If you like the sight of a heroic Chinese splitting open the shaven head of a burly, bearded western mercenary with a fire axe as he battles to prevent a nuclear explosion on a secret underwater base, then you will love the Dante Lam-directed film Operation Hadal. There is bitter hand-to-hand combat, grenade-firing robotic dogs, and a familiar, split-second countdown to nuclear Armageddon that James Bond fans will relish.
The action thriller cost CNY1 billion (US$147 million) to produce in Qingdao, making it one of the most expensive Chinese films ever made, and it involved the construction of a full-scale replica of a submarine, the on-screen death of at least a dozen western mercenaries from the fictional state of Siekerman at the hands of the courageous Jiaolong Assault Team of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Marine Corps, and the destruction of two enemy submarines and two hidden subsea military complexes, fiendishly located in a volcanically active area of the South China Sea near the Chinese coast. The film was released in cinemas in China last year, but is now showing on flights to Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai with English subtitles.
If you have not seen it (and you should see it), the best summary would be that it represents a Chinese adaptation of Crimson Tide, consciously imitating the 1995 Hollywood blockbuster starring Denzel Washington and the late Gene Hackman. In that film, daring Denzel’s character battles both a renegade Russian submarine and treachery aboard his own vessel, but this reboot comes with a strongly nationalist and pro-China twist.
It is contemporary, with a PLAN sonar operator being told by his colleague that “AI will take your job” (spoiler alert – the human later makes the right call, and saves all of China!). It opens with a real-life offshore oil platform being seized by the villainous, gun-toting westerners who are trying to upload data from their stricken autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) which has crashed into a pipeline in a typhoon.
There are Chinese special forces flying in with jetpacks to rescue the oil workers, gun battles galore, and submarines apparently built without automatic fire suppression systems, as evidenced by a heroic scene with a manual fire extinguisher.
I don’t usually write film reviews until the summer holidays and Trevor Hollingsbee is Baird Maritime’s resident security and naval columnist, but seeing valorous Chinese submariners save the world from catastrophe in-flight, I could not help but remember the old adage, “before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes, and if you can’t do that, watch his films.”
Coming at a time when it is widely feared that a trade war between China and the United States may again erupt, and/or that China may attack Taiwan, it has never been more important to understand the mindset of the Chinese state.
What better way to understand it than through domestic propaganda films? If you wanted to understand the attitudes of Cold War America in the 1980s, there would be worse places to start than Wall Street, and the Rambo and Rocky series.
And there has never been less locally initiated coverage of China from the western media since the early 1970s, as foreign correspondents there have been marginalised and expelled. Today, there are just two correspondents in mainland China covering the three largest newspapers in the United States: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Ian Johnson, himself a journalist expelled from China in 2020, called this “a totally outrageous scenario” in an Asiatoday feature on the problem.
Official data show that the number of resident foreign journalists in China fell from more than 700 in 2008 to around 400 in 2024. China expelled 17 foreign journalists in 2020, nearly all from American media outlets. Foreign correspondents reporting in the country face obstacles, including visa issues and delays, surveillance, and harassment by police and other government agents whilst in the field.
Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index ranked Hong Kong and China as 140th and 178th, respectively, out of 180 nations and territories, noting that Hong Kong has dropped 122 places over the last 25 years. The detention and deportation from Hong Kong in November of French journalist Antoine Vedeilhe marked the thirteenth journalist to have been charged by the territory’s authorities under the National Security Law, which was enacted in 2020.
As Linette Lim has highlighted, “China is widely regarded as possessing one of the most sophisticated systems of information control in the world. This comprises censorship of the internet, control over mainstream, and the use of propaganda. The Chinese state works to prevent critical news stories from reaching international audiences and controls how international media and scholars speak about China.”
So, if you can’t read much about China in the press, watch its films. What does Operation Hadal tell us about the outlook of China?
This is the first major film I have seen where America as a nation (thinly disguised as the rogue state of Siekerman) is the adversary attempting to attack China in a contemporary setting.
Yes, evil capitalist Yankees are a staple of Chinese cinema in films about the Korean War, seventy years ago, and the Japanese are stock villains in films set in the 1930s and 1940s, obviously. However, past Chinese military epics have focused on more prosaic bad guys.
In Operation Hadal, there can be no question that the hostile power with two stealthy nuclear submarines with western crews threatening the coast of China is modelled on the USA. This is especially evident when devious Admiral Walter, the chief villain who kills his own submarine captain treacherously, mentions challenges to the military budget in congress. In Siekerman, of course.
This is a break with past Chinese military thrillers, where the previous enemies of the state have typically been drug dealers, terrorists, and rag-tag African militia. Dante Lam’s earlier and more successful action film Operation Red Sea (2018) sees the Jiaolong Assault Team first battling Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden to rescue the crew of a Chinese ship, and then intervening to successfully prevent Yemeni terrorists (I mean Arab terrorists from the nation of Yewaire) from seizing a cargo of uranium yellowcake and the design of a nuclear dirty bomb. The PLAN heroes successfully rescue local Chinese personnel and workers from the clutches of the Islamic terrorists and evacuate them safely to PLAN vessels, loosely based on the events of the Yemeni civil war in 2015.
Meanwhile, the wildly successful Wolf Warrior 2 from 2017 sees Chinese soldier Leng Feng in an unnamed African country, valiantly protecting Chinese medical aid workers from local rebels and vicious arms dealers. The original Wolf Warrior (2015) featured an evil Chinese villain based in Manila, aided by some western mercenaries who were in southern China, seeking “a smuggled cache of biotechnology, [that] could allow the creation of a genetic weapon that could target Chinese people exclusively,” as per Wikpedia.
But in Operation Hadal, America is framed as China’s enemy. These westerners are especially nasty. One of the Czech stuntmen even played a devilish White Walker in Game of Thrones.
The westerners are willing to destroy the environment and cause chaos across the Asia-Pacific by detonating an underwater nuclear weapon to create tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, whilst making it look like a natural disaster. They have built covert bases in the South China Sea (a bit of projection there, perhaps), they send in covert AUV surveillance equipment into Chinese waters, and consider widespread nuclear pollution as a price worth paying in their efforts to contain Chinese power.
They hold innocent Chinese oil workers hostage on the production platform and show no qualms over killing civilians to achieve their nefarious ends.
The emphasis on the PLAN saving the whole of Asia-Pacific from chaos caused by America is stated several times – and the film was scripted and filmed even before Donald Trump had returned to the White House. China positions itself as a guardian not just of Chinese people, but of all Asians against the duplicitous and aggressive American proxies.
Of course, the Chinese submariners on the PLAN vessel Longjiang represent all the virtues of the Chinese people. They are loyal, hardworking, and disciplined. When confronted with their dangerous mission the crew declare, “together as one, one team, one fight!”
Their commander, Captain Zhao, played with stoic virtue by Zhang Yanyu, briefs them to rescue the survivors from the damaged western submarine, because they are humane, of course. The PLAN commandos also bring back the body of their fallen comrade who sacrificed himself to save the mission.
When the Chinese submarine Longjiang sets sail, the crew hand around seedling plants to cultivate onboard, they play guitars, and reminisce about childhood basketball games. These are solid, hardworking, naval men, the salt of the earth, caring but resolute in their protection of the nation.
On the other hand, the western forces played by Cory Beeston, Ivan Kostadinov and Bryan Larkins as Admiral Walters spent their time fighting amongst themselves, killing one another in petty power plays to undermine the international order and to activate the devastating Project Stellar at any cost. The untrustworthy westerners in Operation Hadal behave exactly like the Russians did in Crimson Tide.
These are bad people in the pay of a corrupt regime. Whereas the Chinese seek to save lives and protect the peace, Admiral Walters declared, “I have been authorised to initiate Project Stellar to make the entire world fear our power.”
The film tells us a lot about Chinese perceptions of its role: a state committed to stability, and armed forces that are loyal, well-trained and fiercely dedicated to their duty to the state and to the Chinese people.
In the 1990s in Crimson Tide, it was the declining and fragmented Russian state that posed a threat to global stability in the eyes of American movie-makers. Today, director Dante Lam sees America as the danger to China and to the security of the entire Asia-Pacific region.
Films can often tell us hard truths about cultural assumptions and mindsets. Operational Hadal tells us a lot about the ideals and aspirations for a high-tech PLAN faced with American encroachment and subterfuge. So, activate stealth mode and admire China’s “super conducting MHD” system for submarine propulsion in action.
It’s a wild ride, but you know the heroes on Longjiang will prevail.
Bring out the popcorn, and enjoy.
