Please save your time and energy by avoiding this movie. This movie tried to be this heroic and exciting war movie. But the visual effect and sound mixing suck. For the most part, all you can hear is bombs going off randomly, but the sound mixing was so bad that you could hear anything other than loud noises. The visual effects look like they are a screen recording of Call of Duty, despite this being China's most expensive film yet. Wandering Earth was way better and had better VFX. American soldiers are portrayed as the typical "white, brutal, and racist" people, which is very racist for any filmmaker to do. The way different situations played out in this movie was ridiculous.

Seeing all the one star English ratings here. I honestly doubt they actually watched the movie in China at all since it ranks at least 5 stars just for the action scenes alone. I watched it more out of curiosity and to me, it was surprisingly a decent movie. Note that both koreas back then were dictatorships and the obvious reason why America sided with south Korea was because of fight between socialism/communism vs capitalism.

This movie was designed for a socialist audience obviously. For Chinese, they know about the Americans intervening in a domestic civil war and then invading and occupying North Korea. And bombing the country heavily and wiping out approx third of NK population and bombing civillians indiscriminately. From their pov, they were helping their north Korean comrades to fight back and to also prevent the western capitalists to move on next into China. So this film is set from their perspective that those men were heroes which would not resonate well if you're someone who is very right wing and hate communism.

Nonetheless politics aside, the film is not supposed to be as close to real bitter war life film but the theme is much more about comradary between soldiers and beating the odds and hardship. Men freezing in their foxholes and working together to move forward against the enemy. On that regard, it's actually a very well made film with lots of interesting and gripping war scenes. The CGI could be improved but the action and the raw emotions in the film, def did impress me. The film is definitely meant more for a patriotic Chinese audience politically speaking, I actually enjoyed it more than I should but I am not a very political person. I wouldn't recommend the movie to right wing Trump fans. It will make your blood boil lol.

All those 1-star review bombs are exposing the current climate of McCarthyist sinophobic hysteria in the west pretty accurately.

For anyone not suffering from McCarthyist hysteria, this is a decent movie with well-crafted, tense, and dramatic action scenes. It also does it's job of illustrating the theme of ordinary people being capable of extraordinary heroics feats and self-sacrifice when under existential threat.

Also, a good choice to feature Mao Anying's participation and death in the narrative. It showcases that the social class he was born in as Mao Zedong's son mattered nothing, because death is equal to all when fighting a war.

Less well done were the scenes of the American side. The directors and script writers did provide at least a couple of scenes of American soldiers talking about home life, and I thought this was a good choice to provide the American side with some humanity. But the actors were really chewing the scenery here, especially in their line delivery, which was unfortunate. I think, however, that this can mainly be attributed to the fact that these actors are far from being A-listers. Unfortunately, China still has not build up a decent pool of ethnically non-Asian quality actors, so I foresee more of this happening in the future.

Now a bit of historical context here on China's motives for partaking in this war: A few decades before the Korean War, China had been brutally invaded by imperial Japan through the Korean peninsula, which started off the theater of WW2 in the Far East. Given that this history was still fresh in the minds of the Chinese at the time, China was very sensitive to any happenings on the Korean peninsula. For that reason, they warned the American side multiple times not to cross the 38th parallel or they would force China's hand. The Americans thought the Chinese were bluffing and crossed that line anyway. This (and the American fleets that had gone to the Taiwan Straits in the summer of 1950) convinced the Chinese that the USA would try to invade and colonize China after taking control of the Korean peninsula. To preemptively stop this threat, China decided to set up the People's Volunteer Army to defend against the existential threat.