Bodyguards and Assassins

“5 hours, 13 blocks.
To save a nation’s future, they must protect one man from its past.”

Bodyguards and Assassins(official, wiki-en-zh) is an excellent film these years in Hong Kong.

By coincidence I watched the film Bodyguards and Assassins on 12th, Nov, 2011, which was the 144th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen’s birthday.
Normally, we feel excited while watching fighting films. However, when I was watching this film, I felt sad and upset. The conflicts of concepts, briefs, purposes flooded into my mind. And eventually the conflicts built up the sad but hopeful story.

The businessman did those things for influence of his friend; the chief editor of China Daily did those things by the guidance of his brief of revolutionary; the young man did those things by the influence of the books and his hope for future; the rickshaw puller did those things because his boss helped him a lot; the outcast monk did those things just because his thanked the businessman; the girl did those things for her father’s will; the policeman did those things just because he wanted his daughter know that he was her father; the beggar did those things because he wanted to do something meaningful before ending his life of sad memory; even the leader of the assassins did those things just because he thought the Qing government could aid the country……

That’s an era of mixture of the east and west; and that’s a place of mixture of Cantonese, English, and Mandarin. Not everyone knew the importance of the man coming and the meaning of revolution. But all of them had fought for their briefs inside their hearts.
What I want to say is: Their blood was spread on the ground of City of Victoria in 1906. Fortunately, their blood and fights weren’t meaningless.