The Eight Hundred

The Eight Hundred (Chinese: 八佰) is a 2020 Chinese historical war drama film directed by and co-written by Guan Hu, and starring Huang Zhizhong, Oho Ou, Wang Qianyuan, Jiang Wu, Zhang Yi, Du Chun, Vision Wei, Li Chen, and Yu Haoming.

After holding back the Japanese for over 3 months, and suffering heavy losses, the Chinese army was forced to retreat due to the danger of being encircled.

Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan of the 524th Regiment of the under-equipped 88th Division of the National Revolutionary Army, led 452 young officers and soldiers to defend Sihang Warehouse against the 3rd Imperial Japanese Division consisting of around 20,000 troops on a heroic suicidal last stand against the Japanese under an order by Generalissimo of Nationalist China, Chiang Kai-shek.

[10][11] A theme song for the film titled "Remembering" (苏州河) was written by Bob Ezrin, Shridhar Solanki, Cheng Zhang and Isabel Yue Yin based on the melody of the Londonderry Air and was performed by Andrea Bocelli and Na Ying.

[9] According to a report published on the social media platform WeChat, the participants complained that the film excessively glorified the Kuomintang army.

[29] Ian Freer from Empire awarded the film 4 stars out of 5, writing, "The Eight Hundred is sprawling, and doesn't do anything in a hurry — the main title appears 20 minutes in — and there are ultimately too many characters to care about, but everywhere you turn there is fantastic filmmaking, flitting between grand sweep and quieter moments.

"[30] Maggie Lee of Variety described the film as "monumental, if sometimes unwieldy", comparing it to Dunkirk (2017) and writing, "the saga does share similar sentiments of survival, grit and triumph in defeat ... it too plunges audiences into both the intimacy and magnitude of brutal war spectacle while immersing them in a stunningly mounted period canvas."

[32] Michael Ordoña of the Los Angeles Times, reviewing the shorter theatrical version of the film, similarly commented that it "skips over the whole character-development part, along with the logic of many choices and scenes ... Rather than immersing us in the moment as, say, Black Hawk Down does with its unrelenting intensity, Eight Hundred has plenty of meandering downtime spread out among its massive cast of characters.