LIU Ye's portrayal of young Mao is romanticised beyond belief, in scenes like the New Year Eve firework. It's generally known that Mao is just as much as womanizer as Jack and Bill, maybe with a little more kinship to Jack in their shared interest in movie stars, rather than to Bill's poor taste.
The selling point of star-gazing is also stretched to the limit. The culminating climax of the movie, the meeting that establishes the Chinese Communist Party, is set in a aesthetically unsurpassed scene: on a boat drifting on an idyllic, serenely misty lake that might have been lifted directly out of the frame of a traditional Chinese painting. What you'll likely remember from this scene is not the rousing sentiments of the men inside the boat cabin, but of beautiful ZHOU Xun (who cares what character she plays) at the front, in elegant period dress holding a parasol, a bewitching goddess of love and loveliness.
Just like "The founding of a republic" (2009), this movie is populated with a proliferation of Who's Who in ethnic Chinese movie world today, to the extent that to the general audience, their names may mean more than the names of the characters they play. The movie is not difficult to follow at least in the sense that events are presented in a linear and chronological manner, compared with the stock of temporally scrambled works we have become so used to. How much is recognized depend on how familiar one is what this part of Chinese history. But when the names (which appear on the screen at the characters' first appearance) are missed or not recognized, one probably surmises that in a movie of this sort, if they are played by the likes of Andy Lau or Daniel Wu, they must be good guys.
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