Chinese War with American Characteristics:

The article analyses the stylistic elements in the recent Chinese war epic, The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021). Because of its scale, cost, and generated box office revenue, the movie has come to epitomize the new ambitions and capabilities of the Chinese film industry. The key argument in the article is that the unprecedented domestic success of The Battle at Lake Changjin has been chiefly rooted in its ingenious use of cinematography and its embrace of stylistic diversity. The film exemplifies Chinese stylistic eclecticism that fuses the conventions of early 20th-century American war films with the contemporary “drone age cinema” associated chiefly with action films. Thanks to those elements, the otherwise rigid ideological message of the movie becomes more acceptable to the audience, at least in China.