Years before he became Mainland China’s most popular commercial movie director, largely on the back of black comedies like Be There or Be Square (1998) and Sorry, Baby (1999), Feng Xiaogang served for eight years in his country’s military. While his experience in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s art troupe undoubtedly differed quite a bit from the fighting soldiers in his latest – and probably largest scale – work, it would seem that he came away from it with a respect for individual soldiers and the battles they wage both in peace and war for what they perceive to be the greater good.

An over two-hour long film based on the true story of a war veteran who died, at the age of 71, in 1987, Assembly is divided into two parts thematically. The first very bloody section begins in Northeast China, in the winter of 1948, where the communist forces’ Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) and his men are waging a fierce battle against the better-equipped – but ultimately defeated – Koumintang (KMT) forces. After he survives an ambush by the enemy that leaves 71 of his originally 117-strong Ninth Company dead, Captain Gu gets into trouble with his superiors for having ordered his men to shoot a KMT soldier in cold blood and allowed them to take some of the prisoners of wars’ clothing for themselves.

Ordered to be locked up for a few days as punishment, Gu quickly befriends Wang Jincun (Yuan Wenkang), who is temporarily incarcerated in a barn with him, and effectively seals the sensitive former village teacher’s fate by making him his political officer to replace the one killed by the KMT. And for all of his comrade-turned-superior officer, Liu Zeshui (Hu Jun), assuring him otherwise, it’s hard not to see it as further and even worse punishment when Gu and his remaining men are ordered on a well-nigh impossible ‘special’ mission and told that, even when down to the last man, they are not to retreat from their assigned advance position unless they hear the assembly bugle call.

Assembly’s second half begins two months after the waging of the Ninth Company’s final battle. And after a couple more battle sequences, it moves several years later into the future and a peacetime setting. An army veteran, Gu returns in 1955 to the Wen River area where the Ninth Company breathed its last. While there, he fortuitously meets Sun Giqin (Tang Yan), the widow of Wang Jincun who, trying to find out what had happened to her husband, had been told he had been posted as missing in action. Even more fortuitously, Gu finds a good friend and now senior army officer, Er Dou (Deng Chao), stationed in the area and enlists his help to both confirm the fate of his men and – in a clunky attempt at romance – be a suitable replacement spouse for Sun.

As Assembly is based on the true story of Gu, the manner in which it concludes should come as no surprise to its viewers. What is revolutionary though, by Mainland Chinese standards at least, are the staging and shooting of the many battle scenes which bring to mind Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Taekukgi (2004). (More than incidentally, the producer of the latter film provided specialized crew and assistance to this production.) Additionally, while I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that director Feng went out of his way to paint the Chinese military and associated authorities in a terribly negative light, it still looks like he was allowed to train a more critical eye than one might expect on issues like the social divisions that come about due to vastly differing official rewards being allocated to the families of confirmed war dead vis a vis members of the military whose deaths cannot be confirmed and consequently are adjudged to ‘just’ be missing in action.

Yvonne Teh