Despite the film sets against the Japanese invasion of Nanjing in 1937, the director focuses on what is lost in war in its broad sense. He points out that there is no division between soldiers and civilians, not to mention winners and losers during the wartime due to madness. After showing intense and fierce battle scenes in the opening part, the film offers a detailed picture of some human beings who desperately struggle to survive in the war. Fires are discharged at the civilians indiscriminately turning around the guns from the soldiers. The later part of the film nicely describes the process in which humanities are lost and human souls are dying throughout the massacre. In the process of the soldier’s mass destruction, the filmmaker reveals explicitly that the atrocious violence comes not from overwhelming physical forces, but from extreme fears. The virtue of this film lies in the fact that it clearly delivers its themes till the end through the detailed descriptions of human nature that appears under extreme situations, neither depending on a large scale of battle scenes nor falling into a biased pitfall. (PARK Jong-Ho)