Based on actual events, “The Children of Huang Shi” is an involving wartime drama set in China in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation of that country.

Filmed on locations throughout China, it’s a story of hardship and extraordinary heroism. A young British journalist, George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), comes to China looking for a story and finds far more than he bargained for. Stunned and appalled by atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Nanking Massacre that began in late 1937 and barely escaping with his own life, he takes refuge at a Chinese orphanage in the countryside.

The place is run by the orphans themselves, all boys, who have been abandoned by adults. Nearly starving, they’ve grown almost feral in the absence of any kind of supervision. At the urging of Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), a circuit-riding American nurse who stops at the place occasionally to give the kids much-needed medical attention, Hogg reluctantly agrees to stay and run the place.

Director Roger Spottiswoode (“Tomorrow Never Dies”), working from a script credited to James MacManus and Jane Hawksley, devotes close to half the movie to the gradual process by which Hogg wins the trust and ultimately the affection of the children.

He learns Chinese, he teaches the kids English, he helps to make the orphanage close to self-sufficient in terms of food by planting and growing a garden with the kids’ help.

It’s a two-way learning street. It’s through the kids that he learns Chinese, and it’s from the orphans of farmers that he learns how to make the garden most productive.

The slow and difficult forging of the bond between the Englishman and the Chinese kids is carefully and sensitively detailed by Spottiswoode.

When Nationalist Chinese troops threaten to conscript the kids into their army, Hogg comes up with the idea of escaping with them over the ancient Silk Road route used since Marco Polo’s day to a far distant town on the edge of the Gobi Desert. It’s a 700-mile trek, part of it over high snow-choked mountains, and it’s done mostly on foot by some 60 orphans. Because so much time has been spent at the orphanage, the trek section of the movie feels compressed and somewhat rushed.

Subplots involve a triangular relationship between Hogg, the nurse Pearson and a communist partisan fighter named Chen (Chow Yun Fat) and a friendship that develops between Hogg and a shrewd merchant played by Michelle Yeoh.

The complex emotions that motivate Hogg’s and Pearson’s altruism are closely examined, and all the characters register strongly.

Rhys Meyers effectively anchors the picture and conveys Hogg’s transition from naive idealist to tough-minded, resourceful rescuer. Throughout, his character’s compassion is greatly tested but becomes ever more fiercely focused as hardships mount. He is determined to save the kids whatever the risks, or the costs. And in this story, the risks are great and the costs are almost unimaginably high.

Soren Andersen: 253-597-8660 * * *

The Children of Huang Shi

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell, Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun-Fat

Running Time: 1:54

Rating: R; violence, language, sexual situations, nudity, scenes of drug use

Where: Grand Cinema, 606 S. Fawcett Ave., Tacoma; showtimes, Pages 22-23