This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Attack on a China Mission (1900) It's hard to full judge this film because it originally ran four minutes but now it's just under 90 seconds. What we've got is a woman is pulled and dragged by a man as a group of people attack the mission. There's a violent gun battle that follows. ATTACK ON A CHINA MISSION is one of many films that were drawn from the headlines. Producers realized that people would go see movies about stories they had read about in the newspaper and this here is just one example. For the most part the film is entertaining thanks in large part to the gunfight, which actually leads to quite a few dead bodies, which wasn't all that common in 1900. This British film is certainly worth watching but lets hope the rest of it is located at some point.

It was still a while until the beginning of World War I when this was made, but in film war already became a subject. This one here, which runs slightly over a minute depicts exactly what the title says. I cannot say watching this film gave me anything more than reading the title, but there are a couple factors that still make it a mediocre watch at least. First of all, not all movies had acting at this point. It's a plus that this one did. And also it has actually really many actors, which was probably not so easy to get them to do exactly what the filmmaker wanted. The filmmaker here is James Williamson, probably the very first Scottish director and also one of the most prolific easily, maybe the most prolific actually. It's maybe worth a watch for people who enjoy war movies to see what they looked like 115 years ago, but for the rest it#s really not worth a watch.

In the early days of the cinema, actual film of important historic events often wasn't available but the public clamored for news of the world. So, film companies began faking the news--making film of what people THOUGHT might be the actual events. A good example of this is the Edison film that purports to show the execution of the man that assassinated President McKinley. Another is this re-creation of this attack by Chinese peasants (the "Boxers") on a missionary and his family. Such attacks had happened, but given the sparsity of movie cameras, the scene was re-enacted for the public in this film. The problem is that the home and landscaping don't look particularly Chinese. Not a terrible film, but also not a particularly interesting or compelling one either.

In 1900, it would have been pretty ambitious to tell a fairly involved story like this in a short motion picture. It's hard to evaluate "Attack on a China Mission", in part because it tries to do more than it accomplishes, and in part because portions of the complete film seem not to have been preserved. (And what is preserved also shows definite signs of physical deterioration.)The story is set in the Boxer Rebellion, which would still have been fresh in the public's mind at the time this movie was made. Otherwise, it would be hard or impossible to determine the context of events or the motivations of the characters from the film alone. There is plenty of action, and some good camera shots of it as well, although the course of events is sometimes a little chaotic. Still, it does tell a complete story, as far as it goes.Given the limited resources and techniques then available, telling a story like this was an enterprising idea. Most of the other Williamson films of the era are of good quality, and it seems likely that this one might also have been a good one in its original or complete form. What survives of it is flawed, but still somewhat interesting.