Tony Leung as Zhou Yu in Red Cliff. Photo / Supplied

Tony Leung as Zhou Yu in Red Cliff. Photo / Supplied

When John Woo headed to America after the international success of his high-octane movies - 1990's Bullet in the Head and 1992's Hard Boiled - the formidable Hong Kong director breathed a gust of fresh air into Hollywood action flicks.

Broken Arrow, starring John Travolta; Face/Off, with Travolta and Nicolas Cage; and Mission Impossible II with Tom Cruise, all proved to be huge hits.

Then somehow he went into a decline. His subsequent films, Windtalkers, The Hostage and Paycheck failed to ignite the box office and just weren't as good.

Clearly needing a new direction, he headed back to Asia to make the biggest-budget Chinese film ever, Red Cliff.

"It was my dream project," admits Woo, now 62. "I'd been wanting to make this film for over 18 years. I'd read the book when I was a child so I knew all the characters and I loved the challenge of making the story feel new. This movie is so complicated, so big, but I always thought I could make it, especially since I'd learnt so much from making movies in Hollywood.

I never say anything is impossible."

A David and Goliath tale of The Lord of the Rings complexity, Woo's film tells of Asia's most famous battle, the Battle of Red Cliff, which took place in 208AD and involved enormous armies.

The story surrounding the battle was popularised by The Romance of The Three Kingdoms, a book written 700 years ago which has spawned countless movie interpretations (Andy Lau's Three Kingdoms being the latest), television dramas, novels and even video games.

In the romanticised book the character of Zhuge Liang, a wise sage with mythical powers, had emerged as the hero, but Woo wanted to stick to history and to give credit where it was due. That is, to Viceroy Zhou Yu (the Samson of the story, played by Tony Leung) who with the help of Zhuge (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a clever young military strategist, went into battle against Prime Minister-cum-General Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi from Farewell, My Concubine) and his army of 800,000 soldiers.

Cao Cao not only wanted the opposing kingdoms of Xu in the west and East Wu in the south to be subdued, he ultimately wanted to wipe out all the kingdoms and to install himself as the emperor of a unified China. He also wanted Zhou Yu's wife, Xiao Qiao (Taiwanese model Chiling Lin), said to be the most beautiful woman in China.

Basically there's something for everyone here, even if the action is of prime importance. Woo, never known for his subtlety, couldn't resist including a fictitious scence from the book featuring a military manoeuvre orchestrated by Zhuge, where straw boats come towards Cao Cao's 2000 enemy ships which fire off hundreds of arrows, much needed by Zhou's far smaller army.