Red Cliff II

The second half of John Woo's two-part war epic. At a combined budget of eighty million dollars, it was the most expensive Chinese-language production made to that point. How you see it depends on where you are. In Asia it was released as two separate films running over four hours in total. Outside Asia the two were compressed into one film of two and a half hours, meaning American audiences never saw roughly two hours of material. This second part runs 140 minutes in the Asian cut. The subject is the Battle of Red Cliffs, which redirected Chinese history, drawn from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. This half carries the battle itself, the trick to harvest the enemy's arrows, the turning of the wind and the fire attack. Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi and Chang Chen star. Who it is for: viewers who want large-scale battle and a story about strategy; Woo's choreography works at crowd scale too. Who it is not for: anyone watching the shortened version. In that cut characters die before you know them and the emotional line breaks. Anyone who has not seen the first part cannot start here.