Fatal Mission (怒江之战) is a Chinese television show consisting of 43 episodes and was broadcast from June to July 2016.
About
It’s 1942 and the Chinese government receive intelligence that the Japanese may be developing a dangerous biological weapon in a remote part of Burma. A special squad is dispatched to the region to stop the Japanese.
The TV show is adapted from the novel “Nu Jiang Zhi Zhan” by Nan Pai Shu and Qian Kun, see the Internet Archive.
Cast
Sean Sun or Sun Yi Zhou (孙艺洲) as Zhao Ban Kuo
He is best known for his appearance in the high-rating show iPartment, I had to look back at an episode to recognise him.
Jia Qing (贾青) as Liao Yi Fang
Appeared in multiple productions but nothing we’ve seen before from what I can see.
George Christopher Tronsrue as “Old Jay”
He is a bilingual American actor from Chicago who played a contingent of the US Forces. His performance was actually pretty good despite the storyline. Even though he is taller than me he looked shorter than the others on Fatal Mission.
IMDB – https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3540596/
Review
This show received fairly good reviews, it had action, romance and a lot of heartache. The message I got from the show, which is familiar for Chinese shows of this type, is that the people are willing to sacrifice everything for the love of their country. However, my preference would be if people came back alive.
There were numerous issues with this show:
- I very much doubt that women in the Chinese military in the 1940s wore mini-skirts
- The ending theme gave away major plot lines, so you knew what would happen, to a certain extent, to two main characters.
- Sean Sun had a lot of love entanglements.
- I didn’t think the US military wore berets until Vietnam.
- I swear they had more hair gel with them than arms.
- During their mission, they were only carrying backpacks however a huge amount of equipment was seen during their trek like tents, weapons, transmitters
- One minute Gusika couldn’t speak Chinese and the next she could, I don’t think there were any language schools in the jungle.
- When Knife spoke the aboriginal language someone else with a totally different voice dubbed over him. It was bad.
- So many episodes they were dealing with irrelevant issues, it became tedious after a while.
- Towards the end of the season, it was a mistake to let Long Hair blow up the corridors, no good military mind would have let that happen.
It was good to see an actual American actor on a Chinese show just like the Longest Day in Changan.
I think the actors did their best with what they were given, some parts of the storyline were daft.
The ending, well, I would have written it differently. However, I have seen endings like this in other Chinese TV shows and films.
I give this show a 2/5, they scored a point for the explosions.
Where Can I Watch
I saw this show on Viki, a poorer-quality version can be seen on YouTube.