Someone lamented:
"Traditional reasoning films are outdated."
The traditional narrative, which is limited to logical reasoning and murder mystery, gradually falls into a trap.
So some people want to try to innovate.
I want to play with the "anti-traditional" elements through the shell of "tradition".
"Sharp Blade Out of the Sheath", which received high box office at the end of last year with a low-ranking film, is an extremely successful example.
But trying to play old tricks with new tricks is too risky.
A recent British drama has received mixed reviews -
《The White Horse Hotel》
the pale house
This drama follows the characteristics of the British drama "short and concise".
There are two episodes.
One hour per episode.
On the poster, the title is in the upper left corner.
Specially played the biggest selling point of this drama -
Agatha Christie.
Queen of the World Mystery Novel, one of the three great masters of speculative literature.
Treasure-class writer for the British people.
Calling her "treasure", there is also a joke that British filmmakers always catch her.
Almost every year.
Grandma's works will be re-taken out and remade again.
The 2015 BBC mini-series "No One Survives" attracted a vote of Grandma fans to cheer for it.
The 2017 movie "Murder on the Orient Express" has been remade for countless times.
It's still possible to gather a large group of star actors (Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, William Dafoe).
BBC and Amazon are more thorough, directly jointly creating an "Agatha series".
These include the first two films, Innocence (2018) and ABC Murder (2018).
The 2020 edition of "White Horse Hotel" is already the third work.
Let's start with a brief look at the story.
(Rest assured, there are no spoilers, and those who have seen the original book will know the ending.) ）
Set in the 1960s.
The story begins with the bizarre death of a middle-aged woman, Ms. Davis.
When police investigate the body, a mysterious list is found in her shoes.
There is a long list of names listed above.
The only one with the question mark was the male protagonist Mark Easterbrook.
The character is played by Lufus Sevier.
He played a high-ranking Nazi official in "The Strange Man of the High Castle".
In this play, he is a shop owner in central London and lives in a mansion.
The appearance is grand, but the slag is not good.
After the death of his first wife, he married a friend of his ex-wife.
Secretly found an underground lover.
One day, after a night of affair between the two, the lover died violently in bed.
And her name is in the list above.
After that, there is the familiar plot:
A series of bizarre murders occurred, and the people on the list died one after another.
After the investigation, the clues pointed to a place -
Marche Diping.
This remote village is very evil.
First, there is a "White Horse Hotel" here.
As a service place, it feels particularly gloomy.
I don't see any popularity at all.
Second, there is a "traditional activity" in the village.
It's the kind of religious activity that can make people's scalps tingle.
A crowd of strangely dressed people, wearing terrible masks and carrying "kings" woven from grass, paraded around the streets.
The climax of the celebration is the "beheading of the king".
Cut off the head of the straw man with a knife in public.
Although it is fake, it is still maddening.
Three, there are three witches here.
It looks mysterious and mysterious, and the words spoken are also nagging.
And the place where they specialize is precisely the White Horse Hotel.
The story grows more and more mysterious.
Danger also slowly descended on Mark.
The list grew more and more dead, and only Mark and a merchant named Osborne were left.
He took the initiative to find Mark.
Emphasize that it is actually a "death list" created by a witch.
All murders are accomplished by summoning demons through witchcraft.
The way these dead died was indeed strange.
A common feature is that it loses a lot of hair.
Mark felt more and more that something was wrong.
At night, he often dreams of a dead ex-wife, lover, or witch;
Several times during the day, he found mysterious objects woven in straw on the car.
Even, he had hair loss.
(Bald Star's Nightmare!!!! ）
After the story, Uncle Yu will not continue to tell.
But those who have seen the original work know how wonderful the process of peeling back the cocoon layer by layer and gradually revealing the truth to the surface is.
In Grandma's story, no matter how strange and chaotic and incredible the case is, you can find a reasonable and amazing ending.
Everything is done only by the human heart.
The original version of "White Horse Novel" has a strong religious and spiritual atmosphere, but the logic of reasoning is not diminished in the slightest.
It's even hardercore, because it has to rely on a lot of scientific power.
However, after the adaptation of the drama version, the supernatural being amplified, but the reasoning was weakened.
As mentioned earlier, the show has a total of two episodes, and the pace should have been fast.
But in fact, the screenwriter did not focus on the evolution of the plot at all, but spent a lot of ink to create the atmosphere and portray the characters.
Throughout the episode, there is a lot of fuss around the list and the town, but it never gets into the keyword "White Horse Hotel".
The deviation is very serious.
And in the creation of the atmosphere, a lot of shocking and frightening methods are used, which is closer to horror than suspense.
The show's screenwriter, Sarah Phelps.
At present, the three renovations and adaptations of the "Agatha Series" are all handled by her.
Her adaptations are often drastic.
Logical reasoning is greatly omitted or even eliminated, and attention is paid to the laying of suspense and atmosphere.
Lack of details of the case, but a lot of effort to add material at the audiovisual level.
Whether it's the backstory imposed on the protagonist in "Abc Murder";
Or the logical analysis in the clouds and fog in "The Disaster of Innocence".
It's two hours of laying the groundwork and solving the case for five minutes.
Many people call it "pretending to be a ghost, so making a fool of yourself", that is, there is no dry goods.
Obviously, such an operation does not seem to be satisfactory.
The rating is lower than one.
It has caused many Grandma fans to complain about "magic reform" and "destroy the original work".
The reasoning films of the past two years have indeed stagnated a bit.
The "counterattack" of "Blade Out of the Sheath", in addition to the amazing technique, still guarantees a basic:
Tell a good story.
Today's Hollywood does have some "Jiang Lang talent" flavor.
On the one hand, good scripts and good stories are hard to find;
On the other hand, the audience is indeed becoming less and less impatient.
More enthusiastic about the bells and whistles, indiscriminate audiovisual experience.
What can hit the g-spot of the masses is often mixed with idols, comedies, supernatural elements and other more direct and efficient ways of stimulating.
The more you mix and match, the more novel it is, and the more mixed it is, the more interesting it is.
It's better to be a bombshell than a character in the center of the camera.
This is also why IP and remakes are popular.
What does a large mass base mean?
It's efficient, it's also lazy.
There is no need to think too much about the story, and even the audience of the whole story is already familiar with it.
Simple, fast, batch copy.
Uncle Yu also couldn't tell whether this was developing or hind legs.
The more irritation, the slower numbness.
Putting aside the overly complicated showmanship and costumes, what can really make people remember is still the story.
It has to be the story.