It's 1949 and Tiananmen Square is a mess. Overgrown with weeds and thoroughly dilapidated it looks like hell, but it's where Chairman Mao wants to hold the Founding Ceremony for the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. And so Tian An Men recounts the heroism, the struggle and the sacrifices of a People's Liberation Army unit as they...clean up and re-decorate the Tiananmen Gate? Yes, it's Extreme Makeover: Communist Edition.

2009 marked the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, and the film industry dutifully released a slew of celebratory films. The best-known was Founding of the Republic, featuring every Hong Kong and Chinese star alive, but it's the lower profile special effects extravaganza, Tian An Men, that's actually worth watching. Based on interviews with the real life members of the PLA unit who restored Tiananmen Gate, Ye Daying's massive special effects spectacle recreated 1949 Beijing from the ground up, and required five months of shooting on enormous sets, and six months of postproduction, to bring it to life. Sure, it's Communist propaganda, but it's Communist propaganda on a scale so massive and jaw-dropping that it transcends propaganda and simply becomes...BEHEMOTH.

As the clock ticks down towards October 1, the drama troupe faces insurmountable decorating obstacles like a shortage of red dye, which they must procure via a con worthy of Ocean's 11. But the worst is Crisis Codenamed: Raise the Red Lanterns! Their lanterns are too small in relation to the massive gate, unbalancing their whole design scheme. Heads are going to roll unless they can find one of the few remaining craftsmen who can make a lantern big enough to offset the mega-sized architecture. It's out of these tiny incidents that Ye assembles his massive movie, detail by detail until it towers over the horizon, a massive monument to the blood and sweat that built modern day China, brick by brick and lantern by lantern.