The Warlords (2007)
The Warlords (Chinese: 投名狀), previously known as The Blood Brothers, is a 2007 epic action war drama film directed by Peter Chan and starring Jet Li, Andy Lau, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Xu Jinglei. The film was released on 13 December 2007 simultaneously in most of Asia, except Japan. The film is set in the 1860s, during the Taiping Rebellion in the late Qing Dynasty in China and centers on the sworn brotherhood of three men.
Plot.
The film is set in China in the 1860s, during the Taiping Rebellion. It is based on the assassination of Ma Xinyi in 1870. In the beginning, there is a battle between loyalists and rebels, during which all of the loyalists, abandoned by the forces of a rival loyalist commander, are killed except Qingyun, the general. Qingyun goes to a village nearby where the inhabitants, led by two men, Erhu and Wuyang, engage in banditry. He offers his assistance in executing a raid against a rebel convoy, which is successful. However, a loyalist army assaults the village shortly afterward and seizes the spoils for themselves. Around this time, Qingyun begins an affair with Erhu’s wife Liansheng. Since the villagers are poor and starving, Qingyun convinces them to fight against the rebels as an independent loyalist war-band in order to pillage rebel loot and supplies for themselves. Erhu and Wuyang are distrustful of Qingyun, so the three of them perform a blood oath where, under the pain of death, they promise to care for each other like brothers. The war-band wins a series of victories with Qingyun maintaining order by force. He executes two young soldiers after finding out that they have raped women on the battlefield.
Erhu attempts to kill the enemy commander by sneaking into the city in disguise. From what he can observe, the city is also nearly out of provisions. He is quickly captured, but to his surprise, the enemy commander was already planning on surrendering, and allows Erhu to kill him; in exchange he asks Erhu to promise to spare his troops’ lives (who he claims number 4,000 men) and the lives of the civilians under his control. However, having only obtained 10 days’ worth of provisions from a rival commander, Qingyun refuses to honor the deal due to the lack of food and manpower to maintain so many prisoners. A brief dispute ensues, after which Qingyun temporarily detains Erhu to keep him from interfering. The prisoners are locked in the palace courtyard and massacred with arrows from atop the walls.
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Production.
The film was originally titled The Blood Brothers (simplified Chinese: 刺马; traditional Chinese: 刺馬). Director Peter Chan said it was influenced by the late Chang Cheh’s 1973 film The Blood Brothers, which is itself based on a famous high profile assassination of a local governor in 1870, but denied that it is a remake. He also decided to change the title to The Warlords in order to avoid confusion. (Note that there is another Chinese film with the English title Blood Brothers released in mid-2007.) When asked why he chose to move away from his familiar turf of romance films, Chan said that The Warlords is actually not a martial arts film at its heart, though it contains elements of the martial arts. He added that he had made a wish to make a film depicting men’s affections after watching John Woo’s 1986 film A Better Tomorrow over twenty years ago, and has now finally gotten the chance. His goal is thus to “lead [his] audience to reclaim [the same kind of passion]” as in A Better Tomorrow, which he said is lacking in recent films. Shooting began in early December 2006 in Beijing. Many outdoor scenes were shot in Beijing, Shanghai and the town of Hengdian in Zhejiang province.