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As one of the representatives of maritime civilization, unlike the inward development trend of inland civilization, Britain has never been afraid to turn itself into a beast that always looks at its neighbors, and has established the former sunrise empire through maritime expansion, while also integrating its own marine culture into its national nature, and even affecting the entire Western world.
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"Battle for the Furious Sea" is such a film about Britain's struggle with France for supremacy on the sea before becoming the world hegemon. Navigation, war, machination, exploration of the world... While it combines various elements that straight men like to see, it uses the collision of two heroic narratives to highly restore the historical scene of this maritime civilization country in the era of maritime hegemony.
▲ "Battle of the Furious Sea" phoenix satellite TV movie station on December 30 at 21:15 broadcast
The American-funded film, directed by an Australian director, paints a near-perfect picture of the British Navy of that era: a value for honor, exaltation, an undisguised thirst for wealth, but also unusually tough.
The film is based on the Napoleonic Wars period, and it creatively takes a way that avoids mainstream narratives to tell the story of that era.
In 1805, when Napoleon and the Third Coalition fought fiercely on the European continent, viewers familiar with that period of history may be tired of watching "the uniform triumphs of the Corsican monsters". And when the battlefield goes to sea, everything becomes different.
Although the French army still has the advantage, at least the strength will not be too disparity, and the British army can at least fight in this setting.
This is the basis for this story, and it is from this perspective that we can see the birth of that rough hero. And this kind of rough hero can often only be bred by the marine civilization.
The director of this film is Peter Will, whose works are all familiar to us: "Truman's World" and "Death Poetry Society".
▲ Director Peter Will
This is a director who prefers heroic narratives, and he will set the "world that exists only for one person" in "Truman's World". At the same time, he also favors certain "stubborn heroes", such as the teacher Kitin in "Death Poetry Society" who stubbornly wants to teach students "the beauty of poetry" in defiance of rules.
The two portrayals of heroes are unified in Raging Seas, where he completes his personal heroic narrative with the "lucky" Captain Jack, but at the same time, he also creates an "anachronistic" Dr. Stephen Madureen to further refine this story about heroes.
Captain Jack and Dr. Madureen
From the perspective of traditional Chinese, the hero is the Xiang Yu who "can make ten thousand enemies" and the famous general Bai Qi who "pits and kills 300,000 Zhao Jun", because we believe that the wheel of history will always be "a success into a thousand bones".
Adhering to this classical concept of heroism is the "Captain Jack", who is revered by all crew members, and he is loved ostensibly because he "never lost a battle", but the deep reason is that he "never tried to win the friendship of sailors".
This was the basis of his solemn discipline in guaranteeing the whole ship, and only the sailors, who had an unconditional faith-like admiration for him, could complete the task without compromise and willingness after he had given his orders, and only the sailors who always had reverence and even fear for him could avoid mutinies and rebellions in times of adversity.
"Carrots and sticks" is his leadership art, and he will feast generously after the gunners have quickly loaded their shells, giving them a reward of drinking strong liquor, and he will also lash out mercilessly when his subordinates disobey their superiors.
"Man" has never been the most important supreme being in his mind, and history is not a shining heterogeneity.
The seafarers are just tools for him to fulfill his duties and tasks.
Such values are truly happening in our history.
On June 9, 1938, the most difficult period of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Chiang Kai-shek lost one after another in the frontal battlefield, and the Japanese army was like a broken bamboo.
In order to delay the large-scale attack of the Japanese 14th Division, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the blowing up of the "Garden Pass" of the Yellow River ferry crossing on the back of Zhengzhou City, Henan Province, so as to "replace the troops with water" to delay the process of the Japanese invasion of China, buy time for the transfer of materials and troops, and objectively make the mechanized troops of the Japanese army unable to play their role.
Therefore, Jiang Zaizhen, commander of the New Eighth Division of the National Revolutionary Army, led the elite personally and 800 people to dig the embankment along the river and put the explosives into a large vat for blasting.
The people at the scene were fierce, and the nationalist army even "had to kill dozens of people" to successfully eliminate within a radius of five miles, but even the elites who had experienced hundreds of battles cried in the face of the upcoming tragedy.
As the bomb exploded, thousands of miles of wild land suddenly became a vast ocean, and since then China has added another "yellow pan area".
Downstream people have nowhere to go, displaced, mournful, and starving.
According to incomplete estimates, the number of refugees exceeds 10 million, and the number of dead and injured people is nearly one million.
"Xinhua Daily" published an article saying: "The yellow water flooded, the disaster situation was extremely serious, Zheng County, Zhongmu, Baisha, Weishi, Yanling, Taikang, Xihua, Shenqiu and other counties, the entire Central Plains has become a Ze country." ”
But was Chiang Kai-shek a sinner through the ages? Yes or no, Chiang Kai-shek at that time was in a situation of internal and external troubles, not only to weigh the relations between China and abroad, but also to resist the surrender sentiment within the Kuomintang, he urgently needed more than anyone a campaign that could enable China to gain a firm foothold, otherwise the troops would flee for thousands of miles, and eventually it would be difficult to escape the fate of the country and the country.
Chiang Kai-shek has always been such a contradictory existence, he is a hero and a sinner, he has contributed great strength to the Chinese nation to resist foreign aggression, but he is also the culprit of the civil war, and the characteristics of the hero of classicism can be seen in Chiang Kai-shek's body.
"Human life is like grass, and the fortunes of the country are greater than the heavens."
Such heroes are destined to go down in history, and people are happy to be loyal to pass on their deeds from generation to generation, but if the world were such heroes, then the history of mankind would not only be caught in the battlefield of blood and fire, swords and swords, and how cruel and boring such history would be.
Fortunately, we have another kind of hero, who may seem cowardly, who may be stubborn, but because of them, the world has another deeper heroic feeling.
Stephen Madureen in "Raging Sea" is the second kind of hero in the director's mind.
He was superbly skilled, and in rescuing the ordinary seafarer whose head had been cut off by shrapnel, he demonstrated a technique that seemed almost miraculous to others: repairing the skull with coins.
From the beginning, he opposed Jack's pursuit of the ship's strong and powerful "Hell" for "responsibility and glory", in his view, human life is at stake, and Captain Jack believes that this is a kind of literati cowardice and cowardice.
He is also a biological scientist obsessed with finding new species, and once had a heated argument with Captain Jack over whether to stay on an island full of novelty species.
He did almost die because of his hobby, and when he went to chase a bird that was staying on the ship, he was unfortunately hit by the crew who wanted to shoot down the bird, and immediately needed to undergo surgery to remove the bullet embedded in the ribs.
As the only doctor on the ship, the only possibility was that he had done it himself, so a bloody operation began, and he personally ripped open his ribs and found the shrapnel in a blur of flesh and blood. The scene was so bloody that even jack, the battle-hardened hero who helped him hold the mirror, couldn't bear to look at it directly.
From this point of view, the doctor is not a person who lacks courage, and his so-called "cowardice" is only because he has something more important to guard.
Looking back at our own history, Li Hongzhang is probably also such a "cowardly" hero.
Many people evaluate him as "losing power and humiliating the country" and "cowardly and timid" - he signed many unequal treaties, and he personally buried the Beiyang Fleet.
However, as one of the few people in modern China with an international perspective, Li Hongzhang clearly knew that the poor and weak Daqing was a "paper paste empire" and could only do his best to maintain the last decency of this defeated empire.
As he himself said, "Be a monk for a day and hit the clock for a day".
Many times it is not that it cannot be fought, but that the country cannot afford to pay the price after the fight.
Li Hongzhang is not a person who lacks courage, nor has he ever been a small person who uses the interests of the country to set a foot in his own path to promotion.
In exchange for a gun to accompany 100 million taels of silver, when the Maguan Treaty was signed, he said to the young prince who went with him: "Sometimes the most difficult thing for people to write is their own name, you are still young, this ancient insult will be borne by the old man." ”
He was a man of change, even romance, who led the delivery of the first batch of young children from the Qing Dynasty, hoping that they would bring new hope.
Most of those young children who returned to China became the masters of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, and many people's names are still thunderous: Zhan Tianyou, Cai Shaoji, Tang Shaoyi, Liu Yufeng...
Heroes have always been needed in human history, as the American mythologist Campbell put it: "Heroes are those who dare to embark on a journey, to climb over obstacles, and to express in some way the desires of our hearts." ”
Our history is indispensable to the shining classical heroes, but this second kind of hero is probably rarer and more precious.
They are not the kind of character that is happy and vengeful, and many times they even appear cowardly with their mother-in-law, but when they encounter things that really care about what needs to be guarded, they instantly become hard as iron.
Even if they are going against the tide at this time, even if there is a torrent of waves ahead, they are still willing to be the stubborn stone of the reverse current.
The spark of the collision of the two kinds of heroism in "Battlefield Iron Blood" and "Reverse Current Stubborn Stone" in "Battle for the Furious Sea" reflects the consistent humanistic depth of director Peter Weir's works. Bringing wise thinking in the real sea battlefield that does not lose the ornamentality, whether it is the reproduction of real and meticulous historical scenes, or the meticulous and delicate character emotional performance, this downright "man's play" has a unique temperature, which is worth our careful taste.
Film Forecast
Movie Raging Sea Clash
December 30 at 21:15
December 31 at 3:45 PM
The collision of two heroic narratives
Text: Cao Zeyu
Editing: Focus, Montessori