China Releases Painfully Awkward Military Recruitment Video

China’s People’s Liberation Army recently released a recruitment video that looks and sounds more like a poorly made rap movie than a military advertisement.

The motive behind the video is transparent: It’s meant to make the PLA look cool. Which isn’t surprising since the video was made specifically to appeal to younger, presumably male, viewers.

Packed with shots of ships, tanks, warplanes and ground troops, the video even shows PLA soldiers rescuing a damsel in distress — the only woman that appears in the entire video. There are snipers shooting people, men in crisp uniforms saluting, jets doing flybys over an aircraft carrier, rows of missiles, and highly choreographed shots of supply trucks and columns of tanks.

Oh, and military police riding motorcycles through flaming arches for no reason what-so-ever.

As much as I want to keep ragging on the video, it kind of makes me nostalgic for the days when the Army and Marine Corps recruiting videos had campy slogans like “be all you can be,” “Army of one,” and showed knights duking it out on a giant chess board.

The video was originally uploaded to YouTube by the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA. According to the upload, the song is called “Battle Declaration,” and the commercial is the first hip-hop video made the People’s Liberation Army.

Watch the video below and let us know if this motivates you to join.