Assembly (China, 2007)
This is an excellent (anti-)war film, set in northeastern China, beginning late in the Chinese Civil War in 1948 between the Nationalist KMT forces and Mao Tse-tung's revolutionary Communist forces. The protagonist in this film is a captain in Mao's People's Liberation Army (PLA), however, this is not a political film. It doesn't take any stance for or against the causes of the Communists or the Nationalists, who, by the way, lost the war in 1949, and were chased from the mainland onto the island of Taiwan, led by Chiang Kai-shek. This film, appropriately, doesn't touch any of that.

The captain is a tough and seasoned, competent commander, but he's not at all perfect. He arguably commits war crimes at the beginning, and gets jailed for it, but in context, the horrendous idea of war crimes is also not so black and white. There's a human dimension to decisions and in the extremes of war, people act unpredictably and extremely.

The title of this film refers to the bugle call that would have signaled the captain's company to fall back from the position they were assigned to hold, and to rejoin the main forces. However, there is a question of whether the assembly call was heard or not, to disastrous consequences.

The human toll of war is emphasized when the captain searches for redemption and reckoning regarding his men after the fighting stops (the film stretches into the Korean conflict, including a pretty funny exchange between the captain pretending to be South Korean when his company runs across a couple of U.S. tanks). He is haunted that he may have needlessly sacrificed his men, and that his further actions, possibly cowardly, prevented his mens' sacrifice from being recognized as acts of valor. He has to go about putting together the pieces of evidence that might redeem him and his men.

I highly recommend this film. 8 out of 10 tomatoes.