Amazon.com

Director John Woo’s Red Cliff boasts some mighty impressive numbers. It took four screenwriters to adapt the 800,000-word source material, a 14th-century Chinese novel called Romance of the Three Kingdoms. There are also three editors, two directors of photography, hundreds of horses, and a combined cast and crew numbering in the thousands, making it reportedly the most expensive movie ever made in China. There are quite a few minutes, too, as it has a running time of 2 hours 28 minutes. That’s only about half the length of the cut released in Asia, a fact that has led some critics to dismiss the American release as merely a bowdlerized version of the real deal. That may be, but this depiction of the titular battl (more…)