Hacker Cinema
Wolf Warrior
战狼
2015 · Film · 90 min
Part of Wolf Warrior Collection
Directed by Wu Jing
A Chinese special force soldier with extraordinary marksmanship is confronted by a group of deadly foreign mercenaries who are hired to assassinate him by a vicious drug lord.
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15 comments on Hacker News
> Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
No, relations with China were warm right up through the end of the Obama administration and into Trump's first term. That's why the first approach China took to the Biden administration was to hope for straightforward normalization of relations.
China started issuing 10-year visas to Americans under Obama. The Wolf Warrior movies, after which the policy is named, started coming out in 2015.
China has made the most nukes in the past decade than any other nation in the world.
China has also dramatically increased the size of its military fleet, released movies (Wolf Warrior) to build nationalistic zeal and it's Diplomats have taken a liking to that nationalistic / aggressive stance.
There is no 'projection' here. It's simply acknowledging that China's war investments have grown dramatically and it's own diplomacy has shifted as a result.
China is already preparing. https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1500537455921053701
"China is now launching the enormous warmongering campaign. In 2021 they produced the most expensive Chinese movie ever, The Battle at Lake Changjin, on the battle of Korean War against the US"
"If you watch recent Chinese movies like the Wolf Warrior, you'll see that China is preparing its public opinion for the war with the US. China may not say it to the US but they're absolutely saying this to their citizens. You can't fool yourself about it"
The Wolf Warrior movies are very entertaining to watch if you are a fan of classic American non-apologetic action movies. Basically the same thing but in Chinese ...
This is kind of a tangent but I recently watched Wolf Warrior, an over-the-top Chinese military action movie that is also basically wall-to-wall propaganda for the PLA (not that this military-entertainment complex stuff is unique to China of course. You don't get to put all the latest shiny military tech in the new Transformers movie unless you play ball with the DoD). In a climactic scene[1] after our heroes are attacked by the bad guys (a bunch of American ex-special forces mercenaries), while a voiceover speech is laying it on pretty thick ("To a soldier the most beautiful place in the world is the border of the People's Republic of China, because it is what they fight and die to protect"), they rip off the patches they were wearing for the wargames they were participating in before the attack and slap on patches with the flag of China which say "I fight for China" in English. Thought that was kind of interesting.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCc0DWSZHCs
Not just Americans. See 'Wolf Warrior', and 'Wolf Warrior 2', currently the second highest-grossing Chinese movie.
The other country that is doing this at Hollywood scale is China, and it’s not just their ‘only popular in China’ movies like Wolf Warrior (1 and 2).
Some scenes:
https://youtu.be/g7y36UIRAjo
IP Man 4, which is more well known to western audiences:
https://youtu.be/OlW2VphUNd4
https://youtu.be/JFmaPK0JyVQ
You get the idea. Americans make movies where America good, everyone bad. China is now making movies where China good, everyone bad, specially white Americans.
Anyways, along with the glorification of US might and power by the pentagon, their recruiting tactics have also used video game stylization to attract young people:
https://youtu.be/N0f_ZUgqvxE
^ That is a fucking video game ad as far as I’m concerned. No mature person should be turned on by that.
Thanks for the recommendations — John Cho was also great in "Searching" (a thriller about a Korean-American who tries to find his daughter who disappears). Old classical literature from China (especially "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" about the power struggles in the fall of the Han dynasty) has been a good source for positive role models, too.
I wish the Wolf Warrior movies could be a way to guide China's government to what it could be (a positive geopolitical force that can help). They're more fantasy than reality, though; I can't ever trust them as a Canadian, after they arbitrarily detained two fellow citizens (the two Michaels) [0] for over 1,000 days as part of a geopolitical game [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_and_Michael_Kovrig
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58687071
>>> I wanted to see what a real East Asian hero in the movies could look like
K-Pop Star Rain in Ninja Assassin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Assassin
Lee Byung-Hun as Storm Shadow in the GI Joe movies (a villian, but a damn cool one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Joe:_The_Rise_of_Cobra#Cobra
John Cho in the new Star Trek films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(film)
^Just in case you want to work through a back catalog of kickass Asian dudes in blockbuster films.
I've seen both of the Wolf Warrior films as well. I was curious how they would handle the size/physical strength disparity with the presumably-former-spec-ops American mercenaries. I like the approach taken, where the Chinese protagonists overcome them with agility and dexterity.
As an American, and one who has to deal with the Chinese military as an adversary on a regular basis, I still enjoyed these movies.
I've seen both movies, though I'm Canadian. I enjoyed the movies because my family is East Asian, and I wanted to see what a real East Asian hero in the movies could look like (long before Shang-Chi came out). This differs from the typical depiction of Asian guys in Hollywood movies as unconfident, geeky, and not romantic interests.
In contrast, the hero of Wolf Warrior is athletic, confident, highly competent, and heroic (he saves civilians in the second movie).
I really enjoyed this because the absence of East Asian heroic figures has contributed to Asian men being seen as unattractive in the dating pool [0]. Career-wise, Asians are also the least likely in the US to be promoted, according to the Harvard Business Review [1]. It's also a struggle to lack Asian role models growing up.
You can't even really talk about this issue of underrepresentation in media as an Asian male without criticism. The first result when you search for issues facing Asian men today is a Slate article documenting radicalized men who have harassed Asian women ("Men's Rights Asians Think This Is Their Moment"). What those guys did is reprehensible, but if I speak about these issues in real life, I can get lumped in with them.
So, I enjoyed the movies, but don't typically talk about my enjoyment for fear of being ostracized. Anyways, Wolf Warrior is more G.I. Joe than James Bond or Rambo. He's also not fighting against American spies or representatives of the US government, but rather villains who happen to be American (and more vicious than bumbling). Also, the hero surprisingly disobeys the Chinese government several times (and ends up imprisoned, though he ultimately returns to alignment with the government in the end).
Sources:
[0] https://theconversation.com/asian-guys-stereotyped-and-excluded-in-online-dating-130855
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely-group-in-the-u-s-to-be-promoted-to-management
I hadn't even heard of the Wolf Warrior movies.
More broadly speaking, I'm concerned that their production may be consistent with the CCP's recent saber-rattling. The more evidence I see of that posture, the more I worry that my sons will die in an unnecessary war.
What do Americans think of the Wolf Warrior movies from China? Part Bond/Rambo achinese guy geats bumbling evil Americans.
The Russians were interested in hypersonic glide vehicles as a platform for nuclear weapons.
They really hated the Pershing 2 because that kind of reentry vehicle can break suddenly two or more times confounding the Moscow ABM system. (which might have been able to fire multiple nuclear shots, get lucky to disable the warhead, and burn out all the electronics for 1000 miles away with the EMP -- the American hit-to-kill ABM will just fail)
Russia was trying to outboondoggle us with Buran and the Energyia booster. Like the space shuttle Buran was a hypersonic glide vehicle that could land on a runway with a wing and a prayer, emphasis on the prayer. The rocket engines were on the booster but not the orbiter, so Energia by itself was a capable heavy lift vehicle which the russians planned to out-boondoggle us: one Energia exploded when Russia tried to launch a 1-MW class laser satellite with optical targeting and all the facilities to start burning up targets. (e.g. in response to the Reagan era SDI talk, the Russians tried to hastily launch real hardware)
--
BTW I have seen the boxes on the Iowa class and they are a hoot. The US Congress had a lot of resistance to Robert Macnamara's plan to switch the Navy to vertical launch tubes because they didn't look menacing enough but if you look at Chinese films like Wolf Warrior you see they are very proud of their missile destroyers and their cluster munitions too.
> Over the past few years, I've been hoping to run into an 80s soviet movie with heavily armed evil american antagonists. The soviet ideological indoctrination and censorship game must've been strong, because so far everything I've seen either has pirates/hooligans/etc. as antagonists or fails to even have a "man vs. man" plot at all.
Not 80s, but Wolf Warrior is China vs. evil American mercenaries.
Speaking of propaganda, can we talk about how good the movies Wolf Warrior and Wolf Warrior 2 is? Both films feature Chinese military protagonists and both films feature western villains.
These films remind me of Rambo even including the jingoistic pro-nation-of-origin message.
I think the international market accepted Rambo because they thought USA was cool. I wonder if we will find ourselves consuming “Chinakana” (riff on “Americana”) when we think China is “cool.”