The Last Bullet

This film (drama)Also known as最后的子弹，is aMainland ChinaProducerbeauty live，At2006Released in year 。The dialogue language isMandarin Chinese，Current Douban rating7.3(For reference only)。

In 1950, with the exception of western Sichuan, the entire mainland of China had been liberated. As the liberating army advanced toward Xichang, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Hu Zongnan to defend western Sichuan at all costs, waiting for changes in the international situation. Thus, the first major stronghold in western Sichuan—Tianmeng Mountain—became a battleground for both the Nationalist and Communist armies. Due to having an older brother who was a Nationalist officer, Ma Yiwu, a cultural instructor in a certain unit of the People's Liberation Army, had served for five years and had not yet been admitted to the party. While following the troops advancing toward Xichang, the cultural work team was captured en masse by the Nationalist army. Just as they were about to be shot, a Nationalist officer released the entire cultural work team because of Ma Yiwu. This incident raised significant doubts among the cultural work team about Ma Yiwu's true identity. At this time, a certain unit of the People’s Liberation Army encountered setbacks while attacking the Nationalist 183rd Division, which was entrenched on Tianmeng Mountain in western Sichuan. When the military headquarters dispatched Commander Mei Daxue to provide reinforcements, he learned that the commander of the 183rd Division was Ma Yiwen, the eldest son of the Ma family, for whom he had once worked as a laborer, and that the second son of the Ma family was serving as a cultural instructor in the People's Liberation Army's cultural work team. Believing that Ma Yiwen valued brotherly ties due to his action of releasing Ma Yiwu, Mei Daxue decided to have Ma Yiwu use familial ties to persuade his brother to surrender at the front. When Mei Daxue assigned Ma Yiwu the task of persuading his brother to surrender, Ma Yiwu was unwilling to go...(read more) and do the persuading work. It turned out that Ma Yiwu's girlfriend from university had been forcibly taken by Ma Yiwen, leading to an irreconcilable enmity between the brothers. After some persuasion, Ma Yiwu still wrote a letter urging Ma Yiwen to surrender, but unexpectedly, Ma Yiwen replied that, due to the overwhelming situation, he had sent someone to negotiate with the People's Liberation Army and decided to surrender. A certain unit's commander Sun led Ma Yiwu and a platoon to go receive the surrender, only to find that Ma Yiwen was feigning surrender, and all these PLA soldiers became captives and were taken to Tianmeng Mountain, becoming a shield to obstruct the PLA's assault on Tianmeng Mountain. Having always been suspected, Ma Yiwu, when he proactively requested to follow Ma Yiwen as a captive to Tianmeng Mountain, even became a suspect of being a traitor due to the feigned surrender incident. After reaching the mountain, Ma Yiwu saw his long-missed university sweetheart Song Yiqin, but at that moment, she had become his sister-in-law and had a son, Ma Xiaowen. Ma Yiwen wanted to let Ma Yiwu go down the mountain, but Ma Yiwu knew that Ma Yiwen's feigned surrender was due to him, so if he were to go down the mountain, he couldn't explain it to the organization. At the same time, he couldn't abandon his captured comrades to go down alone. Ma Yiwen believed that Ma Yiwu's unwillingness to go down was because of Song Yiqin. In the dead of night, when the brothers were alone together for the first time, Ma Yiwu's resentment over his brother's taking his wife flared up, and just as he was about to beat Ma Yiwen, Ma Yiwen drew a gun and aimed it at him. At that moment, Song Yiqin stepped between the two. Knowing his brother’s hatred toward him, Ma Yiwen handed the gun to Ma Yiwu, urging him to shoot him, believing it could resolve their grievances and quell the PLA's suspicion of him as a traitor. But Ma Yiwu suspected that the gun had no bullets. Ma Yiwen removed a bullet from the gun, telling his brother that this was the bullet he had bought from Tibetan residents in Xikang fifteen years ago. It was in 1935 when Ma Yiwen's father and Song Yiqin's father had a deep enmity. To save his father, Ma Yiwen had his brother buy a shotgun and twenty bullets. However, due to the shotgun's poor quality, only one bullet remained of the twenty. This one bullet had appeared multiple times in the fates of the Ma and Song families, as well as between the Ma brothers over the past 15 years, intensifying their hatred. Ma Yiwen's feigned surrender sped up the PLA's military preparations to encircle the Nationalist troops on Tianmeng Mountain. Only Mei Daxue still held hopes for Ma Yiwu’s persuasion because he deeply understood that the soldiers who had fought bloodily for years dreamt of returning home to reunite with their families while the elderly in western Sichuan awaited their sons who were fighting for the Nationalists to come back and help them farm. If they forcibly attacked Tianmeng Mountain, many would die in the ensuing brutal battle. Mei Daxue sought ways to notify Ma Yiwu and expressed his willingness to be Ma Yiwu's party introducer. Thus, Ma Yiwu bore the emotional pain atop the mountain, putting aside personal grudges to carry out the persuasion work for his brother’s surrender. An envoy sent by Taiwan, Mao Dahua, realized the threat posed by Ma Yiwu and tried every possible means to undermine his persuasion efforts. The person Ma Yiwen valued the most was his son, Ma Xiaowen. When Ma Xiaowen fell ill with pneumonia after getting soaked in the rain, Ma Yiwen sought an airdrop of emergency medicine from Taiwan. However, what the airplane delivered was orders for the decisive battle in western Sichuan along with boxes of ammunition. In a fit of desperation, Ma Yiwen attempted to exchange PLA captives for medicine with Mei Daxue, who said the Communist Party does not conduct exchanges; however, to save Ma Xiaowen, the PLA agreed to unconditionally send medicine and doctors up the mountain. To stop the PLA's delivery of medicine, Mao Dahua ordered the remaining Nationalist troops along the route to intercept the medical team, and many were injured or killed in this skirmish. At a critical moment, Mei Daxue released Ma Yiwu, who had been apprehended and interrogated by the PLA. Ma Yiwu finally delivered the medicinal oil stained with the blood of ten PLA soldiers to Tianmeng Mountain, saving Ma Xiaowen from the grasp of death. To prevent Ma Yiwen and the 183rd Division from surrendering to the PLA, Mao Dahua determined to blow up Mei Daxue’s command post on his own, creating the false appearance that Ma Yiwen was again feigning surrender, prompting the PLA to launch a general attack on Tianmeng Mountain before Ma Yiwen actually surrendered. At a critical juncture, Ma Yiwu used the bullet that had never been fired to detonate the explosives Mao Dahua had strapped to himself, with a flock of white birds flying into the sky amidst the sound of the explosion.