and everything else is beside the point.
It has already been said above that the Chinese are not shy about making films about the same events, and with The Warriors it is curious that the story of the attack on the Luding Bridge had already been adapted in Chinese online cinema back in 2016, and that film was called… The Warriors. Yes, yes, that is not a mistake, both pictures share the same English title, The Warriors, while the Chinese ones differ by a single character, so don't get confused. Although those Warriors, by the way, are not bad either, so the cost of a mistake in this case is small.
7.0
7.0
