1921 (2021)

I Came for Eye Candy

To be honest, I didn’t understand anything even though I watched the movie from the very first second to the last lol. I’ve never been into history—not even my own country’s, let alone someone else’s. Not something to be proud of, I know, but hey, just being real here. Still, I stayed through the whole movie with an open mind because I was willing to learn. At least, I tried.

I only watched it because the cast is stacked with big names. I mean, I’m sure some of you are the same, right? If you are, and you plan to watch it, honestly… don’t bother watching the whole thing. Just go straight to social media and look up still cuts or photos of your favorite actors. Trust me. Unless you’re actually watching to learn something, not just for the cast.

Even though I recognized like 95% of the cast list, I barely noticed some of them in the actual film. Either their screentime was super short, the styling made them unrecognizable, or the filter totally changed their faces. Or maybe they did show up… right when I was too busy reading subtitles and mentally trying to connect the dots of a plot I didn’t even fully get.

Anyway, that’s my review—thanks for reading!

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Worth Watching

I originally wanted to watch this movie because it has some of my favorite actors and actresses in it (Song Yi, Zhang Ruoyun, Zhu Yilong, Ni Ni). I'm also a big fan of Republican Era movies and dramas.

For some of my fav actors and actresses, it ended up being like 30 seconds of screen time, which was the result of there being so many characters. I personally feel it was too many characters and it took away from the actual story and made it confusing, but that's also coming from someone who didn't grow up in China and never had a Chinese history lesson. At the same time, I totally get why the directors and creators behind the movie did it this way. It's a Chinese movie and not one that was really meant to be rolled out to international audiences. I suspect the average Chinese national wouldn't have this issue since they probably learned about all of those people in their history class lol. The point of this movie was to commemorate all of those who took part in founding the CCP, which is the reason there are so many characters and so many famous actors and actresses.

As someone who is generally uneducated about Chinese history, this was a good opener to learning more about the events of that period and how spread out the movement was. Now I'm more familiar with the names. I even paused to look up some names to learn more about their role in Chinese history and the CCP. Although it did have a lot of characters with short screen times, it did focus on a larger group of people whom the audience gets deeper insight into their lives. The film did a good job of depicting this idea of a bright future, in which the youth of China will continue to bring forth a new and better China. The interaction between the older generations and younger ones and the eventual handoff of a country is a theme within this film that I think was portrayed quite nicely. I think the film also does a good job depicting how passionate people were at the time regarding their beliefs. Overall, I think the movie was decent, I learned something and got to see my favorite actors and actresses!

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