Coen22

The Battle at Lake Changjin is one of the most impressive war films I have seen in years, and it deserves a far wider audience than it has had in the West.

The Korean War is often called the forgotten war. Very few images of it ever reached the public, and most of us know almost nothing about what happened around the Chosin Reservoir in late 1950. This film fills that gap from a side we rarely hear: the Chinese soldiers who fought there.

The opening scene alone is worth the watch. The camera glides like a drone over the American fleet, with carriers, destroyers and transports packed into a bay, and right behind them is the Korean coast, with smoke rising from the hills. Hollywood usually shows American warships alone on the open ocean, which makes them look like defenders. Here, the same ships sit just off someone else's shore. It made me realise how close those sailors were to the war on land, close enough to watch the smoke rise from the places they were bombing. It is an image of invasion, and it changes how you see everything that follows.

To understand the film, you need the context most Western audiences never get. China had just lost somewhere around 15 to 20 million people to the Japanese occupation, and its civil war had only ended in 1949. Barely a year later, a foreign army had crossed the 38th parallel and was pushing toward the Yalu River, right at China's border, while American commanders openly talked of carrying the war into China. Even its supposed ally was unreliable, as the Soviet Union held back the air support it had promised. Seen from Beijing, it looked like one more invasion after decades of them.

Directed by Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark and Dante Lam, with Wu Jing and Jackson Yee, the film follows one company to the front. The battle scenes are chaotic, loud and frightening, and to me they felt credible in a way many war films do not. Above all, the film gets the cold right. Soldiers in thin uniforms faced temperatures far below freezing, frozen rations and frostbitten hands. The final stretch, where the weather becomes as merciless as the fighting, is hard to watch and impossible to forget.

Some reviewers dismiss it as propaganda. It certainly tells the story from China's point of view, and the American characters lack depth. But Hollywood has told its wars from its own side for decades, and we rarely call that propaganda. To me, this is history: the memory of a people who lost a great many young men, told the way they remember it.

Yes, it is nearly three hours long, and some of the dialogue is simple. I was never bored.

If you care about history, give this film a chance with an open mind. It may show you a part of the past you never knew you were missing.