It is no exaggeration to say that "The Wonder of Immortality" is one of the most scarce genres in the current domestic film market.
It uses a soft sci-fi, more precisely fantasy genre approach, to tell a story full of humanistic thinking.
Poster of The Ageless Wonders
This type of good film is numerous in foreign countries, such as "Truman's World" and "The Day of the Groundhog".
However, it is quite disappointing that "The Wonders of Immortality" has undoubtedly been greatly reduced in terms of completion.
It does not make the so-called "immortal" consistent in the story, nor can it find a suitable piece of story soil for the heavy theme.
This also led to the film barely getting a passing score of 6.1 on Douban, which triggered many complaints and complaints about it in the short evaluation area.
What kind of story does "The Wonders of Immortality" tell? Why is it making fans angry?
1
A man's sadomasochistic love
"The Strange Story of Immortality" is obviously a big male protagonist movie, and Guo Xiaolu, played by Wang Chuanjun, is the absolute protagonist of the whole story.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Guo Xiaolu came from a well-off family and grew up in a Kochi family, where his father was a cutting-edge talent in chemistry.
Stills from The Ageless Wonders
However, due to an accident, Guo Xiaolu lost his father in childhood, and he also left his after-effects in the explosion.
His visual system and ordinary people are very different, in short, the world in his eyes is half a beat slower than others, just like the upgraded shots in the movie.
The advantage is that his reaction speed is amazing, and he has an advantage in reading books and learning the piano.
The downside is that he can't move fast, not even a little faster, because his physical speed can't keep up with the speed of vision.
During that boring childhood, Guo Xiaolu met Su Lingfang, played by Wang Luodan.
The latter, like Guo Xiaolu, also grew up in a Kochi family, but because his parents went to Daxinganling to conduct secret research, they put their daughter in the Guo family for foster care.
Guo Xiaolu and Su Lingfang became the soul mates of Qingmei Bamboo Horse. But the happy time is short-lived, and the two people's lives are divided and merged.
Su Lingfang was first taken to the countryside by relatives to raise her, but after a few years, she ran away from home and was not heard from. Guo Xiaolu met Su Lingfang again on the bar stage during college.
Su Lingfang wanted to make a name for herself in her acting career, while Guo Xiaolu was highly regarded by famous teachers and became famous in the surgical world.
Although the two are each other's white moonlight, the trajectory of their lives is gradually drifting apart, so that they gradually miss each other.
Su Lingfang and Guo Xiaolu's childhood playmates were married and became popular in the film and television industry; Guo Xiaolu went to the Czech Republic to deeply research in the field of stem cells with his mentor's daughter.
At the end of the film, the pen turned sharply, allowing Guo Xiaolu to return to his hometown with an ageless body, standing in front of Su Lingfang, who was middle-aged, and the two actually got together again because of a car accident.
Su Lingfang gave birth to a daughter for Guo Xiaolu, and Guo Xiaolu comforted Su Lingfang with an ageless face in the twilight of his old age.
If you look at it from the story level alone, "The Strange Thing of Immortality" is quite strange, and it is no less than the "Soul Hunting" starring Zhang Zhen, which was released at the beginning of the year.
The era set, the literary narration, the infatuation between men and women, the science fiction elements and the dog-blood relationship are all filled with this 136-minute film, and the audience is difficult to get sleepy when watching.
2
What are the fantasy elements?
Obviously, both in terms of title and story framework, "The Wonders of Immortality" is strikingly similar to David Finch's "Rejuvenation" in 2008.
Benjamin Barton, the male protagonist of "Rejuvenation", was born as a baby with an old physique and face. For the rest of his life, Barton grew younger and younger, from an old man on crutches to a vigorous and stylish old sailor, to a charming middle-aged man, and finally to a child who kept degenerating and becoming a child with teeth and teeth.
Poster of "Rejuvenation"
Similarly, in the fantasy setting, the second half of "The Wonders of Immortality" is also fully written on Guo Xiaolu's "Immortality".
In addition, both films revolve around the love story of a man and a woman; both narrate the vicissitudes of a man spanning more than half a century.
However, leaving aside the influence of the classic film "Rejuvenation", Wang Shuo, the screenwriter of "The Wonder of Immortality", has also become the creator of the text core of this story.
In the list of Wang Shuo's works, there are many stories that unfold with wonderful settings.
For example, in "Stubborn Lord", there are avant-garde service projects of "Three T Companies"; the subsequent "Private Order" is a kind of continuation of "Stubborn Lord", the so-called "dream for others", which is a setting with idealistic and fantasy elements.
Stills from "The Stubborn Lord"
Therefore, to some extent, "The Wonders of Immortality" is not only a reference to the genre of "Rejuvenation", but also follows Wang Shuo's own past text style.
The most eye-catching thing about this film lies precisely in the two fantasy settings of the male protagonist Guo Xiaolu.
One is that when he was a child, his visual speed was higher than that of ordinary people; the other was that he gained an ageless body in his youth because of the success of stem cell research.
Specifically, the extraordinary visual speed allows the film's comedic section to be established.
For example, Guo Xiaolu's continuous wrestling in childhood, easy to cope with the professor's table tennis accompaniment, and outstanding achievements in surgery.
These comedy sections not only make "The Strange Thing of Immortality" seem light and interesting, but also prompt Guo Xiaolu's life to turn to one unknown inflection point after another.
As for the second fantasy setting, the immortal body, it becomes the emotional landing point of the whole film, the destination of thinking.
Whether it is the sudden death of his father as a child, or the quiet death of his mother in his youth, or the relief of his mentor, ding Mengmeng's sudden departure, death has become a sensitive man like Guo Xiaolu, who wants to escape the topic of his life.
Therefore, "immortality" in Guo Xiaolu's body has become a mirror that reflects eternity.
The length of an individual's life is not the ultimate goal he pursues, what he wants to touch is actually the inseparable emotions.
This reminds people of "The Man Taken by the Light", which is also a domestic fantasy film.
Stills from "The Man Taken by the Light"
In this film, which is "a pair with love is taken away by the light, and the individual without love is left behind", fantasy elements and realistic issues are cleverly intertwined, which is really unique in the Chinese film industry in 2019.
However, is it quite innovative in the context and taste at the text level, can it cover up the many shortcomings of "The Wonders of Immortality"?
3
Narrative fragmentation and character out-of-focus
If the first half of "The Wonder of Immortality" can be scored seven points, then the second half is not even four points.
In fact, the part of this film before Guo Xiaolu went to the Czech Republic was not badly filmed.
From the loose tension of the narrative, to the careful restoration of the sense of age, and even the ironing texture of the image, it has the taste of the sixth generation of director Wang Xiaoshuai.
This story is also lamented because of the legendary experience of Guo Xiaolu and Su Lingfang.
The rolling red dust of the big times and the unknown future of the little people collide here with the fireworks of sadness. The philosophical thinking of life and death is not abrupt, but it makes the audience with a certain experience feel very deeply.
But when Guo Xiaolu and Ding Mengmeng start a new story in the Czech Republic, the entire film slides into an inexplicable black hole, as if the previous character relationships and emotional accumulation have disappeared.
In addition to Guo Xiaolu's occasional two sentences and Su Lingfang's old love, the rest of the time is staged with Ding Mengmeng in a "cat and mouse" unrequited love.
In addition to forgetting the emotional line between Guo Xiaolu and Su Lingfang, the film also divides the focus of the characters in half and places them on Ding Mengmeng.
Her feelings with Czech women scientists, her parting from her father, and her death vows with Guo Xiaolu make people wonder who is the female number one?
In addition, Guo Xiaolu's clues have also become broken.
Whether it is obstinately going his own way, injecting stem cells, or going to Africa to experience human suffering, the film makes Guo Xiaolu a literary and artistic old youth who "dies for immortality".
The most crucial thing is that the fantasy setting of "Immortality" has also become too realistic in the laboratory bridge section that continues to appear, losing the beautiful lightness of the fantasy film itself.
As a result, at the narrative level of the two parts of "The Wonders of Immortality", there is an obvious and fatal sense of rupture, and the core character relationship, Guo Xiaolu and Su Lingfang, has also become Guo Xiaolu and Ding Mengmeng without warning.
Even if the audience favors the fantasy setting of the film, it is impossible not to feel resentful and disappointed after watching the whole film.
This may be the Achilles heel of domestic fantasy genre films.
They can often start from a fantasy setting, stage one funny gimmick after another for the audience, or visualize the fantasy element into a certain aspect of real life.
What is not enough is that they will always be confused when the genre is integrated, and they cannot use the fantasy element as a bead chain throughout the story.
This craftsman-style craftsmanship technique is actually the cornerstone of the hidden film industry.
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