The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge hurtles straight into pitched battle, dispensing with the first film's magic hour propriety and the gleaming computer generated landscapes that awed their bumpkin witnesses. The absence of these obviously falsified vistas, and the one-note nationalism they were designed to inspire, is an immediate boon in this sequel. Although positioned to evoke an expansive cinemascope awe, The Battle at Lake Changjin's adoring gander at The Great Wall of China was so golden and artificial that it actually more closely resembled those animated multi-channel audio trailers that would cue up before the main feature on certain region 3 DVDs. The nostalgic affection that pulsed through the previous episode has been almost completely hacked away then, leaving something rugged and monolithic in its place. 

Our sole glimpse of China in this episode is across snow-capped mountaintops; a distant and unreachable summit spotted by men whose bodies have already begun to rot. The sumptuous agitprop bent of the previous piece has been chiselled away - Changjin I's chivalrous affectations replaced with a two hour ode to gnarled noses and fingertips shattering by gunfire. The direction of this instalment is credited solely to Tsui Hark - Dante Lam and Chen Kaige are relegated to Executive Producer posts - this change in billing reflected in a film that, unlike its predecessor, does not feel like it is subject to umpteen clashing tones. Changjin II's focus is despairing combat, the film using furious montage and time-slice photography (emphasis on slice) to detail the pyrrhic bloody-mindedness required to push a human body past its breaking point. 

Water Gate Bridge's plot revolves around an enormous concrete complex that houses a mountain pass that will allow the American armed forces to flee the war in Korea, and the desperate efforts by People's Volunteer Army's 7th Company to detonate it. Frost-bitten Chinese soldiers, dressed in rags and wielding confiscated grease guns, hurl their bodies into hopeless, repetitive, conflict. This hair-raising martyrdom is backed by diegetic bugles and non-diegetic orchestra; a sweeping and anthemic chorus to match the film's euphoric expression of (fatalistic) patriotism. No-one escapes the meat grinder: matinee idols are penetrated and pulverised; teeth chip on flash-frozen rations; and a slumming boy bander (Jackson Yee) wears gashes all over his T-Zone, the marks burned into his face by the metal googles he has worn to protect his eyes. This deliriously photographed body horror peaks with a Chinese soldier being slowly crushed by an American tank. His flesh and bones gumming up the caterpillar tracks, rendering it still and, more importantly, vulnerable. This apparently dauntless machine of imperialist might is trapped in place by the literal body of the people.