Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

grantss Very disappointing. I was expecting a decent docu-drama on the 1911 Chinese revolution. However, even calling this a docu-drama might be giving it more credibility than it is due. Much of the "history" seems contrived for nationalistic purposes. There is a huge amount of embellishment, many of it simply to glorify the revolutionaries and put down everyone else, including the west. In some ways it is nothing more than Chinese propaganda.Script is lame. Dialogue could not be more unrealistic. Even the battle scenes are over-dramatized. Plus, because Jackie Chan is included in the cast we are obliged to have a gratuitous, totally-out- of-place martial arts fight scene...Performances are mostly woeful.Avoid.

tzer0 *****SPOILER ALERT!***** This movie is pre-spoiled. Oh, and the revolution succeeds. I gave it 2 stars because Jackie Chan did get one fighting scene in. That was worth one star. The other star is for... well, I'm not entirely sure what it's for. Effort maybe. Comically bad effects certainly.I guess this is Communist China's version on Patton. So instead of being epic and exciting it's epic and long windedly boring. Not that it's not entirely worth seeing. There are a few moments, but you have to add your own jokes, like an MST3K flick.Like the sound effects. They have the same cocking sound for every bolt action rifle, which wouldn't be too bad, except it sounds like a lever or pump action instead. That along with the sound of empty casings being dropped for fully loaded bullets, as well as spent casings, and a ricochet, that seems to be lifted directly from the Rainbow Six video game, used from everything from ricochets to cannons going off completely take you out of the film worse than every grenade in a Chuck Norris movie exploding with a big gas fireball.There are other things, like the "Go Pee" scene. Jackie Chan is leading one, of many, battles in the film and a Vicker's or Maxim type machine gun overheats and seizes up. He tells the soldier to pee on it. Not that this didn't happen, but he pees on the jacket of the water cooled gun, not in it. Not sure that would have worked for long and it would have been tough to keep a line of soldiers constantly urinating on it in the middle of a battle. And speaking of jackets, poor Jackie Chan has to lead a couple of battles without a uniform. And it seems like as soon as he gets one he gives it away to his politician friend before he even sets foot off the boat.That's another thing. Every ship in the film looks like a CG shot from Titanic. It's almost like this movie was made with a kit. Every sound and visual effect has a sameness to is. It's almost comical. Did I say almost? It IS comical. Almost as funny as the leader of the communist revolution begging the heads of the "Imperialist Bank" for money to help end Capitalism. Yep, that happens.So, if you want to see Jackie Chan direct and star in a War Epic sprinkled liberally with comically bad effects, that lots of speeches, and the most propaganda shots since the Battleship Potemkin, this is the movie for you. Otherwise it's a little like the Chinese film industry's attempt to make the Last Emperor from the other side. So despite lots of battle scenes, rather than being exciting, its a bit tedious. So while I feel I understand their attempt to escape oppression better, they seem to have only succeeded in trying to legitimize the new repression, and in making a epically long winded film that would rival and political speech.And speaking of speech. Jackie Chan has a very uncharacteristically gruff voice when speaking Chinese. Though it fits fine with the tough military officer character he plays in the movie, it makes it all the more surprising and funny when he speaks English and it's the same Jackie Chan from the V-8 commercials on TV.Goes good with The Last Emperor, 55 Days in Peking, The Sand Pebbles and or Reds.

kluseba "1911" is an epic Chinese historical drama that honours the centennial anniversary of the revolution against the Qing dynasty. The movie convinces with great special effects in the battle scenes, beautiful and authentic locations, bombastic costumes, many intellectual words and impressive images and a bunch of great and internationally recognized actors such as the very unusual and surprisingly convincing Jackie Chan, the once again very diversified Joan Chan or the charming shooting star Bingbing Li. This movies teaches us a lot about Chinese culture and history and captures the essential of a complex story in a short and intense running time. Even for someone who doesn't know a lot about China, the introduction and the subtitles reveal and explain enough to understand and get into a beautiful movie even though the ending could have been a little bit more expanded. I think the movie could have focused a little bit more on the situation and the authentic everyday life of the Chinese population instead of focusing only on the fate of the famous historic characters.Normally, this movie would have got one point more but I cut off one point because this feature has some elements that remind me of a propaganda cinema. Good and evil are too opposite and well defined and I'm sure that this movie is not always faithful towards the true history behind it. The good guys are wise, selfless and honest while the camp of the bad guys are one dimensional, egoistic and helpless. The movie tries to create a lot of sympathy for the main characters such as Sun Yat-Sen. In one scene, he convinces with his wise words only a bunch of ignorant, selfish and capitalist politics representing a very negative image of the Western civilization. That's a very romantic and epic scene but it's simply to pathetic to be true. This kind of falsification spoils the enjoyment of this otherwise technically perfect movie a lot. At least, after many American, Russian and German propaganda movies that I saw, this is a rather intriguing and also moderate movie with propagandistic tendencies from an Asian country.Apart of this little but though important flaw, this movie is a definite must see and yet another great history flick from China that easily beats the boring patriotic American war movies that have flooded the cinemas of the world a decade ago. It's time for a change and from a qualitative and cultural point of view, I happen to find these detailed, epic and entertaining Chinese history flicks very addicting.

Rhade Liu This film in a word is a mess.The problem with a lot of historical dramas in general is that their historical scopes are too big to fit neatly into the format of a film. 1911 suffers the same weakness as many other recent "propaganda" movies from mainland China: Irrespective of their propagandistic flairs or contents, they are all trying to cover everything and quickly into a usual 2 hrs duration, a task impossible if not improbable to do well. One has to question how much creative freedom Jackie really had with directing it but even without outside pressure, we can intuit that even Jackie won't want to be liberal with a source material so sensitive and "weighty". I am not going to delve into the history as you can find better information elsewhere but judging this historical film purely as film, it is unsatisfactory at best. If you want to learn about the 1911 Revolution then perhaps this film would give you a rundown of its historical development; it is mostly centred from the perspective of the revolutionary faction led by Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the founding father of modern nationhood and democracy in China. As required, you would see plenty of explosions and scenes of war, albeit distributed rather evenly throughout the film, providing as bits of "action" before or after the "civil" and political acts by Sun Yat Sen and the other "players" in the political manoeuvres. The film is littered with bits of textual information supposed to fill you in on the historical facts and significances, but if you are not a fast reader, all of it would fly past your head unless you are a professor in the study of the Revolution. So right off the bat you are witnessing an educational material that lacks substance and depth but only provides you with a general picture and even incomplete at that.With the typical colour filtering for battle scenes, you are treated with the usual grittiness of war. It is very apparent you are supposed to feel the up welling of emotion as men and women sacrificed their lives for the revolution but if anything, the scenes are so short that before you have the chance/time for up welling, it is over. All we know is that battles were fought, people died, and we move on to the (politic) next part. As a historical book, that is fine, as a movie, it does not work. (Granted some scenes might have been touching but within a film world crammed up with similar attempts at dragging out your inner weak spots, we are emotionally fatigued at best to be moved so easily.) One would also be appalled at the film's treatment of westerners. They are stereotyped/caricatured and acted awkwardly, seemingly only needed for their appearances and that none of the people hired to act knows how to act. (I mean come on, this is the 21th century, aren't we smart enough now to see through all the old stereotypes and know that people aren't paper cutouts?) Along with that comes some bad acting on the part of the Chinese casts, where most of them are either wooden or overly melodramatic, some even managed both. Even the Doctor at certain parts of the movie came out awkwardly.Cinematography. This might be much more centred on my own personal opinion but I find some of the cuts and techniques trying too hard, focusing on style rather than lending itself to the story and the scenes. A lot of potentially good scenes are ruined by fast cuts and awkward transitions which in some cases even provide some hilarious results on a film so centred on seriousness, making it somewhat a deadpan. I applaud Jackie for taking on directing but maybe perhaps this is not exactly the source material to work with. Personally I find historical films problematic in ways of execution, especially one about politics and dare I say revolutions? There is no way not to read a film like this in propagandistic terms. But then again can there be politic without propaganda? Maybe this one could be read as an irony? The solution to this is: Just don't take on so much, stop making epic political movies all together and give us something much more substantial than the emotionless husks we are always being offered in, dare I say, "sanctioned" art? (But in the case of China, this might be harder than one could imagine.) It is much better to focus on the smaller characters tangled within all these big events, see things from their eyes and get to understand the big picture. The detachment from human emotionality and focusing on the large picture history book-esque is only going to alienate people. For this story, as much as the personage of the doctor is "monumental" and of his endeavours, focus on Sun Yat Sen himself more, his personal struggles, what happens behind doors. Granted this would basically take the film into another direction but political epics just do not work.(At least I haven't seen it work. Western directors already understood the difficulty and infeasibility of trying to cover everything at once. Personally I haven't seen any western films done this way or similarly. If you have seen a successful one, please let me know, I want to learn.) If a metaphor could be used for this film, then it is akin to watch the scenes outside a fast moving train. Some scenes are nicely shot, well acted, and some sidelined characters having much more commanding presence than the main ones (In this case, I am speaking to the limited screen time roles played by Joan Chen as Empress Dowager Longyu and Chun Sun as Marshal Yuan Shi Kai), but the train is just going too fast for you to take a good look. All this makes you rather be out there...