Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Rizza Kho I disagree with one previous comment made for this movie saying it is a nightmare. Surely that is a comment of an ignorant, Hollywood movie junkie who does not understand biographic movies with a bit of dramatic touch to it. The director's effort to make the movie a bit dramatic is enough for a typical Hollywood movie junkie to understand that the director is trying to give you guys a vivid description of sun bin's life and sufferings. Naked, not sugar-coated reality, is the difference of oriental movies from typical sugar-coated Hollywood ones. If you are the type of person who is not into logical, non-fiction, oriental movies and you are always after happy endings (boring), this movie is not for you. Clearly, it's not for the teeny little brain of the other guy there who commented "it's a nightmare". Anyway, overall good movie. There are missed-out parts like the face branding etc and the additional dramatic suicide of sun bin but yep, it's there for the little-brained ones like that "nightmare" guy who needs his Hollywood fix.

modmax A lot of epic movies has been made in China in the last years, some good and some forgettable. This one falls into the second category. The story is about a strategist disputed between two Chinese kingdoms. Although intelligent, he is very naive. In one reign he falls in love with a girl, general of the army and destined to marry the emperor, in the other he is betrayed and imprisoned by his old friend, also a military strategist and in love with the same girl too. He succeeds to escape and lead the first reign to victory, but in the end he will kill himself. The movie seems to have been done in a hurry, sometimes things happen too fast and you feel like you're missing something in the plot. There's a lot of computer effects but they're not so good. The fighting scenes are intended to be epic but they often result confused and so not exciting. It's not a good movie, but not the worst of its kind. There's a plenty of better Chinese movies, so it remains a mystery why it was distributed in the West. Anyway, if you like the genre, you can take a look: surely you'll forget it soon after.

dbborroughs Epic story of two military strategists both in love with the same woman.Its an epic action/romance filled with lots of crashing armies, tons of computer generated images, freeze frame action sequences and a sense that that it was done on the cheap by TV people. I could be wrong of course simply because it just may have been done cheaply, but the feel seems to match TV drama at times.The action sequences seem wildly scaled down despite being massively huge with the result that they are epic to look at but not particularly exciting (I won't go into the dullest chariot race I've ever seen with the chariots moving at different speeds in different shots) The other problem I have is that the film seems to be larger than the confines of the story. There were times when I had the sense that I was missing something.Its not a bad film, but with all of the epic films coming from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan I'm forced to wonder how this film was chosen to get a release in the US- on the same day as its release in Asia

rightwingisevil OMG, what a terrible movie! I rarely found a Chinese movie so disgusting! The screen writer(s) should be sentenced to a life ban from writing any more screenplays, the director of this movie should also be banned from directing any new movie! Two of the major characters who played the pupils of the military strategy master are perhaps the worst mis-casting jobs ever done any existing casting agency. The dialog, OMG, is one of the worst and the most ridiculous dialogs ever written by a screenplay writer. I have noticed that this movie would be singled out in this year's Cannes Movie Festival to be reviewed. What a shame that Chinese would have picked such a lousy movie to participate this important movie festival, definitely an insult to both of the French and the Chinese. This is the movie that viewers/audiences should walk out of the viewing theater and to have a more meaningful and productive lives. Don's waste one minute or even one second on this horrible movie. I have walked out of the theater urged by my wife when we visited China recently. It's a nightmare!