It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Blistering performances.

A Chinese film with subtitles. It starts with troops from the Eighth Route Army (former Red Army and future People's Liberation Army) arguing with a Nationalist unit over possession of a train. The Eighth Route Army man insists they give it up, part of the price for the anti-Japanese alliance. In the same spirit, he insists that they be polite to a female reporter from a conservative Chinese newspaper whose attitudes are often irritating. (And romance later blossoms, as you'd expect in a film.) You see realistic problems of command and combat. The troops are shown as brave but sometimes ignorant: they have only a hazy idea about how aircraft work and refer to a Japanese air base as a 'nest', as if these were magic birds. They also have to figure out if the base can be attacked, and make mistakes which alert the enemy and make the task much harder.It's probably much more like real war than most war films. And is supposed to be based on a real incident. It should have more background – that the Nationalists and Communists had been at war a few years back, and that it was mostly expected that they would fight again if Japan were defeated, as in fact happened.