Beginning of the Great Revival was a huge hit in Mainland China. Now, if I wasn't a beaten and broken cynical bastard of the lowest order, I would say that it was due to the star power (all 157 of them, as espoused on the poster) and stirring story. But, since I am that friendly neighborhood semi-drunken reviewer that fanboys all over the world have come to know and hate, I would say it was due to the Chinese government keeping Western blockbusters like Transformers: Dark of the Moon out of local theatres and giving mandatory days off from work and free tickets to a proletariat growing increasingly concerned with the way their country is headed.

Now, taking this film in as a white guy from Minnesota who knows about three words of Mandarin and only has a passing knowledge of Chinese history that was implanted by an entry-level college class, whose facts have been slowly whittled away over the years from percolating one's brain stem with a steady diet of Jagermeister, Beginning of the Great Revival offered up some decent entertainment. Certainly, playing "spot the star" was fun enough, even though most of the roles here are so small that calling them cameos would be generous.

But, as Kozo points out in his review at Love HK Film -- something much more astute than the drivel you're currently reading -- the liberties taken with history are obvious, coming early and often, with the most blatant being the treatment of the student movement in the revolution. Anyone of this reviewer's quickly advancing age (aka Generation X) will undoubtedly remember the images from the Tiananmen Square massacre. And here we are, some twenty-odd years later, with the Chinese government using those same sorts of ideals and goals espoused by those called radicals at the time for their own propagandistic use in order to pacify its' own populace and the growing world market for its' new family and capitalist friendly brand of Nerfy soft palatable communism.

And that is Beginning of the Great Revival's main conundrum. Is it entertainment? Is it propaganda? Is it both? And is it right to be entertained by propaganda? These are the sorts of questions that have come across cinema since its' inception, with films like Triumph of the Will becoming lynchpins of discussion from corduroy jacket wearing pipe smoking so-called experts. It remains to be seen if Beginning of the Great Revival will become a movie that inspires overblown thesis papers from countless scruffy bearded undergrads, but taken in and of itself at this point in time, it's a decent historical drama that provides two hours of non-threatening entertainment.

RATING: 6