"Wolf Totem": Chinese theme Western culture

The national premiere won 29.2 million at the box office on the same day, and together with six other films, it set a box office record of 330 million yuan on the first day of the Spring Festival. "Wolf Totem" is an adventure drama adapted from a documentary best-selling novel directed by French director Jean-Jacques Arnold, which took 5 years to create, recreating the legend of the wolf on the steppe of Inner Mongolia.

In the movie "Wolf Totem", taking zhiqing to the mountains and going to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution as the background of the times, it tells the life experience of Zhiqing Chen Jin and Yang Ke who joined the team in the Inner Mongolia Elun grassland. Here, the protagonist Chen Jin encounters a whole new world: vast grasslands, simple herders, and ferocious wolves. Chen Zhen, who came out of the book world, has continuously understood and worked hard to integrate into this unique ecological circle on the grassland. In this film, the wolves on the prairie are the protagonists, and the film spends a lot of time describing their cooperation in hunting yellow sheep, driving military horses into the snowy lake, escaping from people hunting wolf cubs, and howling wolves on the night of the moon.

In fact, this is a movie about wolves. It is a more realistic restoration of the wild, intelligent, cruel and dignified side of the steppe wolf. The subject matter of this film is similar to that of "Princess Mononoke" directed by Hayao Miyazaki in Japan. It is all about the invasion and change of the original relatively balanced ecosystem by the alien world. Princess Mononoke is a girl raised by the wolf god, and Chen Jin is a young man who raises steppe wolves, and their intimacy with the wolves allows us to gain more inspiration from the perspective of wolves to catch this species for humans.

The worship of all living things has always been the totem of human beings. Bringing together faith and worship into a spiritual symbol, giving an image from the creatures of nature, and becoming a conventional cultural cognition. This is inseparable from the history of the origin of our lives, in Bruce Lee's films there are "descendants of the dragon", in Ang Lee's films there are "legends of the tiger", in Miyazaki's films there are also "wolf gods". These totemic worships reached a cultural peak in the previous centuries, and with the deepening of science, people were far more capable of surviving in the face of nature than before, and gradually transformed the totemic belief in the spirit of nature into the worship of scientific productivity.

The totemic belief, which is supported by ancient culture, is described very directly in the movie: this is a movie from the wolf is the totem, to the wolf is the sheep, and then the wolf is the wolf. The wolf is a totem, which means that in the first place in this grassland, humans and wolves are creatures living together under the will of the god Tengger, and the herders are more in awe and far away from the wisdom and bravery of the wolf pack. The men of the steppe are like a brave wolf, and the real wolves guard the grassland.

It wasn't until the modern civilizations made of diesel-burning machines and reinforced concrete occupied the steppe that the previous equilibrium between humans and wolves was broken, and people dug up the yellow sheep of the wolves for the winter in the Snow Lake, stripped out the wolf cubs, and even hunted the wolves to obtain precious fur. Behind the balance break is the establishment of new laws of survival, and the newly stationed members have guns in their hands but lack a reverence for the creatures of nature by the indigenous herders. Soon, after setting traps and hunting again and again, the wolves became "sheep" in the hands of humans. Wolves, who have fallen to the weaker side, can only migrate deeper into the more remote grasslands, away from humans.

"Man can be defeated, but he cannot be destroyed." This quote comes from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and the same applies to steppe wolves. The effect of the 3D picture, 95% of the real shots, highly magnifies the wolf's expression and eyes to the front of the screen, making us re-examine this species. When it was chased by a shotgun to the cliff with no way out, it would rather jump hard and jump into the arms of the god Tengger in the sky than be captured. This dignified being reawakens people's deep admiration for natural species other than humans. The return of wolves from the altar to the essential cognition of the animal wolf clan is also a step towards the maturity of human cognition. The story of the big life and the little life is the story of the yellow sheep and the grassland, and the story of the human being and the wolf.

Good movies are always big and small, and they are thought-provoking. The story of the steppe wolf tribe is about the awakening of the ecological balance of nature, about the fusion and collision of mainstream cultures and marginal cultures, and the humility of always maintaining awe in the face of nature.

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