John Woo’s Red Cliff was released in two parts in 2008 and 2009. It borrows the campaign of 208: Cao Cao comes south, Sun and Liu unite, and fire decides the battle. The film redistributes the roles and motives and adds relationships that are in neither the Records nor the novel.
It is not a reconstruction of the Records, and it is not a short version of the 1994 serial. As a battle, the fire and the retreat are history. The film is a twenty-first-century work on the same place-name. It is marked romance because of the tradition it continues: story, not annals.