I have watched many historical dramas over the years and this is truly one of the BEST movies I have ever seen! There are two parts (the first 2-hour movie and then the sequel, actually a continuation. (It does take a few minutes to get the story set up in the beginning.) Please watch for yourself--I have no doubt that you will captivated. The actors,cinematography, action scenes, story line--all are more than excellent! (for mature audiences)

It's 208 A.D. China. The ruthless Prime Minster Cao Cao has vanquished every warlord in the north. He bullies the weak Han emperor to invade the two remaining southern kingdoms led by the wise Liu Bei and the inexperienced Sun Quan. Liu Bei suffers devastating losses while protecting refugees. His strategist Kongming convinces Sun Quan to join the fight.John Woo delivers a giant CGI-filled action-packed historical epic. The action is fun. Woo brings his hyper-reality style. I would have liked more reality than hyper-reality. One can't deny the epic nature of the mass fighting scenes. The shortened American version does leave the characters stilted and lacking in depth. They are only highlight reels delivering needed expositions for the battles.

"Red Cliff" is a film about an episode of Chinese history little-known in the West, the Battle of the Red Cliffs in 208-209 AD, during the decline of the Han Dynasty. It is, however, a familiar story in China, being told in "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", one of the classics of Chinese literature. At this period the effective ruler of northern China was the Imperial Chancellor Cao Cao, the actual Emperor Xian being a mere puppet. The country south of the Yangtze River was controlled by two warlords, Sun Quan and Liu Bei. Despite the weakness of the ruling dynasty, the imperial army was still strong, and in 208 Cao Cao launched an invasion of southern China in order to reunite the country and to break the power of the two warlords, who formed an alliance to resist him. The defeat of the imperial army by the allies at the Battle of the Red Cliffs was eventually to lead to the fall of the dynasty and the division of China into three separate states during the so-called "Three Kingdoms period".The villain of the film is Cao Cao, portrayed as a cruel and arrogant despot. The heroes, however, are not so much Sun Quan and Liu Bei, but their subordinates, Liu Bei's adviser Zhuge Liang and Sun Quan viceroy Zhou Yu, who lead the allied armies against Cao Cao's invasion. (Given the Chinese Communist Party's determination to maintain centralised control over the whole of China, it is perhaps surprising that the film should take the side of those who in the past resisted the imposition of such control and whose victory led to a partition of the country, albeit a temporary one). The two main female characters are Sun Quan's sister Sun Shangxiang, who infiltrates Cao Cao's camp as a spy, and Zhou Yu's wife, Xiao Qiao.The film was directed by John Woo, best known to Western audiences for action dramas like "Hard Target" and "Mission Impossible 2". "Red Cliff", however, is a quite different sort of film to those. The nearest equivalent in the Western cinema would be the sort of classical epic which Hollywood used to produce in the fifties and sixties, films like "Cleopatra" and "Spartacus" which dealt with the Western contemporaries of the characters portrayed in this film. (The Han dynasty lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD, so was roughly contemporary with the Roman Empire).Like "Spartacus", "Red Cliff" juxtaposes spectacular battle scenes with scenes showing the private lives of the main characters, and like that film it deals with a seemingly unequal struggle in which the heroes are greatly outnumbered by their adversaries. "Spartacus", however, is a tragic drama which ends in the heroes' defeat, whereas here they are victorious, using guile and strategy to offset the numerical superiority of Cao Cao's army. There is a particularly memorable scene where Zhuge Liang tricks the enemy into shooting over 100,000 arrows into a fleet of boats covered in straw, thus enabling the allies to replenish their supplies of ammunition which were running dangerously low.One thing this film does have in common with some of Woo's earlier efforts is the use of highly stylised, choreographed action sequences, something exploited by other Chinese directors such as Ang Lee in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and Zhang Yimou in "House of the Flying Daggers". The difference, of course, is that whereas in those films this style of film-making was used in the context of individual hand-to-hand combat, here it is used to depict large-scale battle scenes between two great armies or navies. (The Battle of the Red Cliffs was fought both on land and on the river).I should point out that I have only seen the version of the film released in the West and which runs to some 150 minutes; Woo's original two-part version, totalling over four hours in length, was only released in Asia. I can, however, say that the shorter version is an excellent film, combining (as did the best of the Hollywood epics) brilliant spectacle with an intelligent, thoughtful script. When I reviewed Baz Luhrmann's "Australia", I concluded that the epic spirit is alive and well and living in Australia. On the basis of "Red Cliff" I can add to that conclusion "…. and in China". 8/10

I recently caught the Westernised version of RED CLIFF on television; there was no way I was going to pay to watch something that had been butchered down from a two-part film series into a single movie. I was entranced by what turns out to be an extraordinarily lavish, big budget war spectacle, with events and action taking place on an absolutely massive scale. If John Woo has made a few mis-steps in his directing career over the past decade, RED CLIFF is a film that more than makes up for them. But why oh why was it butchered so badly? I still hope to get hold of and watch the original movies one day, so my complaints here are more to do with the editing-together process rather than the movie itself. From what I can gather, pretty much all exposition and characterisation sequences have been excised from the Western release, so we're left with battle after battle and little reason to care or get involved in the lives of the participants. It's a crying shame, because with the likes of Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro on board, I'd imagine the non-action scenes are as involving as the battles.As for the warfare stuff, it's splendid. It starts off on an epic scale and only gets better from there, with huge fight scenes of crushing intensity. The only film I can think of that manages to rival the scale of these battles is LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING. CGI is used pretty heavily to animate various things, but it's doesn't ruin the film, rather supplementing what's already on screen. The martial arts-infused fight scenes are spectacular and inventive. In many ways this film reminded me of an old video game series for the Playstation 2 called DYNASTY WARRIORS, and that's a good thing; it takes you by the throat and throws you in the midst of a blockbuster ancient battle in a way that few films manage.