They made this back in the early 10s, when the chinese movie industry was desperately trying to find success by copying 90s hollywood. It's meant to be a Chinese version of a gritty ww2 blockbuster type movie, but the direction was lacking and the narrative kind of gets lost between the many plot threads. It was widely panned as "misery porn" but honestly I don't care, I'm a slophog for ww2 dramas so I really enjoyed it. Every scene with the laughably corrupt KMT mobile military court side characters is absolute kino btw.