Review for Axis of War: The First of August

Introduction

It's 1927 and the time of the great Northern Expedition, an alliance of rival factions the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalists) and the Chinese Communist Party. This expeditionary alliance was forged in order to defeat the tribal warlords in the North of China and help to unite the country, and overall was going pretty well. Sadly President Wang Jungwei and General Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leaders, had no intention of sharing power with the communists and sought to undermine them, eliminating them as a force in the long-term.

Branding the Nationalists as the White Terror, the communists shook off the more moderate views of Secretary General Chen Duxu, part of the more right wing branch of the Communist Party and under leaders such as Zhou Enlai came to realise that the only way to achieve their aims was to bear arms against the Nationalists, something predicted earlier by Mao Zedong who would end up leading the People's Republic of China.

Soon all roads lead to Nanching on 1st August 1927, the scene of the first uprising there and the birth of the first Chinese Independent Revolutionary Army.

You should note as well that the artwork doesn't resemble events in the film as there are no strafing aircraft or any aircraft at all in this film.

Audio

Choice of 2.0 Stereo or 5.1 Surround soundtrack and the film is well subtitled in English, although not without some problems. Initially you get a lot of subtitles to try and introduce characters or places with Chinese subtitles appearing on-screen at the same time as English ones. This not only eats up screen space but the timing is a little short so you barely have time to read those, making it hard at first to understand who the lead characters are. Clearly not an issue for the native market as presumably they'll all be well schooled in the events shown.

Visual

Nice visuals overall with some good production values but the propaganda side of the film starts to hit when the Communists start to break away from the Nationalists, with the Communists all neat and tidy in their blue uniforms with orange neck scarves whilst the Nationalists are generally depicted as scruffy drunks.

Overall

It's rare that I'm impressed with a DVD distributor, but I have to say that currently my favourite distributor is Metrodome. I've received a fair few of their films over the last year or so and they seem to have an eye for picking up a good selection of foreign films which co-incidentally seems to be looking more into history and modern warfare. Maybe it's down to Saving Private Ryan or maybe it's not, but I had previously thought that the war film as a genre was dying out with its peak in the 1970's, and for the most part in Hollywood cinema that's the case. It would appear though that warfare is particularly popular within foreign films be it European or Asian, and quite frankly I'm loving it although it can have its drawbacks.

Axis of War: 1st of August is one of those films, the first part of a trilogy comissioned and produced by the Chinese Government. Axis of War is about the struggle faced by the Chinese Communist Party to gain control of their country, which for an outsider with an interest in history like me is still interesting subject matter. Where it fails, of course, is that it is produced by the Chinese government for its native audience and therefore on the whole is a neat propaganda film that only recounts positive things about the fledgling Communists.

Some of this is quite laughable really with all the Communists being nice and polite, respectfully referring to all their superiors as "Officer" when talking to them and part way through the film there's a nice rendition of some Party song about how wonderful it is to be a Communist. And everyone is equal and ready to be be forgiven for the slightest mistakes, even if stripped to the waist and tied to a huge mast on a platform surrounded by troops and person begging someone to recant is a young girl - at which point the gruff veteran promptly sees the error of his ways, bursts into tears and begs forgiveness - and gets it as Communists are full of forgiveness so long as you cry.

This first Axis of War film is severely cliche ridden, as you might expect, and therefore it's not for everyone. If you can get past this, however, and the fact that you probably won't have any idea of what's really going on, this is quite an enjoyable film. The Chinese Government have clearly put a lot of money into this and the production values are pretty high with some of the action sequences quite impressive albeit nothing you haven't seen before.

Quite enjoyable, but more for the Party apparatchiks...