The international trailer for John Woo's Red Cliff hit the web last week, and it's... interesting. View it here. It's definitely not the kind of movie you've come to expect from John Woo, who hasn't done a period martial arts movie in over 30 years. The movie's a big, bulging costume epic starring Tony Leung and bunch of other dudes with swords, and based on the legendary Battle of Red Cliff, in which a force of fifty thousand defeated an army of nearly one million.
Frankly, I sort of see this movie as John Woo's last grasp at greatness. Let's face it—with a growing resume of stinkers like Mission: Impossible, Windtalkers and Paycheck, he hasn't really made anything even close to Hard Boiled in a really long time. Red Cliff could be the comeback we've been waiting for. I'm actually kind tired of the genre, which got jumpstarted by Crouching Tiger, but it seems like people just get can't enough of these big, swooping Chinese costume epics. And I'll admit, this doesn't look half bad.
True to John Woo's signature style, expect to see lots of slow motion shots, and maybe a random dove or two. Hell, maybe we'll see Chow Yun Fat making a cameo, jumping through the air with two guns with two guns blazing.