#longge

This director made The Battle at Lake Changjin| 长津湖 (2021) before and it was much more tolerable on the ✨Message✨ it also made some attempt to show the human side of the war.

Here I think someone got to the script because from what I could discern, the story was meant to be centered on the family - Li Moyan, the father and the commander of the unit that the movie follows, Li Xiang, his son who is a soldier and Li Xiao, the daughter that ends up in the diplomatic party, going to the US to argue the Chinese cause. The traces are there, but they do not come together at all.

The characters of Li Xiang and Li Xiao are absolutely absent from the narrative, they only exist in Li Moyan's words when he tells his comrades that he has a daughter and an estranged son. Li Xiao appears at the very end, for two scenes together and doesn't bring much to the story aside from crying about the words of the Chinese representative and explaining to Madame Tang (Zhang Ziyi!!!) that she has a father she loves and who has the other key to her home. Li Xiang appears only in the post credits scene that I screenshoted above.

What is left in the movie? Well. Death, explosions, dramatic singing of the national anthem, Good Leader Mao crying for his people and pretty much everything that comes to your mind when you think 'heavy-handed national propaganda'. A lot of emphasis is put on the character's ages - you are meant to realise that the soldiers are young, mostly between 18 and 30. Mao's son who tragically dies is 28, a very important thing for everyone around.

That's why I believe Longge was ultimately dropped from the movie - he is too old, simply. Doesn't fit the image the movie wants to sell but they couldn't exactly cut him out entirely, since he was one of the promoting factors.

So they slapped the montage at the very end, right after the first credits, to appease people who watched it only for Longge, that is my theory.