None of the three hosts of Friendly Fire grew up in China or in families of Chinese background

and today's film features a lot of people and place names that contain sounds that are unfamiliar to us.

I say that just to make sure it's understood that if we pronounce anything wrong on today's

show it's because we're bad people who tried to be

wrong because we like getting corrected on Reddit.

Now with that out of the way, if you didn't grow up in China you like us might not be super familiar with Chinese history.

It is long, complicated, and impressive.

This is a huge country that has more or less considered itself to be one big country for a very long time.

There is some archaeological evidence suggesting dynastic rule dates back as far as 2,100 b.E. Now the dynasties controlled most of what we now consider

to be the borders of China but occasionally in this long history China has not been

a single country but a collection of states which occasionally went to war with each other

and wars are the things that movies get made about and then we talk about it on friendly fire. Literally all of Chinese history has been leading to this moment.

Now today's film is about the dawn of an era called The Three Kingdoms.

In 2008 CE Kowowkow, a big wig in the falling Han dynasty tried to obliterate any military threat to the continued

unification of China by bringing a 200,000-man army down the

Yancey River to crush two Allied warlords who were not on board with the way

Kow is running the country. It's simply the story of how the Allied Army, just 50,000 and no. the into three independent states. This is a John Wu film from 2008 CE so you're not

going to be surprised to hear that it is big, stylish, and exciting. Wu is the

master Hong Kong filmmaker who came to the US to give us beloved classics such as Broken Arrow,

face off, and not to mention Wind Talkers, which is on the war movie list, and Hard Target, which is not.

In setting out to depict the Battle of Red Cliffs, he returned to China and amassed an enormous

cast, and $160 dollars in order to make a sweeping

...