War brings out the worst in people. And sometimes the best.
Dongji Rescue
After opening in Asia earlier this month, the film expands to select North American theaters on Friday, August 22, via Well Go USA Entertainment. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.
Because tragic true stories always need a little something else to become truly epic cinematic adventures -- just ask James Cameron about Titanic -- the filmmakers behind Dongji Rescue no doubt felt emboldened to embellish the historical account.
Directed by Guan Hu, a veteran filmmaker whose credits over the past 30 years include the impressive historical drama The Eight Hundred, and Zhenxiang Fei, an actor turned director who has been helming episodic television shows for the past several years, Dongji Rescue is based on events that transpired in October 1942. A Japanese ship (Lisbon Maru), transporting 1,800 British POWs from Hong Kong to Japan, was torpedoed by a U.S. ship off the coast of China, near the Dongji islands.
Captured by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1939, Dongji residents, numbering less than 300, were held prisoner, their boats locked up, and subjugated by the few Japanese soldiers who were stationed on the island. In 1942, they would risk the fury of the Japanese Army by seeking to help the British POWs, who were locked inside the sinking ship and expected to die and/or be shot by the Japanese Army when trying to escape their fate.
None of that is a spoiler; the trailers below include multiple scenes that advertise what happens. Nonetheless, the trailers also reveal the scale and scope of the film, as well as the stakes for those involved.
Dongji Rescue goes to great lengths in order to establish the cruelty of the Imperial Japanese Army. They treat the meek and mild islanders with savage brutality, which the islanders endure stoically, simmering with anger.
Except, that is, for two brothers and a similar-aged woman, all raised by a village elder who rescued the two brothers at a very early age from the sea -- their origins never known -- and treated all of them as family members, even though the brothers were banished to the other side of the island by the superstitious islanders, who thought they were born to be pirates, based solely on their tattoos. (This is never really explained, just accepted by everybody.)
The brothers, capably played by Zhu Yilong and Wu Lei, and the young woman, effectively portrayed by Ni Ni, are the true heroes of the narrative, demonstrating a vigorously independent spirit that ultimately leads them to spearhead the rescue.
The production is quite impressive in its historical recreations of the fishing vessel and the doomed ship. Sometimes that is needlessly undercut by an abundance of slow-motion shots and syrupy musical that seeks to add to the melodrama. And the film's insistence on hammering home its overriding message is more than a bit overdone.
Even so, this is a sobering story that is told with great craft, along with an equal amount of respect and admiration for the sheer bravery of all involved. In times of war, you can always count on Chinese fishermen to willingly perform acts of selfless heroism.