The Sacrifice
金刚川
China, 2020, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 122 mins.
Directors: Guan Hu 管虎, Guo Fan 郭帆, Lu Yang 路阳.
Associate director: Tian Yusheng 田羽生.
Rating: 7/10.
Korean War drama takes an offbeat approach to its simple story, and has less of the usual genre cliches.
STORY
Mount Geumgang, southeast North Korea, near the South Korean border, mid-Jul 1953. The Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, sent to support the (North) Korean People’s Army, has gone from being a defensive to an offensive force, preparing for a decisive battle in the Korean War. (The so-called Jincheng Campaign 金城战役, centred on a bulge by US/South Korean forces around the border in the east, was to be the last large-scale PVA offensive of the war.) A unit codenamed Yanshan 燕山 is ordered to cover the PVA’s main force on its right flank, and must be in position by 06:00 on 13 Jul. To get there, however, it must first cross the rapids of Mount Geumgang that are in its way. 1. Soldiers 一。⌈士兵⌋. On the afternoon of 12 Jul, as US planes circle overhead, the PVA unit hides in the thickly wooded hills around the river, waiting for their engineers to repair the pontoon bridge so it can cross. One former squad leader, Guan Lei (Wu Jing), is obsessed with getting into action and winning a medal; he takes his frustration out on a second lieutenant, Zhang Fei (Zhang Yi), who stands his ground as he is now technically Guan Lei’s superior. One lieutenant, Gao Fulai (Deng Chao), is told his men will be the last to cross the river and must mend the bridge if it is damaged any further; they will need to cross by 05:00 latest to make the 06:00 rendezvous. A few troops manage to cross during the late afternoon but the bridge is bombed again. Engineers work through the night to repair it and by 03:00 more troops cross. However, delayed-action bombs start detonating, and then the bridge is devastated by another bombing raid. 2. Adversaries 二。 ⌈对手⌋. One US plane is shot down during the afternoon and US pilots are surprised to find the bridge repaired so soon. As darkness falls, the crazed US pilot Hill, aka Warthog (Vladimir Ershov), strafes the bridge for personal reasons, ignoring calls to return to base. In the attack at 03:00 he manages to take out the second anti-aircraft gun commanded by Zhang Fei, but at huge personal cost. And then the US’ B-26 bombers go in to finish the job. 3. Gunners 三。⌈高炮班⌋. During the afternoon, troops down by the bridge prepare to cross when the engineers have repaired it. Some manage to cross before B-26 bombers launch an attack. One plane is brought down by the maverick Guan Lei, who takes charge of one of the two anti-aircraft guns. He’s no longer a company commander, just a private; but his superior, Zhang Fei, who’s in charge of both anti-aircraft guns, lets him have his head. Crossing re-starts in the late afternoon as more planes are heard; in fact, it’s the noise of long-range howitzers. Repairs continue through the night, and then comes the bombing attack at 03:00, in which Guan Lei is killed. Zhang Fei and crazed US pilot Hill then engage in a personal “duel”. 4. The Bridge 四。⌈桥⌋. At 04:35, in the early morning of 13 Jul, a US pilot is told to return to base, as the bridge has been completely destroyed. But as a PVA soldier walks the remains of the bridge, amid the corpses and devastation, hundreds of soldiers seem to cross it, as a wall of living human flesh supports the bridge…
REVIEW
Hot on the heels of Sino-Japanese War drama The Eight Hundred 八佰 (2020), which climaxed with Chinese troops escaping across a bridge in Japanese-besieged Shanghai, writer-director Guan Hu 管虎 zeroes in on another slice of bridge heroics with The Sacrifice 金刚川. Set 16 years later, during the final major Chinese offensive of the Korean War, it shows Guan, 52, again taking generic material and making it his own with original touches and viewpoints. Centred on the crossing of a fast-flowing river (the titular Geumgang River) by some units of the People’s Volunteer Army, the story is re-told from three different viewpoints, capped by a semi-mythic coda. The Sacrifice isn’t as stylistically audacious or emotionally trenchant as The Eight Hundred, and is let down by one section (the viewpoint of some US pilots) that’s cliched and corny; but at its best it has the same elemental power as Eight Hundred. After 17 days, it’s still doing very nicely in the top spot, with a hawl of almost RMB890 million so far – a long way from Eight Hundred‘s ka-pow RMB3 billion but still very respectable for a less elaborate, not especially starry war saga. [Final tally was RMB1.12 billion.]
The story is basically a preparatory sideshow to the famous Battle of Geumseong – known as the Jincheng Campaign 金城战役 in Chinese – in which a special PVA unit has to cross a treacherous river to get into position by 06:00 on 13 Jul 1953 to protect the right flank of the PVA’s main attack. The problem is that US planes keep bombing the pontoon-like bridge as soon as the PVA’s engineers have made it passable. The story, spread over an afternoon and a night during 12-13 Jul, is re-told from the viewpoints of (a) PVA soldiers, (b) US pilots and (c) PVA gunners, followed by a coda set at dawn on 13 Jul. Given the length of the third episode – at 46 minutes roughly twice that of each of the preceding ones – it’s surprising that this wasn’t shortened to make room for a section devoted to the engineers, whose work is so crucial to the whole crossing. This would have needed to be inserted earlier on, as the raw, supercharged emotions that blaze through the third section centred on the anti-aircraft gunners do segue naturally into the dawn coda.
Bridges have long been central to some of the best war movies, given the way in which they physically concentrate the action and their building (or destruction) can function as a thematic device. (It’s hardly an accident that the first fictional feature released by the PRC government was Civil War drama The Bridge 桥, 1949, dir. Wang Bin 王滨.) But here, again, Guan goes against the grain, neither fetishising the bridge as some kind of giant metaphor for the progress towards victory (it’s actually a rather boring, practical structure) nor concentrating on its repeated ruination and repairs. Instead, he and his five co-writers (including Ge Rui 葛瑞, The Eight Hundred, and Zhao Ningyu 赵宁宇, Towards the River Glorious 打过长江去, 2019) concentrate on a handful of individuals, led by two anti-aircraft gunners (hangdog actor Zhang Yi 张译, very good here, and action star Wu Jing 吴京, in a showier but ultimately supporting role) who lead the defence of the bridge against marauding US pilots. There’s little through-story, but the growing frustration of Zhang’s low-key character climaxes the picture, in a white-hot “duel” to the death with a crazed, vengeful US pilot in an all-or-nothing suicide attack.
The Sacrifice is also not your usual Chinese blockbuster in which hordes of celebrities pop up for a few seconds. Well-known comedian-director Deng Chao 邓超 (then in the midst of shooting his episode in My People My Homeland 我和我的家乡, 2020) shows up for one blackly comic scene that was largely improvised and played in his native Jiangxi dialect for humorous effect; but he’s the only celeb cameo in the whole picture. Other roles are largely anonymous – compounded by the usual problem in war movies of not always being able to make out faces – but his hardly matters in the overall effect. As in The Eight Hundred, Guan again shows his gift for focusing on individual stories while still keeping the wider story going.
The US pilots episode, with its weird, Americanised Chinglish and hardboiled cliches (“Without the bridge, it’s their hell. With it standing, it’s ours,” growls one US pilot), could easily have capsized the whole film, especially given that the main performance by Russian actor Vladimir Ershov is designed simply to show how crazed the Yanks were and how brave and resourceful was the PVA. The ridiculous dialogue apart, the 20-minute segment (called Adversaries 对手) does at least have a visual energy that doesn’t hold up the film, with the camera constantly circling the planes and their occupants in a sustained display of visual effects and green screen.
Individual sequences shot by each of the four directors are not identified, nor the individual work of the four DPs – who include the prestigious Luo Pan 罗攀 (The Dead End 烈日灼心, 2015; Youth 芳华, 2017). Like the multi-handed script, the whole blends seamlessly under Guan’s supervisory hand, even with such disparate directors as Guo Fan 郭帆 (sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth 流浪地球, 2019), Lu Yang 路阳 (wuxia franchise Brotherhood of Blades 绣春刀, 2014-17) and, most unlikely of all, Tian Yusheng 田羽生 (the yuppie Ex-Files 前任 series, 2014-17). Music by A Kun 阿鲲 (caper extravaganza Switch 天机•富春山居图, 2013; The Wandering Earth) and Eight Hundred‘s Andrew Kawczynski is largely in Hans Zimmer wall-of-sound mode, just more noise among all the other effects. Locations around Dandong, in Liaoning province, up against the border with North Korea, convincingly stand in for the mountainous and visually imposing Geumgang region.
CREDITS
Presented by China Film (CN), Huayi Brothers Film (CN).
Script: Guan Hu, Ge Rui, Zhao Ningyu, Zhang Ke, Jing Yu, Gao Linyang. Photography: Luo Pan, Liu Yin, Han Qiming, Gao Weizhe. Editing: He Yongwei. Music: A Kun, Andrew Kawczynski. Music supervision: Yu Fei. Art direction advice: Zhao Wei. Art direction: Yan Shuheng. Styling: Li Zhou. Sound: Wang Danrong. Action: Fu Xiaojie. Visual effects: Yin Duanyang, Xu Jian, Ding Yanlai.
Cast: Zhang Yi (Zhang Fei), Wu Jing (Guan Lei), Li Jiuxiao (Liu Hao), Wei Chen (Yan Rui), Deng Chao (Gao Fulai), Vladimir Ershov (Hill, US pilot), Qiu Tian (Xin Qin, radio operator), Ou Hao (No. 7), Shi Haozheng (Shitou), Zhou Siyu, Liu Xianda.
Release: China, 23 Oct 2020.