Hong Kong filmmaker Dante Lam Chiu-yin has spent most of the last decade in mainland China, playing with escalating budgets and an impressive sandbox of military hardware and pyrotechnics to create explosive epics that have decimated Chinese box-office records.

He has done everything from recounting past historical victories in his two The Battle of Lake Changjin films – which he co-directed with Tsui Hark and Chen Kaige, and which were released in 2021 and 2022 – to conjuring up fictitious triumphs for China’s armed forces, as in 2018’s Operation Red Sea. Even the Chinese coastguard was anointed with one of Lam’s action-packed makeovers in 2020’s The Rescue.

Lam’s spectacle-oriented sensibilities are on a scale matched only by Hollywood hotheads like Michael Bay and James Cameron.

Read my full South China Morning Post review