#du jiang

Du Jiang in the few roles that I’ve been able to see him in.

Operation Red Sea

The Captain

The Bravest

All three make me cry.  They’re such great movies and I’m glad to have been introduced to them!  His characters always have this kind of strength that is both powerful and yet warm.  I saw him first in “Operation Red Sea” and just fell in love with him the moment his character tried to help rescue a suicide bomber who had been forced into being one to save the lives of his family.  In “The Captain” he played a second captain aboard the nearly doomed Sichuan flight.  HIs character was charismatic and he smiled a fair bit in the movie so that made me happy, aha.  Now, “The Bravest” is a movie that has a lot of mixed reviews on and I am leaning towards the ones who liked it for what it was.  Was it unbelievable a lot, yeah.  But the characters kept me into it.  The scene where they were leaving last messages for their family on the cellphone before he threw it over to safety so their last messages would be heard got me sobbing.  They were all in tears and then so was he and I was already there.  Yeah sure the scene where they all linked arms to defend this chemical tank from the fire would seem really stupid as the fire would not be slowed down by waterless firefighters at all, so them linking arms and yelling at it might seem weird.  However if you think about it in terms of the context, it actually seems about right.

“Operation Red Sea” is one of those Chinese movies that you shouldn’t just casually watch, I guess??  Because you know how there is a censorship of every movie and drama that gets published and it having to go through this process often delays things from airing for several years?  So, I had come to accept and honestly love the fact that Chinese movies and dramas aren’t overly gory like western media (or Japanese) and after seeing a military comedy from the Philippines, I felt comfortable with this Chinese movie.  

I think it was about ten minutes into the movie that I realized that I had found one of the most graphic military movies that China has and it was allowed to be so, as my Chinese friend told me, because it was based on a true story, so they allowed it to be gory.  Plus it had the support of both the government and the military.  It was in all honesty a great movie.  It wasn’t dull with unnecessary drama.  It flowed like “Black Hawk Down” and yeah, there are at least three scenes from this movie that I’m never going to get out of my head.

What’s funny is that at the time I was trying to slowly get back into watching military movies and general action/adventure movies.  I had been pushed away from them due to anxiety issues that made it almost physically impossible to watch movies that I was very familiar with as they would cause me so much stress that I would get physically ill.  Needless to say this movie both helped and hindered my progress.  I can do pretty well with movies now, but it is very very obvious that I will never be able to watch horror movies again and same thing with disaster films.

THE CAPTAIN (2019) ★★★✮☆