The film was released in South Korea on 21 December 2011, but performed poorly at the box office due to high competition and received generally mixed reviews from critics.

In 1928, Kim Jun-shik (Shin Sang-yeob) works alongside his father (Chun Ho-jin) and sister Eun-soo (Lee Yeon-hee) on the farm of the Hasegawa family (Shiro Sano, Kumi Nakamura) in Gyeong-seong (present-day Seoul), Japanese-occupied Korea.

In July 1939, the Koreans are deployed to the battle at Nomonhan on the border with Mongolia, where Shirai (雪莱/徐莱；Fan Bingbing), a Chinese sniper avenging the deaths of her family at the hands of the Japanese, is captured and tortured.

After refusing to join a suicide squad, Jun-shik is imprisoned with Shirai but escapes with her, Jong-dae, and two other friends to the Khalkhin Gol, where they spot a massive Red Army advance.

Jun-shik and Tatsuo are captured and, by February 1940, are held in Kungursk prisoner-of-war camp north of Perm, Soviet Union, where both Koreans and Japanese are incarcerated together.

They force their way out as the United States Army scales the cliffside, and attempt to sprint away inland, but Jun-shik is mortally wounded in the chest by shrapnel from naval artillery.

Production lasted eight months from October 2010 to June 2011, with locations in Latvia and Korea (Hapcheon, Cheongoksan National Park in Gangwon Province, Saemangeum Seawall).

[11] It encountered stronger than expected competition from Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, released on 15 December, and it also received a lukewarm response from viewers.