Critic Reviews

It’s a fantastic World War II movie, the action is tense, and the stories on the ground are inspiring and heartbreaking.

Guan’s direction may be less radical or propulsive than Nolan’s, but it too plunges audiences into both the intimacy and magnitude of brutal war spectacle while immersing them in a stunningly mounted period canvas.

The Eight Hundred bites off more that it can chew but it consistently serves up gripping filmmaking on the biggest canvas.

While the scale of Hu’s production is indeed impressive in its giganticness, and likely plays excellently on the IMAX screens for which it is intended (I had to settle for watching it on my television), The Eight Hundred falls a few hundred yards short of war-movie greatness.

With so much intense focus lavished on the action, there’s none to spare for the characters’ emotional lives, and it’s hard to care much about who lives or dies.

Like the ambitious The Wandering Earth, the last Chinese epic to make a play for international glory, and indeed Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, The Eight Hundred is thin on characterization, and too often slips into rote narrative and war movie cliches (really, a runaway white horse?). And that's despite eight writers working on the script. The sheer volume of men fighting and dying in the face of overwhelming odds and stellar technical spectacle step into the gap where emotional connection should be.

The Eight Hundred fetishizes martyrdom, but for those seeking big-screen, epic violence, it’s pretty much the only game in town.