General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Snipers

Snipers (狙击手) is a 2022 Chinese war film co-directed by Zhang Yimou and his daughter Zhang Mo, set during the Korean War (known in China as the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea) and centered on a duel between a Chinese People's Volunteer Army sniper squad and an elite American sniper team. It was released in China on 1 February 2022, the first day of the Lunar New Year, and was Zhang Yimou's first film in the Spring Festival release season.¹

Key fact	Detail
Directors	Zhang Yimou and Zhang Mo, his first father-daughter co-directing credit¹
Release	1 February 2022 (Chinese New Year's Day), China; runtime 1 hour 36 minutes¹^•²
Historical setting	The "Cold Gun, Cold Cannon" movement of the Korean War, after the fifth campaign of 1951–1952¹
Screenwriter / producers	Chen Yu (screenplay); Pang Liwei and Cao Xiaobei (producers)²
Principal cast	Zhang Yu as squad leader Liu Wenwu, Chen Yongsheng as Dayong, Liu Yitie as the scout Liangliang, Zhang Yi as the company commander³
Reception in China	Douban score 7.7, the highest-rated film of the 2022 Spring Festival season; Spring Festival box office of 262 million yuan⁴
Filming	Real snow locations in the mountains near Baishan, Jilin Province, in temperatures tens of degrees below zero⁵

Spoilers

Story and historical background

The film takes as its background the "Cold Gun, Cold Cannon" movement (冷枪冷炮运动), a phase of the Korean War that Chinese sources describe as little known but significant. After the fifth large campaign ended in 1952 and the front lines settled into a stalemate, Volunteer Army headquarters called on front-line soldiers to wage low-intensity sniper and artillery warfare, using flexible tactics to wear down enemy strength in small engagements. From May 1952 to July 1953, this campaign killed and wounded more than 52,000 United Nations and South Korean troops.⁶

The plot follows the Fifth Squad (五班), a sniper unit under squad leader Liu Wenwu, ordered to rescue a wounded scout named Liangliang who carries important intelligence and has been captured and used as bait by an American sniper team led by John. The American side, armed with scoped M1C rifles, sets a trap for the Chinese squad, which fights back with inferior equipment, including unscoped Mosin–Nagant rifles, using tactics and teamwork. The film compresses the fight into a single snow-covered slope, with successive rounds of maneuver such as using a steel plate as cover, luring the enemy with thrown earth, and trading lives for lives.⁷ After Liu Wenwu's death, the young soldier Dayong carries on the fight and completes the mission.³

Historical models. Zhang Yimou said the film is not based on a single individual but was constructed from materials on many snipers of the Cold Gun Cold Cannon movement. Critics have connected the characters to real sharpshooters such as Zhang Taofang, who in 33 days hit 214 enemies with 442 rounds, a record for the front, and Zou Xixiang, credited with killing 203 enemies using only 206 rounds.⁸^•⁶^•⁵ The film's squad speaks Sichuan-area dialects, a choice that reflects the large number of Sichuan natives among the Volunteer Army soldiers.⁵

Production

Zhang Yimou divided the direction by language: he directed the Chinese side of the battle while Zhang Mo directed the American side, including casting, script adaptation into idiomatic English, and the English-language scenes. Two battlefields were built and the two units shot simultaneously, with the directors reviewing each other's footage and working out the next day's tactics on a sand table each evening.⁸

The film was shot entirely on real exterior locations in the mountains of northeast China, near Baishan in Jilin Province, in genuine winter conditions tens of degrees below zero, with no studio sets. Zhang Yimou insisted on real snow, saying that a realistic war film should not be made with fake snow. Because the pandemic prevented casting American actors of the intended age from abroad, the production recruited about 150 foreigners then living in China and cast older, veteran-looking actors as the American team, adjusting the story so the enemy squad became a group of World War II veterans.⁸^•⁵

Casting. Apart from the established actors Zhang Yu and Zhang Yi, the film uses largely new faces; Chen Yongsheng plays Dayong, a literate, tearful young soldier who grows into a marksman over the course of the battle.⁸^•⁵ The film was originally titled The Coldest Gun (最冷的枪).⁹

Style

Reviewers noted the film's restraint as a departure from Zhang Yimou's usual visual signature. The romantic, saturated color palettes of his earlier work are absent; the film uses a cold black-white-gray palette, fixed and restrained camera work, and quick, clean editing across a 96-minute runtime that stays almost entirely within the single battle.¹⁰^•⁶ Commentators described its method as "seeing the big through the small" (以小见大): a small-scale engagement presented as a cross-section of the whole war, with each soldier's death given a distinct, individualized treatment rather than mass-casualty spectacle.¹^•⁸ Zhang Mo added espionage-thriller elements to the sniper-duel structure to sustain pacing during the long waiting periods inherent to sniping.¹¹

Reception and box office

The film opened on 1 February 2022 against The Battle at Lake Changjin II and other Spring Festival releases. It drew more than 920,000 viewers on its first day and passed 2 million admissions within days, with opening scores of 9.5 on Maoyan and Taopiaopiao and 7.7 on Douban, the highest of the season.¹² Its Spring Festival box office reached 262 million yuan, and as its word of mouth spread and the Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony drew attention to Zhang Yimou, its share of screenings rose against the trend.⁴ Total box office passed 500 million yuan in late February and 600 million yuan by late March 2022, with screenings extended.³

Despite leading the season in口碑 (word-of-mouth) scores, it had the lowest box office among the season's non-animated films, a gap commentators attributed to its lack of star power, its small-scale narrative, and limited screening times, for which Zhang Yimou publicly appealed to theater managers.¹³ English-language reviews were mixed: Screen International's John Berra called it relatively contained and short on visual flourishes while delivering action with brisk proficiency, and The News Lens's CJ Sheu described it as an unapologetic Chinese patriotic melodrama.²

Place in Zhang Yimou's career

Zhang Yimou deliberately differentiated the film from The Battle at Lake Changjin, which was already in production when he took the project; where that film uses panoramic, epic-scale narrative, Snipers stays with a small unit in an unnamed corner of the battlefield. He described the film's theme as the spirit of an army with inferior equipment that nonetheless fought the world's strongest military, and the film's ending, in which the company commander reads the roll of the fallen squad and each name is answered "here", was reworked with Zhang Yi late in production to emphasize inheritance and remembrance.⁸^•⁶ It was his 23rd theatrical feature and followed the spy film Cliff Walkers (2021); he was concurrently preparing the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, which opened three days after the film's release.⁵^•⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released since 2000 › Released 2017 to 2026

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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