Dongji Island

Great action film: visually breathtaking, brutal, and explosively message-driven

Watch this if you:
• love wartime action
• appreciate great cinematography
• want to check out some underwater wire fu
• are up for epic statements about inhumanity and war
• are willing to go with iconic characters and broad symbolism
• want to see Zhu Yi Long’s amazing acting and 9.5% body fat abs
• want to see Wu Lei's wonderful acting and his ability to embody goodness and justice
• want to watch Ni Ni's awesome acting and her character's role as a force for change
• are curious about why “propaganda” is not an insult in the Chinese filmmaking industry

Don’t watch this if you:
• can't take brutal violence
• prefer realism and naturalistic character development over powerful message delivery
• are never okay with demonizing villains
• are sadly insensitive to the awesomeness of Ni Ni, Zhu Yi Long and Wu Lei.
• always judge a film by the same standards as those of Oscars voters
• think “propaganda” is only and always a bad thing

This is a powerful action movie that made me cry buckets. It's a:

Stunning visual experience

Enraged condemnation of a Japanese war crime

Grueling, devastating ride

Hymn to justice and kindness

After seeing it, I needed a few days to move out of the loss and sadness.

A week or so later, I started getting curious about where Dongji Island's filmmaking style fits in Chinese filmmaking history. Because it's quite strongly message-driven. I mean, I usually notice ideological content in films and tv shows, whether that's a cultural stance in Hollywood products or political messaging in cdramas. And after some preliminary internet searching, I learned that being propaganda is not a movie flaw in China the way it would be in my country. It seems like within Chinese filmmaking, propaganda can be art.

Anyway, in my opinion, Dongji Island has elements of extremely well made propaganda, but overall it's great art.

Because of its propaganda side, though, I don't have much hope for it to become popular in the West. I think Oscars voters go for stories with realism, psychological growth and complexity that privilege the individual. Dongji Island is fueled more by the message than it is by psychological arcs. While its characters have individuality and uniqueness, their symbolic weight is emphasized. And the movie subordinates the individual to the collective.

What’s stayed with me the most are not only the deep emotional impact and the amazing visuals, but also the performances. Besides the leads, Wu Lei, Zhu Yi Long, and Ni Ni, who are all on fire, I keep remembering moments from supporting actors, especially Chen Ming Hao, Ni Da Hong and Yang Hao Yu.

I’m really grateful for the limited American release, because I was able to see this on the wide screen! The lowest score I gave it was for rewatch value, because I would have to take a lot of deep breaths before I walked into a theater to see this a second time. But it will remain with me from just the one experience.

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A thrill ride into an overlooked story

I'll be the first to admit I know very little about the Pacific Theatre of WWII. This may seem surprising given australia's geographical proximity and involvement in the fighting, but most of our nationalistic myth-making leans more into the WWI imagery than WWII.

And as much as I would like to say a curiosity in history was the reason I chose to watch Dongji Rescue, I'd be lying. I was 98% there for the cast. And damn, did they deliver.

I didn't even recognise Zhu Yi Long, even though I finished a third re-watch of the Story of Minglan earlier this year. Boy, does he have range! Same goes for Wu Lei, who I've seen in a few things, but I felt like couldn't quite shake the child actor background until now. Yet despite their stellar performances, Ni Ni takes the cake. Her character doesn't feature much until the latter half of the movie, but from therein she steals the show.

The storyline is a classic thriller style, mixed with the usual tropes of Chinese films set in this era. Like every Cdrama, the white characters are super cringe. Thankfully, their parts are kept relatively short, and only one pom sticks around long enough to get a name. There seem to be two thematic strands in the movie: the moral obligation to save lives, and the fraternal bond between the male protagonists. The first is executed well, but the latter suffers with the movie focussing more on plot progression than character development.

With that in mind, I think they could've chopped out Ni Da Hong's character altogether. He was simply one character too many and didn't really do much other than give Ni Ni's character substance. Not that her character needed it. She had depth after just a few seconds on screen. The other drag for me was a couple of scenes that verged a bit too close to melodrama. Combined with the cringe poms, they did take me out of the film quite a lot.

That said, the underwater and on-water shooting was the best I've ever seen. I would love to see behind-the-scenes footage of how that was achieved because, in spite of my mild thalassophobia and claustrophobia, my eyes were glued to the screen.

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