The Eight Hundred’s success is not quite as straightforward, though. The vast Shanghai set for The Eight Hundred took 18 months to build. At this point, China was seeking western support in the Sino-Japanese war, so the Sihang warehouse incident was already, in part, a theatrical exercise. The Japanese avoided striking this British-governed area, which was just across the creek from the Sihang warehouse, giving western observers a ringside seat. The Shanghai set – a huge project that took 18 months to build – is detailed and convincing, especially the foreign concession area, populated by Europeans and Americans as well as Chinese civilians. There are huge, often violent action set-pieces. Shot entirely on the giant-screen Imax format (a first for a Chinese movie), it took 10 years to make, with a reported budget of $80m. China’s film industry might also take some pride in The Eight Hundred. The Eight Hundred depicts the legendary defence of the Sihang warehouse in Shanghai, where, in 1937, an isolated battalion of Chinese soldiers held out against the invading Japanese for four days and, as the film would have it, “restored the pride of a nation”. The Eight Hundred draws attention to the meteoric progress of China’s increasingly blockbuster-oriented film industry, but also to the Chinese government’s determination to stamp its authority on it. It has been compared to western war movies such as Dunkirk (although there is more than a touch of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor in there), and so far it has taken more than $400m (£308m) at the box office, making it the second-highest-grossing movie of the year worldwide. While the rest of the world’s cinemas are still in coronavirus recovery mode, most of China’s 70,000 screens have been open since early August, and The Eight Hundred is a sign it no longer needs Hollywood content to fill them. If he could see 80 years into the future, he would have the answer: as an epic, effects-enhanced patriotic action movie. ‘No one knows how this history will be written,” a soldier muses portentously in the new Chinese blockbuster The Eight Hundred.
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