Operation Red Sea [Hong hai xing dong] **** (2018, Yi Zhang, Johnny Huang, Hai-Qing) – Movie Review

Director Dante Lam [Lin Chaoxian]’s spectacular real-life Chinese battle movie Operation Red Sea is absolutely brilliantly staged at great cost ($70,000,000) and on an epic scale (140 minutes). Despite its positive and up-beat nature, the movie has a bleak and devastating impact.It is battle movie and it is properly gruelling. Just when you think it’s over, there’s even more, and at even a higher level of nerve-shredding excitement. You could say it’s a case of over-kill or just good measure and great value.

In the patriotic, flag-waving screenplay by Ji Feng, the Chinese Navy Marine Corps’s élite Jiaolong Assault Team launch a hostage rescue operation in Ihwea and undergo a fierce battle against terrorists whose plot to obtain nuclear materials is hidden under cover of a violent coup.

Operation Red Sea is a celebration of courage and bravery, as well as skill and precision, and is based on the story of the evacuation of the 225 foreign nationals and almost 600 Chinese citizens from Yemen’s southern port of Aden during the Yemeni Civil War in March 2015.

The movie is very strong stuff with an 18 certificate and scenes not for the faint-hearted. It is virtually non-stop action for the 140 minutes, with only the slightest and shortest pauses for breath or quiet, reflective or sentimental moments. And that must be good, and it is.

The battle choreography and CGI effects are staged on an incredible level of skill, imagination and achievement, so that, while you obviously know you are watching a movie, it throws you right there in the middle of the action, so you completely forget you are watching a movie. It is that vibrant.

Coming out to Leicester Square afterwards was a bit of a relief, drab and boring though everything in real-life London looked. I saw it in 2D on a tiny screen and from the back row in a tiny cinema. The screen looked like a postage stamp, but the film still had its effect. Can you imagine how it is on the IMAX screen in 3D?

A huge hit at home, it took $72,491,251 on its opening weekend in China.

It stars Yi Zhang, Johnny Huang, and Hai-Qing. The actors make a bit of an impression, when they are allowed, but they are appearing in mostly no acting required action roles.

It was shot in Morocco, starting in February 2017, with 400 Moroccans and 300 Chinese among the technical crew.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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