Ji jie hao
Tags: tragedy, anti war, violence

Plot synopsis:
In 1948, during the Huaihai Campaign of the Chinese Civil War, Captain Gu Zidi leads the 9th Company of the People's Liberation Army 139th Regiment to capture a town controlled by the National Revolutionary Army, during which they sustain heavy casualties. Angered by the death of his political commissar, Gu attempts to execute the NRA soldiers who surrendered. As a result, he is thrown in jail by his superior, Colonel Liu Zeshui, for three days, where he befriends Wang Jincun, an enlisted man and former school-teacher who was jailed for cowardice. Upon being released, Gu and his 46 surviving men are sent to defend a coal mine on the bank of the Wen River, which is near Tai'an, Shandong. They are ordered not to retreat until they hear a bugle call for assembly. With Liu's permission, Wang becomes the 9th Company's new political commissar. Almost immediately after fortifying their position, the 9th Company comes under heavy attack by NRA forces. Having fended off a wave of enemy infantry, and destroyed two enemy tanks, only a handful of soldiers are still alive. At this point, some of the soldiers claim to hear the bugle call in the distance. Gu, who was temporarily deafened by an explosion, is reluctant to believe them and commands that they fight to the death. The entire 9th Company is killed except Gu, who is knocked unconscious by a tank shell.
PLA forces eventually recapture the area and find Gu, unconscious and heavily wounded, and wearing an enemy uniform. At the military hospital, Gu tries to explain that he was a captain in the PLA, and that, after being knocked unconscious, he awoke, put on the enemy uniform in order to steal food from nearby, and then bombed an enemy fuel depot before falling unconscious again. However, the PLA went through a reorganization while Gu was in a coma, and hardly anyone remembers the existence of the 139th Regiment, whose members nearly all perished, so Gu is unable to verify his identity. He is scorned by the other patients who consider him a deserter. Gu volunteers to fight in the Korean War as an enlisted man, and during an artillery spotting mission, risks his life to save his commander, Lieutenant Zhao Erdou, from a landmine, in the process losing his right eye. The two of them become close friends, and Zhao supports Gu's attempts to have his contributions and those of the 9th Company recognized.
Gu returns to the Wen River battlefield and tries to locate the mine. He is disappointed to see that the mine has been reactivated and that the old entrance has been buried underneath piles of coal. He encounters Wang's widow and convinces her to marry Zhao. As time passes, Zhao manages to discover the location of the tomb of Liu, the 139th Regiment's leader. Gu visits the tomb and finds that the curator is Liu's assistant and bodyguard, who survived the war, though he lost one of his arms. The curator confirms that the bugle call was never sounded, as the 9th Company was deliberately sacrificed to buy time for the rest of the regiment. Gu flies into a rage and fights with the curator but later manages to calm down.
Gu starts camping at the mine and attempts to dig out his men's bodies with a shovel, despite protests from the miners. When Wang's remains are found a month later, the PLA sends an official notice to the local government to honour the 9th Company. However, Gu remains inconsolable because he cannot find the remaining bodies. At this point, he experiences a flashback which reveals that, as enemy forces closed in, he and Wang buried the bodies of the others deep inside the mine. While Gu went out to continue fighting, a mortally wounded Wang blew up the entrance to prevent the enemy from capturing the bodies, killing himself in the process.
Years later, the remains of the other soldiers are found during an excavation for an irrigation project. The PLA erects a monument near the site and conducts a military funeral with full honours for the 9th Company. Gu finally finds peace. The ending titles say that Gu died in 1987 at the age of 71. He was abandoned by his parents when he was three months old due to famine in his hometown, and was found by a shoemaker in a millet field. He was named "Gu Zidi", which means "millet field".

Review: Still, I'd like to give credit to this Chinese director for his guts to do such a Chinese war movie that well handles battle scenes with great details, tells the audiences the past without being necessarily affected by current Chinese politics, and touches a lot of people simply because most of the story feels just down to earth and so damned real.
In 1948, during the Chinese Civil War, the Captain Gu Zidi (Hanyu Zhang) from the Liberation Army falls in disgrace with his superiors after an incident with prisoners of war.
Gu Zidi fights in the Korea War and spends the rest of his life feeling guilty for the death of his men and trying to prove and achieve recognition for the honorable deed of his forty-seven soldiers."Ji Jie Hao" is an impressive movie about the Chinese Civil War of 1948.
After so many years waiting, there comes "Assembly", the first military blockbuster of China that Chinese movie and military fans have been hardly expecting for such a long time!
I believe this movie will pose an extreme important position both in the movie history and military culture of China.Since Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and Tom Hanks' "Band of Brothers", shooting an excellent and extraordinary warfare movie becomes a great dream among Chinese movie and military fans.
I'm just so pleased that China is now also able to shoot such a warfare movie that shake my heart so greatly and touch my emotion so deeply, that reflect the brutality of war and restore history details so really!
Nearly-real combat scenes and explosions shot by a shaking camera, old weapons and uniform (Type 55 uniform of PLA) in history exactly restored, native language of that period, and so on These scenes only exist in our dreams before, now they finally come into big screen!Unlike the epic works of August 1st Movie Studio that mainly focus on great leaders, "Assembly" precisely draws the inner heart of a normal person for the first time.
He never gave up and continually to fight, to find his men's bodies, until they were formally confirmed as martyrs and buried in 1958.By the end of the story, when 47 heroes finally received the medals and salute that belong to them, tears break out from the eyes of every audience.
This is an excellent military blockbuster which might remind people of less its American counterpart Save Private Ryan than the traditions of the Chinese chivalry which lays a stress emphasis on "Name" or "Title".Gu Zi Di(Millet Field), who is orphaned in a famine and named after the millet field where he was picked up,tried conscientiously every means to reclaim the credit of being martyrs( the holy death) for his 47 neglected dead comrades.
Assembly is a gripping film about the Chinese civil war and its aftermath, recounted through the story of a doomed company of Communist soldiers and the subsequent struggle of their commander, Gu Zidi, to win recognition for their sacrifice.
Hanyu Zhang is superb in the role of Gu Zidi, carrying the memory of his lost and forgotten comrades, and is the focus for a film that is by turns brutal, moving and provocative.The opening battle scene is Assembly is startlingly violent and throughout the film the portrayal of modern weaponry and its effect upon human bodies is truly frightening.
There are some eye-opening details about the nature of warfare in the Chinese civil war, including the deployment of 'political officers' to encourage Communist troops to act in line with Party doctrine.Admittedly, much of the film's appeal stems from its foreign origins.
The battle scenes cut frantically between different shots, unlike, for instance, the opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan, where the action relentlessly tracks the soldiers' landing on the D-Day beach.
This repeated cutting and changing conveys some sense of the chaos of warfare, but I feel that the shaky camera-work was overplayed and found this a bit irksome after the first few battle scenes.A more general problem is that this film focuses almost exclusively on the actions of the Communist soldiers.
Although Assembly is written from the perspective of the winning side, it does not begin to examine why the Communists were at one time so short of munitions and especially men in fighting the war against the Nationalists.
The story of Gu Zidi's company of men is a battle against the odds, but the film does not delve into the root causes of their desperation.But although Assembly is a portrait of one side in a long military conflict there is surprising depth to this portrait.
The film does not follow a straightforward triumphalist narrative about Communist war heroes, but instead builds a complex tale of an individual (Gu Zidi) who struggles for the posthumous recognition of individual soldiers who made an individual sacrifice.
That it is such a great struggle for Gu Zidi to secure a memorial for these fallen comrades is at least partly an indictment of post-war society and government in China.Assembly achieves a remarkable amount in less than two hours.
But here, Feng managed to bring about a movie which goes beyond the usual ra- ra, and shows us that a movie with universal themes can also come out from what is essentially a war movie based upon China's tumultuous era after WWII.Assembly refers to the call of the bugle to retreat and regroup, and this is the call that Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) and his 47 men of the 9th Company, 3rd Batallion, 139th Regiment, are keenly listening out for, as they go about their mission in ill-equipped fashion, holding fort on a strategic plain.
Sent to the frontlines for war-crimes, Captain Gu and his men, while being the best at trench warfare, find themselves severely lacking in essentials - manpower, ammunition and heavy weaponry, as they go up against the marauding forces of the Nationalist army, with their relatively superior armour.
The war sequences here aren't poetic in the veins of Terence Mallick's The Thin Red Line, but are more aligned with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, with its gritty realism, strained colours, and bloody, gory violence.We're probably, in recent years, in tune with war movies that put us in the shoes of aggressors, and that is to follow an assault team.
In fact, you'll probably be wondering instead that the PLA at the time was really backward, given the world's military technological advancement in the West/Japan during the 40s.And given last year's double bill by Clint Eastwood in Flags of our Fathers and Iwo Jima, Assembly seems like both movies combined, in providing both an in-depth look at the battles fought, as well as taking time off to contemplate more serious issues in dramatic fashion.
These acts might bore those who came satisfied with the first half, but for those looking into a more intimate drama of one man's fight for his lost brothers, then this portion will likely appeal to you.Ultimately, Assembly is an ambitious film.
And after watching this, you'll probably won't hesitate to watch another war movie coming out of China, if they meet the benchmark set by Feng Xiaogang.
Very realistic battle scenes, good character development, a bit weak on the romance side of things, but hey, this isn't a chick flick.My Chinese Mandarin skills are weak, so I appreciate the good quality English subtitles provided.Overall, I think China has taken a good step in creating this movie so that it does not appear like a "state-run, propaganda" film...rather a real film with deep meaning and quality entertainment value.This film makes me ponder the question, will there be more movies like this to come from China?
Besides all the positive reviews about its realistic visual style, the shaky camera and all the "Private Ryan" stuff, it really deserved compliments from Chinese people, while we can see the true differences between Chinese people and Western people in a cultural perspective.I've read some reviews criticizing the Assembly for it being too "western", and has significantly less character development in the entire movie, but to state in short Assembly is a movie purely shot from the angle of Captain Gu, who is the main man in the movie.
Besides, director Feng Xiaogang apparently deviated from the typical Chinese war movies' atheism tune and communism campaign injected by political needs.
It's a story of the return of a long-lost heroism.I think the biggest breakthrough that Xiaogang Feng made is there was no propaganda for the Communist Party of China.
The soldiers in the film are a real reflection of the true Chinese spirit.As a Chinese, I loved this movie very much even though it was not 100% "Made in China", for it was a milestone in the Chinese film history where directors learned not to simply imitate how American or European directors to shoot a movie, but to use these technologies to tell a more convincing story.
recent years war movies the like of "flags of our fathers", "saving private ryan","iwo jima" are certainly (and always will be) violent but with lesser gratuitous effects and they dealt very justly with the myriads of war consequences, first on the soldiers and the rest of us.
And for any "westerners" unaccustomed with China's history, it may give some insight to tiny part of her modern part some 50+ years ago events that led to fall of Chang Kai Shek and rise of communism under Mao Zhe Dong's.The story line is compelling, similarly to "SPR" we have some well drawn all-human characters and their war story laced with brutal, bloody and yet so mesmerizing scenes, an insight to mankind at its worst.The acting is excellent, even the supporting actors and extras performed all great or at least sufficiently enough to make us believe the scenes we are watching could have happened exactly as they are portrayed on the screen.Why then I gave it 9 instead of 10?
Whereas previous films such as Tai Hang Shan Shang followed traditional depictions of large scale warfare and propaganda rhetoric, Assembly focused on the relationship among individual soldiers and the brutalities of war.
In an attempt to reflect the sense of brotherhood and the absurdities of war that are so apparent in films such as Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and Taegukgi; Assembly ultimately accomplishes neither.Although i first welcomed the refreshing change in presented in the Assembly, the heavily borrowed western styles proved to be too impersonal from the Chinese perspective.
Furthermore, this is probably the first Chinese war film i encountered where the word 'comrade' was replaced by the word 'brothers' to reflect the interpersonal relationships among the soldiers.
The other obvious western influence comes from the dark cinematography and shaky camera work from films such as Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers.
But after combining these in story elements with the stylistic elements; the Movie becomes woefully unoriginal and unreflective of the Chinese experience.Although Assembly may be unique for a Chinese war movie, its no different from Western films.Problems in perspectives asides, there are still significant problems within the actual movie that fail to live up to its potential even from a western view.
All in all, Assembly is a decent war film from the western perspective, but from a Chinese view, it both inadequate and impersonal.
The story of a Chinese regiment fighting against the Nationalists in the brutal civil war manages to tug at almost every human emotion.
The scenes of warfare in this movie are very well done and manage to do so without demonizing the enemy as in so many war films.
For those of you who know such things, and there are many, the range of weaponry used in this film spans the the entire history of modern warfare for the Chinese from the 1920's on through the war in Korea and adds greatly to the intense realism of the film.
Watch for the scene in which the Captain sees what has become of the old helmets once used by the soldiers.The main character, Captain Gu Zidi, superbly played by Zhang Hanyu, cannot give up the memory of his lost men and never ceases in his struggle to have their memory honored.
So the second half of the movie is set after the war, and there the movie became interesting again, a lot of insights into communist China and many other things that I don't want to spoil, although that plot was dragging a bit aswell but not too much.
The movie was in Chinese, making it more realistic; however, the English subtitles were presented very quickly and it was hard to follow the story.
This movie was on my bucket list for a long time, and now I finally watched it.The movie starts off with a battle scene during the Chinese civil war.Gu Zidi is a young officer in (I guess) the Communist army.
The battles have no shortage of pretty brutal scenes (like Saving Private Ryan) and moments of self sacrifice.
Gu Zidi is the only survivor after a final battle and he has fight bureaucracy for the honor of the men who are simply declared MIA.The first half has lots of war action.
Great performances all round, but particularly from Hanyu Zhang as Gu Zidi, he really put in a tremendous performance.Now, whether you agree with the politics or not, this film is about the camaraderie of soldiers and about coming to terms with the consequences of war.
If the Chinese communist party didn't win the civil war, China might be a better country than it is today.
Some of the scenes remind of me "Saving private Ryan." Remember people, only good things about the Chinese communist party are allowed to be made movies.
The producers of the really brilliant Korean film Brotherhood have returned now with a powerful Chinese war film.In the middle of the Chinese Civil War Captain Gu Zidi (Hany Zhang) is a skilled officer in the Communist army but when he disgraces himself he is given a suicide mission to hold an old mine at the South Bank of the Wen River with only 47 men.
With no one believing him Gu returns to the army whilst proving his claims his men died as heroes.Saving Private Ryan has been a major influence on war films ever since and it is clear that the filmmakers of Assembly were trying to make a Chinese version of that film.
Even though Assembly is influenced by other films Assembly can easily stand on it's own two feet, with a strong story about a soldier suffering from guilt because of his scene of honour and duty prove that his men be classified as heroes like they deserve.
Assembly is a film about the brutality of war, the guilt someone can feel, personal and collective redemption and someone trying to do the right and honourable thing.Xiaogang Feng directs a powerful film about how Gu Zidi fights against the odds in more ways then one.
But Feng does skip over a few things that we should have seen, like the final battle and how Gu got off a mine.Zhang gives an incredible performance throughout Assembly, showing a wide range, making Gu into a likable character.
The persistence of the central figure Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu), and the the humanity and anti-war theme shine through the film.
The problem is: the plot seems to be a rehash of countless Hollywood war movies, except that the actors are Chinese and the army is the Peoples' Liberation Army.
"Assembly" is a Chinese war movie made in collaboration with the special effects and stunt coordinators from the Korean war epic "Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood Of War" which is one of the greatest modern war movies along with "My Way".Despite the great war scenes, "Assembly" doesn't come close to the high quality of the aforementioned titles.The viewer is thrown too fast into the story.
The elements that save this movie are the special effects, the cinematography, the soundtrack and the solid acting, especially by main actor Zhang Hanyu.On a positive side note, this movie has no propaganda tendencies like similar films.
In 1948 during the Chinese Civil War a broken company of men is ordered to hold an old mine until the bugler plays assembly.After the war the captain of the men, the only survivor and the only one who said he did not hear the bugle call, tries to find their bodies and prove his men died as heroes.Profoundly moving story of the brotherhood created in war and the need to right an old wrong.
This is a film about the people, and the individuals who fight in times of war.
This is a film about the human cost of war.Ultimately the film works because of Zhang Hanyu as Captain Gu Zidi.
While many frown at this attempt, "Ye yan" is still far better than the rubbish that once respected directors such as Zhang Yimou has been turning out.With "Assembly", Feng has finally shown how good he is.Perhaps the first thing to say about "Assembly" is that it is the first ever war epic coming out of China that does not have the slightest trace of political propaganda.
Assembly is the story of how Gu Zidi returns in his old age to the mine where his comrades in 9th Company valiantly gave their lives in order to find their bodies to gain proof so the government would recognize their sacrifice.
What makes Assembly such a great film is that despite the gratuitous blood and violence, both of which there is no shortage of during times of war, the movie presents a clear anti-war message and ends on a poignant note.A running joke throughout the film is based on the fact that Captain Gu Zidi lacks a proper name.
The protagonist is a soldier in the Chinese communist army, Hanyu Zhang.
Good reason to make movies about the unforgiving brutality of war and the misunderstandings that follow.In the case of this film, that's part of the problem.