Dongji Rescue ★★★

Released: 22nd August 2025

Director: Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang

Starring: Wu Lei, Zhu Yilong

Less than a year ago, director Fang Li covered the story of real-life heroism and human sacrifice in The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru: a critically-acclaimed documentary about the eponymous WWII event that became an unlikely box office hit in China. It’s an arduous task to bring attention to such an understudied and largely untold tragedy, yet the film managed to be a powerful, emotionally charged account of the rescue of 384 British POWs near the Zhoushan Archipelago. This year, directors Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang chose to adapt the same story for a major blockbuster feature, utilizing the framework of disaster film spectacle in Dongji Rescue: a work that channels the scale and formal ingenuity of Guan Hu’s recent wartime epic, The Eight Hundred, but one that feels slightly too calculated for its humanistic ethos.

In contrast with the documentary effort, Dongji Rescue opts for a more traditional, character-driven approach that, naturally, takes creative liberties with the real-life account. The story follows two fishermen brothers living on the occupied Dongji Island, Adang (Wu Lei) and Abi (Zhu Yilong), who find themselves involved in the conflict when one of them rescues a British soldier, William (William Franklyn-Miller), stranded at sea. Fearing retaliation from the local Japanese military, the brothers hide the Brit, only to discover that the sinking ship nearby is carrying hundreds of starving POWs with no allied forces in sight. Driven by selflessness and years of life under imperial tyranny, the brothers venture out to sea once again, hoping to bring the soldiers home amidst the impending collapse of the Lisbon Maru.

Guan Hu is certainly no stranger to crafting incredibly effective set pieces: the third act of The Eight Hundred alone could rival any major blockbuster released in the past 10 years for the sheer visual flair on display. In that department, Dongji Rescue is no exception, highlighting astonishing underwater photography and beautiful period imagery that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible (preferably, IMAX). There is a certain immediacy to the way Hu and Fei shoot the disaster scenes, rendering them immersive and unusually terrifying – the whirlpool sequence in particular stands out as some of the most visceral filmmaking you’ll see all year.

That focus on the technical prowess, however, can at times take away from the film’s emotional core. Amidst the copious amounts of gore and unflinching violence, the film finds itself struggling to keep the balance between maritime action and its statement on collective heroism. The sincerity on display is admirable, but it often gets overshadowed by the frequent tonal clashes that plague the narrative. Similarly to recent war epics like The Battle at Lake Changjin or even Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad, the melodramatic tone of the film works best when the film takes detours into intimate character drama, rather than seeing it play out amidst the horrors of war designed for big screen spectacle.

Dongji Rescue is an impressive attempt at dramatizing the Lisbon Maru disaster for the purposes of a major blockbuster. Directors Hu and Fei see the event through the lens of real-life horror, depicting it with the kind of brutality that’s necessary to convey the terror that still remains underexplored in contemporary cinema. While the overarching theme of collective heroism rings mostly hollow due to the fictional narrative at play, the sheer visual kineticism on display more than makes up for any of the script’s shortcomings. When paired with the documentary that preceded it, Dongji Rescue works wonders — just don’t expect to get a viable history lesson out of it.