If I gained anything from watching Lu Chuan’s Nanking! Nanking!, I learned what self-indulgent was, and how distasteful it could be. It has got to be one of the most dreadful movies I have seen, in spite of a couple sequences that were close to inspiring, but not quite. Those sequences include a montage of massacre, where the preparation of the killings are cut together first, followed by the intercut of the different scenes of butchering.
What I was most offended by the film is the lack of compassion and humanity the filmmaker showed. How do we sympathize with the victims of the massacre? To show that they are not just faces, but fleshed out human beings. So we could relate to them, care for them, or even like them before anything terrible happen to them. But the first thirty minutes of the movie was just reenactments of the killings, in which all the Chinese people are just faces, and we see them fall on the ground as if they were ants. We know the history, and we don't need them to recreate the scenes in such details. On the other hand, we need to know the details of the victims' lives. We need to know their likes and dislikes, their personalities, their habits, so we know that they are not just another creature to be eliminated, but human beings.
Most of the movie was shot hand-held, and it proved me that handheld shots are not a sure-cure for melodrama. The discrepancy in the style is evident - the camera technique doesn’t match other aspects of the directing. The acting is stilted, and the pacing excruciatingly slow at times.
The film doesn’t have a main character. It focuses on a few people: a soldier of the Nationalist army, John Rabe's interpreter, a woman who works in Rabe's factory to protect Chinese people, and a Japanese soldier sympathetic towards Chinese people. Because the movie never truly focuses on any of these characters, the structure seems fragmental and hard to follow.
A movie has to, first and foremost, tell a story. Second, a movie should have interesting, believable, and ideally sympathetic or likable characters. Third, it should have an emotional impact on the audience. Fourth and the last, if a movie has a message/meaning, it’s a nice thing. This is the order of priorities in making a film. These priorities should never be taken out of order. Nanking! Nanking! violated the order and put the meaning/style/message before everything else. It doesn’t have a clear story, or a strong character, therefore, it doesn’t have the emotional impact, and the message it tries to get across doesn’t resonate with the viewer.
