The biggest movie of 2021 is not a Bond film, a Marvel movie or likely anything you’ve even heard of.
It is for the second year running a giant expensive patriotic Chinese war movie, breaking every box office record in its home country but getting shown almost nowhere else.
This year’s box office champion is The Battle at Lake Changjin, centering on the titular battle in 1950, a Chinese victory that forced America out of North Korea. It focuses on two brothers, played by Wolf Warrior and a singer from TFBoys, as a seasoned veteran and his younger, angrier naïve brother respectively, as the latter learns how to soldier. This maybe seventy minutes of plot is stretched out to nearly three hours, making the movie feel, to put it mildly, a bit thin.
All the usual modern Chinese propaganda hallmarks are here: grand patriotic speeches about dying for your country, men grandly and patriotically dying for their country and every white actor feeling straight out of a community theatre.
I didn’t hear a single convincing American accent the entire movie, and one “American” stopped acting when his line ended.
Most of the film is massive expensive battle scenes, some of which are genuinely tense, mostly involving being bombed by the US Air Force.
But what production value there is in the dozens of (often practical) tanks, villages and bases being annihilated is undercut by shaky camerawork and sometimes sloppy editing, with explosions seemingly happening between consecutive shots. Between this and the thin character drama I zoned out during some battle scenes until a novel moment of violence perked me up again.
But this film is not meant solely to entertain. It exists to propagandize and does so in two ways. The first is in framing the war as wholly between the United States and China, for reasons I’m sure are obvious.
The “War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea” we are reminded was entirely the Americans’ fault, and I don’t think I saw a single Korean in this Korean war film set in Korea. The closing text over the American retreat hilariously reminds us how “presumptuous” MacArthur’s plan to win by Christmas was.
The second is in its scale. This film feels huge, possibly larger even than Dune, and it’s hard not to be impressed by its massive swarms of Chinese extras flooding American bases and American planes annihilating entire valleys, even if the CGI is a little cartoonish. This film has and destroys more practical tanks than I’ve seen in years. In its propaganda-through-scale theme it reminded me of Triumph of the Will, another movie existing to inspire its own country and intimidate others through production value alone, throwing so much money at the screen for so long that while it gets mind-numbing you cannot help but feel impressed.
The Battle at Lake Changjin is not a great movie. It is interminable, frequently boring and its attempt to frame Mao as a friendly paternal type who just wants to peacefully improve his country is wildly unconvincing. But what strikes me about it is its profound sense of insecurity. So much money and work is put into selling its patriotic message, which is stated so many times that you feel its creators don’t truly believe it. Anyone who must say “I am the king” is no true king.
