Operation Red Sea (

2018

)

China is nominally a communist country, and thus according to the old Marxist doctrine, their artwork shouldn’t be subordinated to the pursuit of profit. Operation Red Sea really demonstrates the “nominal” in the “nominal communist country” as it is little more than a shameless rip-off of the massively successful Wolf Warrior 2 (2017). Ok, there are a couple of minor differences; Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) had lone hero Leng Feng rescuing Chinese citizens from a civil war in Africa, while Operation Red Sea has an elite military squad (the Jiaolong, roughly the equivalent of the American Navy SEALs) rescuing Chinese citizens from a civil war in the middle east. Ok, that does sound pretty similar, the closeness of the two films is not helped by the fact that both films begin in the same way, with the hero/heroes thwarting a gang of Somali pirates trying to hijack a ship in the middle of the Red Sea. From there, Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) turns west into Africa and Operation Red Sea sails off to the eastbound for Yewaire.

Obviously, the war-torn nation of Yewaire is supposed to be an analog for the real-world war-torn nation of Yemen. It’s such an obvious ruse, that I have to wonder why director Dante Lam bothers with it unless it has something to do with the way that the film depicts the Yewairian rebel forces as a pack of religious fanatics so cruel and ruthless that they make ISIS look like a gang of schoolyard bullies. At one point, a rebel commander threatens to execute the children of a captive in front of him, if he does not drive a car loaded with explosives into an enemy position (evidently, cinder blocks are scarce in Yewaire). Later, when a rebel fortification is overrun, the rebels try to execute their captured civilians, despite the fact that these deaths will gain them nothing. Indeed, the rebels have an almost obsessive desire to murder civilians, as evidenced by the fact that when they ambush a military convoy escorting civilians out of the war zone, they target the bus carrying the noncombatants first. They even dress like Saturday morning cartoon villains, with the elite rebel troopers wearing black from head to toe, topped off with a black skull mask. Seriously, the last time I saw an army this overtly evil in popular culture they were chanting, “Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!”

I suspect that this is an attempt to make the film’s violence seem grittier and authentic, exposing the audience to the real horrors of war al la Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Black Hawk Down (2001). Indeed, the gore and violence in this film, particularly the violence visited upon sympathetic characters and non-combatants, is absolutely horrific. There’s a scene midway through the film that seemed to have wandered out of a Cat-3 horror movie. However, the goal of exposing the audience to the grim realities of war is doomed from the outset by the film’s flag-waving patriotism and reverence for the PLA. A realistic depiction of any conflict, even the most morally clear-cut, would expose plenty of moral shortcomings on the part of the alleged good guys. We see none of that in Operation Red Sea, from start to finish the Chinese military is either rescuing civilians from murderous hordes or preventing nuclear material from falling into the hands of sadistic terrorists. Indeed, the sanitized depiction of the PLA is so great that they never even disagree on tactics among themselves. There is no scene where a battlefield commander questions the wisdom of the rear echelon, or where an overall commander admonishes a subordinate for excessive bloodlust or cowardice. These are all just professionals doing their job to the best of their abilities. If this movie were American, it would seem like someone directed a modern war movie using the military of 1950s Hollywood. Hell, that’s not even being fair, as films like Paths of Glory (1957) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) managed to sneak their way onto screens even at the height of naïve American patriotism.

All this is not to say that Operation Red Sea is a bad movie, as this is merely the context in which the central drama unfolds. Sure, that context might be pure propaganda but so long as the film’s core is sound it won’t impact it much. Thankfully, the emotional core of Operation Red Sea, the soldiers of the Jiaolong assault team and their relationships with each other, is completely solid. Commanding the unit is Yang Rui, who spends most of the film coping stoically with the burdens of command, and his number 2 Xu Hong, who is coping with the situation rather less stoically and already showing signs of PTSD by the film’s midway point. The squad also contains two machine gunners Tong Li, the unit’s only female member, and Zhang Tiande, a huge man with an almost childlike personality who harbors a secret crush on Tong Li. The squad sniper is crippled in the film’s opening and replaced by a cocky pretty boy, Gu Shun. Gu Shun constantly lectures his spotter, the high-string Li Dong, in the most condescending manner possible, but it’s obvious as the film goes on that he’s developing a grudging respect for his aid. Rounding out the Jiaolong assault team is Lu Chen, the medic and Zhang Yu the signaler. As we’re dealing with a rather large cast here, the characters by necessity have to fairly broadly draw and leaning heavily on archetypes, but the soldier never feels inauthentic. Even the minor characters, like Lu Chen and Zhang Yu are given moments that humanize them. There is no soldier in the whole unit that the viewer isn’t made to care about. The two standouts though are the squad’s machine-gunners Tong Li and Zhang Tiande. Though, at the climax of their joint arch, the film does descend into clumsy sentimentalism.

With 8 soldiers in the unit, all sporting identical fatigues/haircuts and spending most of the film locked in frenetic action sequences, it would be easy to get confused about just who is doing what. It’s no small achievement on the part of the actors, the script, and the fight choreography than that I could almost always tell which character was doing what and why. Case in point, before the largest action sequence in the film, the soldiers even pour over a hand-drawn map, come up with a plan of attack, and parcel out roles to each squad member before leaping into the fray. It serves the double purpose of making the initial action coherent and then heightening the tension when the plan falls apart halfway through, and the squad is forced to improvise. It’s a move straight out of Seven Samurai (1954), which is always a good place for an action film to look for inspiration. I’m no expert in modern military tactics (I'm barely even competent in ancient military tactics, and I actually studied that), but to my uninformed eye Operation Red Sea seems to be doing a very good job of making the action believable. Mostly it’s small things, the way that Yang Rui checks his corners whenever he enters a room, even when there are no terrorists hiding there, or the way that Tong Li takes cover and draws her knife when she runs out of ammo. The opening credits cite a great deal of cooperation from PLA experts, who I expect were hard at work making sure that these little details checked out.

If Operation Red Sea has a flaw, it’s that it goes on for too long. Two and half hours is a long stretch for any movie, but it’s not like it’s unheard of for war movies to last that long. Indeed, it’s now downright common for modern Western action movies to stretch out to two or three hours. The difference is that Western action movies are a great deal more padded than the average Chinese action film, having roughly half their run-time devoted to talking. Just take a look at The Avengers (2012) or Transformers (2007) for good and bad examples of this phenomenon. Operation Red Sea just jumps from one set piece to another, with barely a moment of calm in-between the violence. Honestly, it’s masterfully done and never boring, but by the end, even the most engaged viewer is probably feeling a bit exhausted. This is compounded by the fact that the film’s penultimate action scene, where the 8-man Jiaolong assault squad takes on 150 terrorists in a protracted rescue mission is the longest, most thrilling, and most emotionally impactful sequence in the entire film. It’s the perfect fit for the climactic scene, but then the movie keeps going, sprinting the surviving PLA soldiers off to stop the terrorists from getting their hands on a plane full of yellowcake. The whole sequence feels tacked on and serves only to lessen the impact of the more fitting climax.

There is no recent Western action film (perhaps Acts of Valor (2012), though I haven’t seen that one) that is comparable to Operation Red Sea. We just don’t make realistic military propaganda films anymore, and looking at the films that are given such a label (Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Hurt Locker (2008), American Sniper (2014), etc.) the gulf between American and Chinese military films becomes obvious. No, it’s Western war games, like the Call of Duty franchise, that has the most in common with Operation Red Sea. Indeed, at times Operation Red Sea seems to be structured more like a video game than a movie. There is, for instance, no narrative reason to transition from an infantry battle to a tank chase sequence, but in a video game, it would make perfect sense, as you would want to squeeze in a vehicle level before the end. Just like the Call of Duty games, Operation Red Sea is eager to showcase a wide variety of military technology in one and only one instance each, from the flight-suits to the condensation rounds (no idea if this is the correct term). It goes some way towards explaining why, after walking out of Operation Red Sea, I had the strong urge to revisit some old First Person Shooters.