The Communist Party line on the Sino-Japanese war is mirrored in this epic commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Japanese surrender.

And an epic it is, employing the considerable resources of the People Liberation Army's August 1st Film Studio and thousands of troops as extras. But as is customary in mainland war sagas produced since the 1970s, the narrative is heavy on politically correct exposition and grandiose tableaux, while failing to tell a story that resonates with humanity.

The film concentrates on Commander Zhu De (Wang Wufu, who has made a career out of portraying Zhu on screen) during the years 1937-1940, when, as head of the 8th Route Army, he united with Kuomintang forces to defend the crucial Tai Hang region from the Japanese. Rather than focusing exclusively on Zhu and his stratagems in maintaining an uneasy alliance with the KMT while fighting their common enemy, the movie goes for a more grandiose approach that shuttles back and forth between the opposing camps.

Over the course of the film's 117 minutes, an occasionally confusing array of Japanese, KMT and communist military are introduced, the heroes and villains forming a gallery of historical figures who rarely come across as people. From beginning to end, they engage in an unending stream of large-scale armed conflicts that, for all their technical derring-do, have a somewhat numbing effect.

The trio of directors (Wei Lian, Shen Dong and Chen Jian) had a mammoth task co-ordinating their battalions of cats and crew, and the battle scenes represent impressive feats of engineering. The overall effect is of a dry textbook spewing up second world war minutiae. The cardboard characters' lack of feeling is underlined by an undue amount of turgid speechifying and such cliches as excessively dramatic music and an ethereal background chorus.

Although depicting events of six decades ago, the movie reflects the early 21st-century thaw in KMT-communist relations in the favourable treatment of some Nationalist leaders. The wartime accomplishments of Lin Biao, long anathema due to his Cultural Revolution activities, are also presented in a positive light. Also a sign of the times is an effort to broaden the movie's commercial appeal by the inclusion of Hong Kong's Tony Leung Ka-fai (as one-armed soldier He Bingyan) and Taiwanese star Liu Dekai (as KMT general Hao Menglin).

Memorable is an awkward but brief subplot involving the film's only female character, radical American journalist Agnes Smedley. Earnestly played by a French actress (identified in the Chinese credits as 'Anna'), her European-accented English and youthful appearance (she looks about two decades younger than the 45-year-old Smedley) gives the movie a faint hint of welcome, if misguided, oo-la-la.

On the Mountain of Tai Hang is screening now