Time Contributor | Simon
Flashes of light, drama is like life.
In 2018, there was an obscure thriller that was well received worldwide.
The freshness of Rotten Tomatoes is 92%, and the audience reviews 87%.
It can be called a model of small cost counterattack, with hundreds of thousands of costs, in exchange for more than 70 million box office revenue.
5 years later, the film launched a sequel.
30,000 people rated 8.1, and the audience on Rotten Tomatoes praised 90%, and the evaluation is still good.
Today, Time Jun will talk about this -
Cyber Mysteries 2
Suspense story
The film has its own gimmick and is the most popular "desktop movie" at the moment. ”
Desktop movies, as the name suggests, can be completed only through a computer screen, without the need to build complex scenes and studios, let alone find unique exterior scenes.
At most, the scene switches between the computer screen, the mobile phone screen, the TV screen, and the camera, which is called a "desktop movie".
The previously acclaimed "Unfriend 2: Dark Web" and "Cyber Enigma" are outstanding representatives of tabletop movies.
Although the scene is slightly single, it does not mean that the content is boring.
On the contrary, the film not only burns the brain, but also adapts to the habits of young people using electronic products.
The camera turns off with the computer mouse little by little, and a huge amount of details pour out, firmly grabbing the audience's attention.
Specifically, "Cyber Mysteries 2" tells such a story.
The heroine June, who lost her father when she was a child, grew up with her mother since she was a child.
In the blink of an eye, she has reached the stage of adolescent rebellion.
Although she is 18 years old, her mother is still not at ease, calling her videos or voice messages every day, instructing her all kinds of trivial life chores, Junen is very upset.
Coincidentally, one day, my mother suddenly told her that she was going to Spain with her boyfriend for a few days. This made Junen so happy that she went to party all day.
On the day his mother was supposed to return, June woke up from his "messy" home and rushed to pick up the plane. Strangely, the mother and her boyfriend were slow to show up.
After waiting for most of the day and not seeing a figure, June wondered, could it be a change? Or did you go play again?
In order to find out the current situation, she simply called the hotel where her mother was staying, but the other party told her that the two left their luggage in the hotel, but the person disappeared. Not only could Junen not be contacted, but neither could the hotel.
A good big living person, just evaporate in the world? June tried to contact her mother's friend and call the police for help, but the response was to make her wait. She was so anxious that she couldn't wait a second.
From here, the film enters self-help reasoning mode, where you can see all kinds of unexpected reasoning clues.
For example, she opened a website that provided errand running services and asked her errand brother to go to the hotel where her mother lived and check the hotel video.
At the same time, June logged into her mother's boyfriend's Google account to see where they both passed and if there was any useful information in their mailboxes.
This look is amazing, she found that her mother's current boyfriend had an ambiguous interaction with other members of the opposite sex, which frightened her.
Zhu En followed the vine and found out the man's previous criminal record. It turned out that he had previously gone to prison for several years because he defrauded women of money.
Could it be that the disappearance of the mother was deliberately planned by her boyfriend, and the whole thing may be the so-called "pig killing plate"?!
The film accompanies June's Internet search and ushered in waves of small climax.
The screen switches between crazy clicking windows, and the rhythm is so tight that it flies, and people dare not take a breath when they see it.
The most exciting part was that June discovered a website that could view street surveillance footage. In the video, she saw her mother and her boyfriend being kidnapped on the street, and she was immediately terrified and terrified.
At the same time, something even stranger appears, the mother's friend suddenly and mysteriously dies, and the dead biological father seems to be alive.
All kinds of clues are like a fog, enveloping Junen layer by layer.
Is the disappearance of my mother an accident or a planned conspiracy? Can June solve the confusion and find the truth? The mystery was not solved until the last second.
Electronic phobia
The fear of the film mainly comes from two levels.
The first level comes from the unexpected plot, which is reversed layer by layer, and the end can never be guessed until the last second.
The second level comes from the fact that it has a strong sense of immersion. Because the scene in which the story takes place is too familiar. Social animals have to knock on the computer every day when they go to work, and after work, they have to use the computer to watch movies, brush dramas and play games.
Therefore, when the heroine turns on the computer and skillfully operates the browser, chat software, and mailbox, it will be easy for the audience to substitute, because this is what young people do every day.
Distilling the horror and horror from the familiar daily life is the most difficult part of this movie.
For example, during the chat, the heroine made a strange phone call coldly. While hesitating to answer, the computer pops up other unfamiliar windows, which need to be dealt with immediately.
The two urgently appeared electronic tasks, making the heroine's sense of oppression stronger and stronger, and at this time, the camera was used to hit the front and back, constantly emphasizing the floating frequency of the phone ripple, and the heroine's flashing eyes left and right, and the tension was eager to drill out of the screen.
In addition, directors have other unique skills.
For example, let you find unfamiliar information in familiar emails. Through a keyword search in your mailbox, you suddenly find a side of someone that has never been revealed, and it turns out that he is not as good as you seem.
For example, when you turn to browsers, video sites, and chat software, it seems that you have done countless search efforts, and you find that it is futile.
It's a suffocating feeling that even the Internet can't help you, and it's far more desperate than the powerlessness of reality.
What's more, after the heroine's mother disappeared, the TV station reported the incident, and public opinion began to ferment on the Internet.
Some netizens believe that this is a pure disappearance, while others believe that it is an elaborate conspiracy theory, and even suspect that June is consuming his mother, and then launch a human flesh search and public opinion attack on her.
The director integrated the most popular diode phenomenon on the Internet into the film, which naturally drove the audience's sense of immersion and anger, as if everyone was eating melons and began to point fingers and vent their emotions.
Truth and facts, in the process, are diluted and blurred. This is also the most bizarre and cruel reality of the current era. The film brings this phenomenon to the screen.
Shoot novelty
Compared with "Network Mysteries 1", the shooting method of this sequel is more mature.
The story does not only take place on the computer screen, the director also added the digital watch screen.
The camera jumps from the computer to the phone and then to the digital watch. This will give the audience a sense of immersion like playing a game, and play through the level and fight monsters with the heroine.
Secondly, the film also teaches you how to play with Google accounts.
Since Google accounts can communicate with many software, you can log in to a Google account and you can see personal information such as email and map location.
Junen is by logging in to the Google account of his mother's male ticket to find clues step by step and promote the search process.
This is actually telling the audience in disguise that it is almost impossible to achieve 100% privacy in the Internet era.
Surprisingly, the live photos of the iPhone were also added by the director to participate in the narrative together.
The director abandoned dry text chats and replaced text with live photos, which were used to show important moments when characters revealed their hearts and emotions.
There are not many appearances of live photos, but every time they appear, they surprise the audience, it turns out that a small photo hides so much information.
The errand business in the same city shown in the film also makes people marvel at the speed of the development of the Internet.
With your fingers at the touch of a finger, you can find someone to help you do things in a foreign country, but how to build trust with the person across the screen has also become the most difficult problem in the Internet era.
Especially when you have urgent matters to deal with, how do you quickly trust a stranger to run errands for you? When things don't go as expected, how do you measure the uncontrollable?
Through the plot, the director pointed out the crisis of trust in the Internet era.
In the end, you will find that people's pathological dependence on the Internet is the most terrible thing.
Through several mobile APP, you can roughly understand a person's interests and love status; Through email, social platforms and keyword search, you can see a person's education and work information; The Internet makes it easy to piece together the trajectory of everyone's life.
For a long time, people have enjoyed the convenience provided by the Internet. When the Internet has penetrated into all aspects of our lives, it will inevitably face the risk of privacy leakage and information fragmentation.
Don't let your true self become a fragment that has been "missing" on the Internet, this is the theme that the film wants to express the most.