When a movie lets you actually see it, the beauty can sweep you right off your feet. That is the first thing that struck me about Dongji Rescue. It is a lavish war spectacle that is often gorgeous to look at and then sometimes so dim that you end up squinting at the screen and wondering if your settings are messed up. When the light hits, it has the lush glow of a painting. When it does not, well, it feels like stumbling around a room with the lights off. Even with that quirk, the film has the muscular confidence and grand sweep of a national epic. It wants to declare itself and it does not whisper.
The story roots itself in a real and harrowing episode from 1942. A Japanese cargo ship called the Lisbon Maru was transporting British prisoners of war when a United States submarine torpedoed it in the East China Sea. The vessel did not go down right away. It took almost a day to finally sink. Over the hours that followed, a group of Chinese fishermen from the nearby Dongji Island rushed out in their small boats and pulled hundreds of exhausted and terrified men out of the water. That kernel of history is already a powerful tale of peril and mercy. This movie reaches for that truth and then builds a huge tower of drama and action around it.
Since this is a Chinese production, the camera stays close to the islanders and their lives under a military occupation. That choice grounds the movie. The village itself becomes the heart of the tale. Families scraping by. Boats bobbing at the docks. Sea air and salt on the skin. There is a feeling that these people learned to live inside pressure and danger. The script then threads a more personal thread through the historical canvas. An English medic, played with quiet clarity by William Franklyn Miller, slips free of the wreck and washes up into the hands of a generous fisherman named Ah Dang. Wu Lei plays him with a gentle stubbornness that fits. He is the kind of young man who does the right thing even when it makes his life harder. His older brother Ah Bi does not greet the situation with open arms. Zhu Yilong gives him a prickly wariness. He has lived long enough to know that kindness can be costly. The brothers butt heads. They both want to keep their people safe. They just disagree about how to do it.
This friction is the first spark that the rest of the movie ignites into a fire. The English medic is not a symbol. He becomes a person to the islanders. Helping him forces them to choose sides with their actions. The occupying soldiers are never far away. Their power sits like a boot on the throat of the community. It is the sort of setup that war movies have used for decades. The film understands that and leans into it with big emotions and bigger set pieces.
Zhu Yilong and Wu Lei carry a lot of the film on their shoulders and backs and lungs. The movie asks them to become folk heroes without capes. The two of them dive into the sea, disappear for long stretches, and pop up where the trouble is worst. They hold their breath so long that you might find yourself checking your own. They move like sharks when they want to, then stand as still as statues when a look can cut deeper than a knife. There is some swagger to the performances. It is a show. At the same time, it feels designed to celebrate the stubborn grit of people who live by and under the water. These guys are not soldiers, at least not at first. The movie lets them become exactly that.
You can feel the budget on the screen. The producers did not skimp. Shot with IMAX cameras and stacked with detailed period props, the picture has expensive muscle. Waves look heavy. Boats look battered by years of work. The island looks like a place you can taste, the green of the hills and the white of the foam. A lot of extras flood the frame during the bigger moments. The directors, Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang, know how to marshal a crowd. They love a wide shot that captures dozens of moving parts at once. There are marches through streets, gatherings on beaches, and frantic scrambles on ship decks. It has the organized chaos that only a very controlled set can produce.
The best stretch might be the final rescue sequence. I do not mean best in terms of moral comfort. It is best in craft. The movie builds to a raging storm of water and metal and sheer will. Fishermen who have nothing but their boats and courage throw themselves into a whirl of bullets and waves to find survivors among the wreckage. Ni Ni, as Ah Hung, is the pulse of that whole push. She leads with her voice and with her hands. There is a sense of calling. Not just personal, but communal. The wind roars. The water hits the lens. It is all very loud and very clear. You can track where people are. You can feel the desperation and fury. You can admire how the shots lock together to make a flowing experience out of a thousand little pieces. It really is a sight.
Not every sequence gets the same visual clarity. There are night scenes where the image sinks into itself. The mid film rescue that takes place in the murk of a ship is particularly hard on the eyes. I tried to adjust my screen, then stopped, then tried again. Maybe my screener was off. Maybe that was the intention. I found myself wanting a little more detail in the shadows. Sometimes I think this darkness is a creative choice, meant to put us inside the fear and blindness the characters feel. Other times I wonder if the movie is echoing a trend we have seen in many big studio pictures, where everything gets moodier and murkier and then somebody calls it realism. Whatever the reason, the dim look cuts into the tension because it is harder to read where everyone is and what they are doing. The daylight and storm scenes, by comparison, are crisp and often breathtaking.
There is also a major pivot in tone that you will either ride with or resist. The film starts like a saga of ordinary folk doing something extraordinary in the face of tyranny. It uses familiar notes and shapes. That is not a complaint. Familiar can still be powerful when it is done well. About halfway in, though, the movie sharpens its edges and leans into rage. Suddenly the rhythm changes. The violence becomes more intimate and more blunt. The camera does not flinch when knives find a target. You can hear it. The sound design wants you to hear it. The brutality is not extended into gore for shock value, but the intention is clear. The antagonists are painted in broad strokes as vicious or cowardly, and the story promises that this cruelty will not go unanswered.
This move will remind some viewers of the kind of war cinema associated with Mel Gibson, where suffering becomes the fuel for a blast of retribution and martyrdom. Dongji Rescue borrows a few pages from that playbook. Not quietly either. The second half wants to make you clench your jaw. The crowd in the theater will cheer and wince at the same time. It taps into something primal and not especially complicated. In a movie like this, nuance takes a back seat to catharsis. That is a choice. Whether it is the right one is going to come down to your appetite for this style of storytelling.
Any film that engages with the Second World War and national memory is going to carry a burden of representation. This one does not pretend to wear that lightly. It is a grand mural of sacrifice and courage, with the colors turned up. The idea is simple. The islanders fought bravely and with honor. They saved strangers at great risk. Their bravery deserves the biggest possible stage. The movie accepts that thesis and then shapes everything to serve it. Other countries do this with their own stories. This is that same impulse from a different vantage point. It creates a sense of collective pride, and it also can slide into a bold and very direct patriotism that some will call jingoism. The truth is both can be true at once. The people on Dongji Island did something brave. The film that celebrates them also flexes as a statement of what national cinema can do when it wants to speak loudly.
There are quieter pleasures in the film that I do not want to overlook. The way the camera visits small details and lets them hang in your mind. A rope coiled on a deck. A knife blade catching the afternoon sun. Fish laid out on a table while a family listens for footsteps outside. There are lovely wides of the island that make it look almost too beautiful to be a war zone. That is not a knock. The contrast makes the violence feel more obscene. Paradise is not a safe word in this story. The directors use that a lot. One moment you think you could vacation there. The next moment every palm tree looks like a place to hide a gun.
The performances, across the board, serve the tempo of the film. Zhu Yilong is terrific at communicating weariness without dullness. He is always thinking, weighing risk, and still he cannot help but step forward. Wu Lei brings a protective tenderness to Ah Dang. He does not turn him into a saint. He turns him into a stubborn brother and a rescuer who does not want a medal. Ni Ni gets to throw off every trace of fragility and play a leader who lives inside the storm. William Franklyn Miller is quiet in a way that keeps the focus on the islanders while still giving us a window into the terror and relief of a man who has literally washed into a different world.
As a piece of action cinema, the movie has a robust engine. The set pieces build. The editing does not shred the images into confetti. You can follow fists and bodies in space. You know where the boats are, where the guns are pointing, and where the next wave will hit. The score swells a bit too often for my taste, but it never drowns out the elemental sound of wind and water, which does more storytelling than a dozen violins can manage. There are a few moments where the movie nudges the audience too hard to feel a certain way, but that is part of its DNA. It would rather be obvious than coy.
I kept circling back to the lighting. Maybe because I have grown weary of the current trend of dim action where you can barely make out faces. This movie is not unwatchable at night by any means, but it does flirt with that frustration. Perhaps the directors wanted us to carry that frustration. Perhaps they wanted the audience to feel helpless and boxed in and to fight for each glimmer of hope the same way the characters do. I can respect that idea in theory. In practice I think it holds the movie back in places where it should soar. When the light returns, the film breathes. You can almost hear the sigh of relief from the screen.
There is a wry humor hidden under all the muscle and anger. Not jokes exactly. More like a shared look or a shrug that says we do this because we must, not because we are heroes. That is the tone that keeps the movie from turning into a sermon. It is melodrama at times, but it is not self important. It is more like an old tale told around a fire that somebody finally had the money to put on a giant screen.
And the giant screen does matter here. If you can find a theater with a bright projector and a sound system that can handle the thunder without muddling the dialogue, you will get the best of what this film can be. The ocean will feel like it is in the room with you. The ships will creak. The storm will make your seat vibrate a little. The scale is the point, not an accessory. The directors meet the challenge that the format sets.
All of this leads to the bigger point the movie seems to be making about who gets to tell stories like this and how loudly they get to tell them. For a long time, the biggest World War II movies most people saw came from the same few countries. The style of heroism, the version of history, the types of bravado on display, those were all shaped by that limited pipeline. Dongji Rescue looks at that model and says we can do that too. We can spend a mountain of money. We can hire a small army of extras. We can make the ocean itself a character. We can make a movie about our own people and our own memory and present it with world beating spectacle. It is not a shy statement. It does not pretend to be.
Some viewers will bristle at the broad strokes and the easy villains. Others will stand and clap because they felt seen and because the action delivers a rush. Many will feel both at once. I did, to be honest. I winced at the gleeful brutality even as I felt the intended satisfaction when bullies were knocked off their perch. I felt some cynicism at the dim twilight look and also a thrill when the sun came up and the island bristled with movement. I rolled my eyes at a couple of speeches. I also teared up at the sight of small boats shoving into big waves to drag strangers from death. That is life with movies like this. They kick you in the shins and then pick you up and tell you why they did it.
There is also a funny little mirror here. People in the West love to wag a finger at cinema from elsewhere when it gets loud about its own virtues. Then we remember we once let Michael Bay take a run at Pearl Harbor and we quiet down. Every country has its myths and its favorite ways to depict them. Every industry has its love of bigness for its own sake. This picture is very much of that tradition and also very much its own thing because it comes from a specific place with a specific history and an unashamedly local pride.
By the time the credits roll, Dongji Rescue has done what it set out to do. It has argued with force and a big voice that heroism can live in small places and that the memory of that heroism deserves a colossal canvas. It has offered beauty and bombast in equal measure. It has stumbled a bit in the dark and then righted itself in the thunder and spray. It has given its actors room to become folk legends without pretending that there is anything simple about staying alive during a war. It has honored a story that might otherwise sit quietly in a book somewhere and never get the rumble and echo of a packed theater.
If you go in expecting elegance and restraint, you will not get it. If you go in craving a pounding heart and a proud heart at the same time, you will. That is not a small thing. The ocean is large enough to hold many kinds of ships. This one sails with its sails full and its flag high, and it does not apologize for the wake it leaves behind.
