The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge is a poor war film with enough ambition to make its failures frustrating. The directing credits name Tsui Hark, Chen Kaige and Dante Lam Chiu-yin, and the shared aim seems clear: to treat military endeavour with unbroken seriousness. There is nothing wrong with that starting point. The trouble is that the film makes reverence compulsory, leaving little room for people, and 149 minutes is a long time to spend being asked to pay our respects.

Wu Jing plays Wu Qianli, Jackson Yee plays Wu Wanli and Zhu Yawen plays Mei Sheng. The commitment of the performers is welcome, but the writing by Lan Xiaolong and Huang Jianxin allows earnestness to do too much of the work of character. Belief in a cause can make a soldier interesting; it cannot supply every detail of a personality. We wanted more awkwardness, more disagreement, or simply a conversation whose purpose was not to reinforce the film’s already settled position.

Elliot Leung’s music has to work within that narrow emotional range, and it does little to widen it. There is plenty of weight here, but too little variation in what we are being asked to feel. The same limitation affects the film’s scale: ambition is visible, yet the effort to make everything matter leaves too few moments that can be taken casually. A war film needs those smaller passages if we are to care about its soldiers between the fighting.

The MacArthur scenes are a welcome exception, allowing a cartoonish note to interrupt the solemnity. We laughed at that exaggeration, and felt relieved to be allowed a less dutiful response. The broadness is enjoyable because it changes the mood, even if it is hardly subtle characterisation. The English dialogue is much less successful: its stiffness keeps drawing attention to the lines themselves, and the humour cannot make every awkward exchange feel intentional.

The length makes these weaknesses harder to overlook. At 149 minutes, the film needs more than conviction to keep each stretch from feeling emotionally similar to the last. The cutting should have been tougher about how often we need to be told to take this seriously. War films can honour service while making room for fear, vanity, boredom or a bad joke; here the wish to remain respectful so often wins that the drama struggles to get started.

Viewers who want a reverent military spectacle may be willing to accept those limits, and it would be unfair to dismiss the seriousness of the effort. Our patience ran out with the stiff dialogue and the constant solemnity, not with the subject. The flashes of humour suggest how much a little freedom might have helped. We would choose something that gives its soldiers permission to be ordinary for a while.