Shoutout
to one of the two smartest guys in Red
Cliff. Due to A Little TLC(w), I’ve
already talked about Zhou Yu, but now it’s time to take a look at his partner,
the awesome war strategist Zhu-ge Liang.
In a pair of films full of badass soldiers, he – a non-fighter – is
something of an odd man out, and yet he also deserves a lot of the credit for the allied army’s approach to fighting Cao
Cao (some Zhu-ge Liang-related spoilers.)
We
quickly get used to seeing Zhu-ge Liang outside the action. While the bloodshed is going down, he stands
apart from it, either from a vantage point where he can see the battle or
somewhere he can receive messages about its progress. The fact that he himself does not fight,
however, in no way reduces the importance of his contribution to the war
effort. Beginning as a strategist for
Liu Bei, Zhu-ge Liang is the first one to recognize a need for an alliance, and
he’s the one who rides south to broker a partnership with Sun Quan of the neighboring
kingdom. So, even at the most basic
level, without him, we’d be talking about a very different movie.
But
that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Watching Zhu-ge Liang in (mental) action is watching a master at
work. He comes up with the idea for
using tortoise formation in the battle at the end of the first film, and it’s
only through his strategic employment of this inventive, “outdated” formation
that the allied army is able to hold its own against Cao Cao’s vastly-larger
force. And that’s Zhu-ge Liang’s MO in a
nutshell: figuring out how to use what
limited resources the army has to its best advantage. Not enough men? Put the (incredibly awesome) shield-bearers
to work dividing and conquering Cao Cao’s army, boxing them into small areas to
be taken out more easily from the (relative) safety behind the shields.
His
strategy for getting 100,000 arrows in three days marries the “use what you’ve got”
philosophy with two others: “use what your enemy’s
got” and “let Mother Nature work for you.”
This made it into my Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments post for these films
despite Zhu-ge Liang not lifting a single weapon himself – it’s badass ‘cause
it’s just so damn smart. He takes a
small number of boats, covers them with straw, and sails them to the edge of
Cao Cao’s camp under heavy fog with a skeleton crew. Cao Cao’s naval commanders, fearing an
assault hidden behind the fog, orders wave after wave of arrows fired at the
ships, which get stuck in the straw, turning the boats into arrow-laden pincushions. Thanks, Cao Cao!
Zhu-ge
Liang’s knowledge of the physical world helps in the final battle as well. When Zhou Yu recognizes that the wind is
blowing in the wrong direction to use fire in their attack, it’s Zhu-ge Liang
who reads the signs of the weather and season to realize that the wind is going
to shift. His predictions help the army
plan their attack for exactly the right moment.
Additionally, when an epidemic hits the camp, his quick thinking
prevents the spread from being even more severe than it is, and he knows which
plants to collect for making medicines.
Basically? He’s the epitome of a non-threatening guy who
calmly walks around with his everpresent fan, but Zhu-ge Liang is one of the
allied army’s most valuable assets. His
mind saves countless lives and helps turn the tide of the war. In my book, that’s very cool.
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