REVIEWS
THE EIGHT HUNDRED
THE SIX-DAY BATTLE FOR SIHANG WAREHOUSE, COMMEMORATED IN CHINA BUT UNKNOWN IN THE WEST, IS RETOLD IN GORY SPLENDOUR
Director: Hu Guan Released: Out now
Asian war cinema is a rich and under-appreciated genre, with many of its best titles still unseen in Europe. The Eight Hundred, a 2020 release that topped box office records in China despite the Covid-19 pandemic, gathers up all the familiar tropes – duty, sacrifice, and dying for your country – and pushes them through a meat grinder. The plot itself is about a week-long fight over an abandoned warehouse, in which a few hundred Chinese Nationalist troops fought against the Imperial Japanese Army besieging Shanghai in 1937.
Context and dates matter too. The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought from 1937 until 1945, overlapping with WWII, and
