There are moments — actually, there are many moments — in Operation Hadal (released internationally as Operation Leviathan and in China as Jiaolong Xingdong) when you’ll catch yourself thinking: “There’s no way that’s possible.” The short answer: yeah, probably not. The longer answer: who cares? This is a movie where spectacle grabs the controls and logic gets sealed in a watertight compartment somewhere way, way below crush depth.

China has been building toward this kind of military action blockbuster for years — from the Wolf Warrior films to The Battle at Lake Changjin — and Operation Hadal might be the boldest, most technically ambitious swing yet. This thing wants to be The Hunt for Red October, Black Hawk Down, and a full-throttle theme-park ride all at once. It almost pulls it off. Almost.

THE SETUP: STEEL, SALT WATER, AND HIGH STAKES

The setup is clean and instantly gripping. A heavily armed mercenary force storms Deep Blue 3, a massive offshore drilling platform sitting in Chinese waters. This isn’t a basic hostage grab; the danger escalates fast. A possible nuclear angle crashes into the plot, and suddenly we’re not just talking about a tactical incident — we’re staring down a potential geopolitical disaster. Beijing doesn’t hesitate: send in the elite Jiaolong commando unit on the Longjing, a state-of-the-art Chinese submarine, and crush the threat by any means necessary.

From there, the movie barely lets you breathe. We rocket from surface infiltration to underwater firefights, from submarine duels to close-quarters gunfights in cramped, pressurised metal corridors. Advanced military hardware is everywhere — some of it feels ripped from real-world tech, some of it clearly lives in full sci‑fi fantasy — but it all looks big, heavy, and dangerous. The deep ocean isn’t just a backdrop; it’s the main arena. The film leans hard into that hostile, claustrophobic environment, and the production design team deserves serious credit for turning steel bulkheads, flooded passageways, and pitch-black trenches into a constant pressure cooker.

THE CAST: TALENT THAT DESERVES MORE ROOM

Huang Xuan leads the Jiaolong team with a quiet, coiled intensity that feels right for a professional soldier. He’s physically convincing, totally committed, and he absolutely works as an action anchor. The problem is the script: it gives him a mission, not a personality. He has to complete the objective — and that’s pretty much all we really learn about him. Yu Shi steps in as another key member of the squad, handling the more tech-heavy sequences with confidence and presence, even when the writing around her starts to thin out.

The most interesting casting choices are Zhang Hanyu, a heavyweight from Chinese prestige cinema, and Duan Yihong, one of the best character actors working in China right now. Their roles hint at deeper layers — experience, moral authority, the burden of command — but the screenplay never truly digs in. They’re at their best when the movie finally takes a breath and just lets them sit in the frame and hold it. Those moments are rare, but when they land, you can see the film that might have been.

Du Jiang and Wang Junkai round out the main commando lineup. They handle the physical side of the job just fine, but the script mostly separates them by gear and battlefield role rather than personality. Jiang Luxia — a legit martial arts pro with real action cinema chops — is a standout presence. The movie is smartest when it simply gives her space and lets her move.

The mercenary villains get the job done but never really stick in your mind. Within the film’s logic, they’re dangerous, organised, and tactically sharp, but they’re more moving targets than actual characters. That’s a pretty standard issue for the genre, but it still hurts the movie: when your bad guys are just obstacles, your big action scenes don’t have a real human force pushing back.

THE ACTION: WHEN THE OCEAN TURNS INTO A WAR ZONE

Let’s be clear: as a machine built to deliver huge-scale military action, Operation Hadal is a monster. The filmmakers know the underwater setting is both their secret weapon and their biggest headache. Underwater action is notoriously hard to shoot clearly — movement slows down, geography gets messy, and everything can turn into a murky blur. You can feel how much time and money went into solving those problems, and for long stretches, it pays off. Fights in flooded rooms and open water have real physical weight, and the submarine warfare sequences deliver honest-to-goodness tension.

The Longjing itself is a star. It’s a fantastic piece of production design, walking the line between believable military tech and aspirational naval flex. Any time the submarine is doing its thing — slipping through the depths, launching the team, squaring up in underwater confrontations — the movie feels locked in. Those scenes blend scale, claustrophobia, and forward drive in a way that’s seriously impressive.

The ambush sequences — both on the platform and below the surface — are another highlight. They’re tight, aggressive, and just disorienting enough that you feel the chaos without completely losing track of where everyone is. The editing in these stretches is fast but controlled; the film keeps the momentum surging without tipping into total visual noise.

THE PROBLEMS: SHALLOW WATERS UNDER ALL THAT DEPTH

Still, for all its ambition and hardware, the movie doesn’t fully hit what it’s aiming for, and it’s worth being honest about where it stumbles.

Character work is the film’s biggest weak spot. A good commando-ensemble movie lives or dies on how much we care about each member of the team — their bonds, their fears, their reasons to make it out alive. Operation Hadal doesn’t have the patience for that. Characters get introduced, tagged with a broad trait, and thrown straight into the fight. We’re told why they matter to each other instead of actually shown. So even when the action is firing on all cylinders, it doesn’t always land emotionally. It feels like watching top-tier choreography performed by talented actors in roles that never quite turn into real people.

The plot is genuinely tangled. Mission objectives keep shifting so often that it wears you down. New complications, extra threat angles, and fresh twists on the nuclear stakes keep crashing in at high speed, until the movie starts to feel less like a story and more like a string of expensive, escalating set pieces searching for a strong through line. Exposition is barked out fast, often drenched in technical jargon and often delivered while something is exploding, so hanging onto the full picture isn’t always easy.

The tech regularly jumps from “maybe” to full-on science fiction, and the film never stops to acknowledge that leap. Some viewers will be all-in on that and ride the high; others will find it pulls them out of the thriller side of things. The wilder the gadgets and hardware get, the harder it is to feel real tension, because the rules of what’s possible keep stretching whenever the plot needs a boost.

The visual effects are hit-and-miss. At their best — especially in the big submarine shots and exterior platform work — they look excellent by any standard. At their worst — usually in some of the busier underwater composites — you can see the digital stitching clearly enough to crack the immersion the movie has been building. In a film that leans so heavily on its images to carry emotion, that inconsistency is a real issue.

And eventually, the spectacle just becomes too much. Every action fan knows that point where you’ve seen enough explosions and stunts that the next massive sequence doesn’t hit harder — it just blends into the noise. Operation Hadal barrels straight past that line and keeps piling on. The movie clearly loves its own size and intensity, but in the third act, the nonstop barrage starts to numb instead of thrill. A tougher, leaner cut — more character beats, more well-placed quiet before the next blast — would have made the biggest moments really soar.

A NOTE ON THE INTERNATIONAL CUT

If you’re watching the shorter international version — released in many territories as Operation Leviathan — it’s worth knowing that the cuts almost certainly hit character scenes, not action. That’s the usual pattern for international edits of Chinese blockbusters, and it means the criticisms about thin character development probably apply even more to the version most overseas audiences will actually see. If you can get your hands on the full domestic cut, that’s the one to go for.

THE VERDICT

OVERALL: Operation Hadal is a big, muscular, technically ferocious slab of action cinema that also, frustratingly, keeps refusing to slow down long enough to let you really care about the people inside all that metal. It’s a movie of massive scale and minimal interior life — brilliantly engineered on the outside, running a little thin when it comes to human drama.

For action junkies like me, though, it absolutely delivers — and then some — on its core promise: sustained, large-scale military spectacle in a deep-ocean environment that cinema almost never uses this heavily. The suffocating underwater sequences, the submarine warfare, the cold efficiency of the commando team, and the sheer audacity of the film’s technical ambitions make it essential viewing if you take the genre seriously. Huang Xuan, Zhang Hanyu, Du Jiang, Duan Yihong, Wang Junkai, Yu Shi, and Jiang Luxia all show up ready to work; they just needed a script that cared as much about people as it does about hardware.

So here’s the play: watch it loud. Watch it on the biggest screen you can find. Roll with the science fiction. Forgive the tangled plotting. And take it for what it really is — a national action cinema machine firing on most of its cylinders, reaching for something genuinely epic, and getting close enough that it matters.

★★★½ | 3.5 / 5 — A relentless, technically dazzling underwater war machine that runs on spectacle when it should sometimes run on heart. Essential for genre diehards; overwhelming for everyone else.