ASSEMBLY (China, 2007)
Directed by: Feng Xiaogang
Starring: Zhang Hanyu, Hu Jun, Yuan Wenkang
“...the film is graphic, relentless and moving...very much a reaction against the propaganda war movies churned out by the Chinese film industry in the 1950s and 1960s.”
                                                                                    - The London Times

China’s most successful commercial director, Feng Xiaogeng, delivers a dirt-in-your-teeth war movie that transforms into something richer and deeper about halfway through, elevating itself from an ultra-advanced riff on SAVING PRIVATE RYAN to a human drama that guts you like a bayonet. Opening smack in the middle of China’s 1948 Civil War, the Communist People’s Liberation Army is locked in bloody, flesh-shredding combat with the Nationalist Kuomintang forces (the KMT). Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) leads his PLA rifle company to a hard-won victory but just when it looks like the carnage is over, in a fit of rage he commits a war crime and is subsequently imprisoned. Given a second chance, he’s sent to the front on a hopeless mission: to protect the rear during a retreat from superior KMT forces. He’s told that his company is expected to hold out until they hear the assembly call, at which point any survivors can retreat. Needless to say, things go very, very wrong very, very quickly. Just when you’re starting to think that you might go insane if you hear one more artillery shell explode, the film suddenly shifts gears and focuses on the problem that confronts every veteran of every war: how do you live with the choices you made on the battlefield once the war is over? In diving down into the depths of Gu Zidi’s postwar soul, ASSEMBLY becomes a movie that speaks directly to Americans who are, right now, watching their soldiers coming home and trying to fit back into civilian life.

Grossing 180 million yuan ($25 million dollars) ASSEMBLY was the number two hit of the year in China, becoming a blockbuster of massive proportions, out-earned only by Jet Li’s WARLORDS. It’s a surprise that this carnage-soaked movie did so well, until you consider its director. Feng Xiaogang (whose THE BANQUET opened last year’s New York Asian Film Festival) is China’s most commercially successful director, with nine blockbusters under his belt ranging from martial arts epic to romantic comedies. With the help of a special effects and art direction team from Korea (who had just finished working on that country’s Korean War epic, TAE GUK GI) he has assembled a brutally beautiful war movie that focuses on an aspect of war that we would all rather forget: sacrifice. War forces soldiers to sacrifice everything: their innocence, their lives and, sometimes, even their humanity. Feng Xiaogang does not take this lightly, and with ASSEMBLY he wants to show the sacrifices that serve as the foundations of modern day China. As he says, “Every sacrifice deserves respect, whether it is voluntary or not.”