This is, sort of, a Chinese disaster movie with every bit of the quality of a Hollywood disaster movie but told so differently.   Unlike the normal Hollywood approach were you learn about peoples lives and then you get the disaster.  This movie has the disaster first and then you get involved with the survivors.

Aftershocks is  about the reprecussions of the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976 that flattened the city and took the lives of hundreds and thousands of people and left thousands upon thousands of orphans.  It follows the lives of three characters for 30 years and in the process you will learn a great deal about Chinese culture during those time period.  While reading the comments about this movie I learned that the Chinese people thought this movie was full of propaganda.   As a westerner, I guess I saw some, but I wouldn't have said it was chock-full.

There's some great drama in this movie.  The inciting incident is that while trying to pull survivors from the rubble, a mother is forced to make the choice as to which one of her twins to save - the boy or the girl.  She saves the boy and we follow their life from that point.  But unknown to both of them the girl, left for dead, is actually alive and we  follow her story from that point - as an orphan of the quake who is adopted by a communist party couple.  

I was a little disappointed that there wasn't additonal disasters in this movie, just the first one.  However, the story kept me so involved that I hardly noticed.  Even though you know what's going to happen in this movie at the end, you are never sure where this movie is going to go in-between.  And then when you get to the end and what you expected was going to happen, finally happens, and you're all smugly ready to say 'I knew this was how it was going to end'  then they approach that ending in such an unexpected manner that really tugs at your heart-strings.  I'm even getting a bit teary-eyed remembering it.

I really can't recommend this movie enough. See it.