everything you have heard about this movie is true.

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

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Pardon for my English, I don't speak English as my first language. But anyway, any film that Chinese made about war is always propaganda or not liked most by Westerners. But Westerners made film that described Asian as weak is OK and widely acceptable. Reason is simple, for westerner Asian film is always wrong but westerner film is always right. This film is not targeted for western audience anyway. The film is merely to tell people about the history in the past which no one aware of. China has so much history that the world doesn't know about it. Media is the only way to tell of those history as most people share the most common sense "laziness to read"

This movie is a nationalistic propaganda loved by China, because it is about Taiwan.The island of Taiwan was taken by Dutch, taking advantage of the corrupted and collapsing Ming Dynasty, which soon collapsed under Manchu attack. The protagonist, Cheng-Gong Zheng, a loyal subject of Ming Dynasty wanted to use Taiwan as base to restore the Ming dynasty in China, so he fought with Dutch and took back Taiwan, and since the 2000 presidential election of Taiwan resulted in putting the pro-independent candidates into presidential office, this propaganda served China well in advocating the unification of Taiwan, and that's why Chinese government had its full support to Hong Kongers who made this movie.