Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Chinese history, legends, some of us have taken the time to read this wonderful book. Some of us only know of the stories from the Koei video game series Dynasty Warriors, (Which I am also a fan of) Though the games are repetitive as hell, I cannot get enough button mashing action from this series.

In 2008 director John Woo returned to China and decided to make what I consider his masterpiece. Taking from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he put together the movie Red Cliff. A movie so amazing with its blend of action, story telling, visuals and musical score, it broke every Chinese box office record, including throwing Titanic off the mountain and being the biggest film in Chinese history.

To summarize for those of you who have never read the book or played the video games and have no idea what it's about. The year is 208 A.D. The Han empire is in disarray as China has endured years of civil wars and warlord uprisings. a tyrant named Cao Cao, who controls the Han Emperor like a puppet is on a campaign to eliminate every threat to him and the Han, and in doing so looks to gain power and military might so that he may one day overthrow the Emperor and rule all of China. After eliminating many threats he has only two remaining which he must defeat in order to realize his dream. Liu Bei, a ruler of the people who fights for Virtue, and Sun Quan, who rules the peaceful south lands. The two must form an alliance and fight off the on-coming forces of Cao Cao at Red Cliff (Battle of Chibi to you Dynasty Warriors players) And hope to bring and end to the conflict.

Though some would lump this movie in the same category as films like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero, It keeps the "Wire Fu" fighting to a minimum, but still brings an intelligent and action packed film together that is in my opinion unparalleled. Some scenes including Zhou Yu and the boy playing the flute is absolutely beautiful, the music ties it all together and unifies the film in perfect harmony. The casting I think was just right, as I could look at the characters, and before telling you who they are I could pick them out and identify them with very little difficulty. And they did an amazing job performing the action and dialogue based scenes through the whole film.

Of course there are some down sides to this film, the voice acting is pretty solid for the most part, but not the best. I wouldn't cringe at any one line specifically, and the actors did a good job trying to match up the lines with the lips, but overall it was still less than perfect. While visually it was beautiful, and for the most the film used live action as much as it could, at times it still had to resort to CGI, and some of the CGI scenes were lacking in quality. Finally, while I had no problem during the huge fight scenes telling the difference between the different armies, I watched this film with people who knew nothing about the story or the people involved, and at times loose track of, "Who the Good guys and Bad Guys were in the fight." But to me these elements are trivial and never threatened the story at all.

An edited/shortened 2 and 1/2 hour long version was released in the U.S. but the Chinese version runs over 5 hours. To those of you who aren't big fans of the genre, I recommend sticking to the U.S. edited version. But for fans of Romance, I say go out of your way to get the extended version.

Red Cliff is an amazing film that is a perfect blend of action, story telling, and visuals. If you love Romance, it's your movie, if you aren't familiar with Romance but enjoy films like Hero or House of Flying Daggers, It is definitely worth a look.

FINAL GRADE: A+

Trailer:
]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3qIXQCHf94