First up,
my A Little TLC(w) addition to my reviews for both Red Cliff and Red Cliff II: “Recommend? In General – Absolutely. Fantastic war epic with amazing, killer
action and excellent character work. Tony
Leung Chiu-wai – Oh, yes. Dubbing
aside, Leung is just wonderful here as the soulful, insightful viceroy.” Clocking in at nearly five hours, this
one-film-split-into-two is worth every minute, and that’s in no small part
thanks to the awesomeness that is Zhou Yu.
I’ll cop
to having known basically nothing about this period in Chinese history the
first time I saw the film, but even then, I could tell Zhou Yu was a Big Deal
the moment he’s introduced onscreen.
Characters start talking about him shortly before his first appearance,
and when we do get to his initial
scene, the camera plays coy with him for the first few minutes: giving us shots of his hands, shooting him
from behind, extreme closeups of just his eyes, etc., but never pulling back to
show us him, not until the
anticipation has been sufficiently built.
Translation? This is a guy you’re
gonna want to pay attention to.
And he
earns that in spades. I love Zhou
Yu. On the most basic level, he’s a
terrifically well-executed example of the classic archetype of the Noble Leader
in a sprawling war epic, the one who gives the meaningful speeches to inspire
the men, the one all of them look up to but the one who also fights right
alongside them in the heat of battle (he does spend the first part of the
“tortoise” battle commanding from outside the fray, but most of the time, he’s
right in the thick of it.) Zhou Yu would
fit in nicely with countless brave commanders, both historical and fictional,
who’ve graced the screen with an entire army of loyal men behind them.
To go
along with the inspiration, Zhou Yu backs up his words with all kinds of
competence. He kills it on the
battlefield. I’ve said it before, but
I’ll say it again – dude takes an arrow in the shoulder, rips it out, takes a
flying leap, and stabs the horse-mounted
archer in the neck with the archer’s
own arrow that he just shot Zhou
Yu with. Hot damn! He’s also a tremendous strategist, and he and
Zhu-ge Liang take turns being the most brilliant tactician in the camp. He understands, not just troop formation and
battle strategy, but how Cao Cao thinks, predicting when the enemy is gonna zig
instead of zag. And then, just to top it
off, he has a number of random additional skills that he can throw in for a
wildcard win – his talent for mimicking handwriting plays a key role in one of
his machinations against Cao Cao.
A great
leader, a skilled soldier, a brilliant strategist. He’s also an artistic soul with a love of
music and a famed ear, and he rushes to his wife’s side when one of their
horses is in distress during labor. I
like that, that he appreciates art and cares about the pain of animals. That’s not something you see too often with
this type of character. I’m not saying
that I would’ve expected him to be portrayed as a total He-Man, but these are
shades that could’ve easily been left out of the story, and I’m glad they
weren’t. Strong and sensitive, logical
and poetic.
It’s
always a little frustrating now when I see Leung in a film where he’s been
dubbed. My first time through mainland
movies like Hero and Red Cliff, I didn’t recognize his voice
well enough to realize that it wasn’t him (not to mention being ignorant enough
that I didn’t necessarily note whether I was hearing Cantonese or
Mandarin.) Now, though, it always sticks
out to me that it’s not his voice, and while I certainly understand the
practice – not wanting Chinese viewers to put up with a Hong Kong actor working
their way through their dialogue phonetically – I still wonder what nuances he might
have added that are missing.
That
said, Leung still does a superb job in this role. He’s commanding, empathetic, shrewd, lethal,
romantic, wry, inspiring – all that and more.
While Zhou Yu is a larger-than-life hero, at times probably a little too amazing for credulence, Leung’s
performance keeps him feeling real. I
100% get why Zhou Yu’s men would follow him into battle no matter what.
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