RED CLIFF : INTERNATIONAL VERSION VS ASIAN VERSION

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I had the chance yesterday to attend a press screening of the international version of Red Cliff, which will be released in the French theaters on March 25 th, 2009. The whole movie was in Mandarin like the Asian version, but there was also an English voice-over in the beginning, to introduce the story (just for a couple of minutes hopefully).

Here are some of the most obvious differences that I remember between the international version and the Asian version (don’t read if you didn’t see the movie, because there are spoilers)

*Concerning the character of Sun Shangxiang (played by Zhao Wei)

She’s still going undercover in Cao Cao’s camp, but never get caught. All the parts about her friendship with a young soldier from Cao Cao’s army (played by Tong Dawei) were cut. So at the end of the movie, when she cries in front of a dead body, and Zhou You (Tony leung) watch them and says that nobody won the battle, the effect of his sentence is less powerful, because we don’t know that this dead man was her friend.Also, the intense relationship between Sun Shangxiang and her brother Sun Quan (Chang Chen) has almost completely dissapeared. So when she comes back from Cao Cao’s camp, the scene where she’s taking her clothes off to show the map, is shorter and has a completely different tone (they cut the part when her brother put some clothes on her and apologies).  From dramatic and emotional, it becomes just fancy and amusing.

They also cut the hunting “eyes of the tiger” scene with Sun Quan. So at the end, It’s not obvious to understand why there are some roaring tiger sound effects whenSun Quan is chasing Cao Cao like a hunter...

*Concerning the characters Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) and Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro)

In my opinion, the most disappointing change concerns the nature of the relationship between those two characters. In the Asian version, Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang appreciate each other, but they also often challenge and tease each other. So they’re not really friends, but a bit like rivals. They even put their lives in danger just to prove their points.But in the international version, there is no more tension between them. Once they played music together, they become friends and that’s it. Because of that, a lot of suspensul elements of the Asian version just dissapear (no more suspense for the “100 000 arrows” scene for example, no more suspense for the “wind scene” etc...).  

Of course, there are more differences, but less important I think. I didn’t took any notes during the screening because I tried to appreciate it without comparing or thinking about the 2-part 4h40 Asian version that I saw before. And it worked, most of the time. This 2h25 version of Red Cliff is still a great movie. The emotion is still there. The storytelling is more fluid  and the characters are presented in a very clear way (It’s very easy to identify who’s who) + you don’t  need to know anything about the historical background to understand the story.

Like for Shaolin Soccer (also distributed in France by Metropolitan Filmexport), maybe we’ll have the chance in France to have the two versions – Asian and International – together when it’ll be released in DVD later...

Frédéric Ambroisine (March 13 th, 2009)