Jin Dong + Wang Zhiwen, again a spy war theme, opened the new drama "Infernal" with some expectations, and the result ... Ay.
This play is about Lu Feng (played by Jin Dong), who graduated from the Japanese Army Academy, bursting with strength, and just returned to China and joined the Japanese secret service organization "No. 76" in China, and his real identity at that time was actually an undercover agent of the national army commander.
During the secret lurking of "No. 76", Lu Feng witnessed the darkness within the military system and the atrocities committed by the Japanese army against the sons and daughters of China. When he was distressed, the Chinese Communist Party threw him an olive branch, allowing him to find an opportunity to abandon the secret and serve the country with his life.
As a result, Lu Feng became a super spy with a triple identity: on the surface he was a Japanese military agent, the deeper layer was an undercover military commander, and the final hole card was an underground member of the CCP.
This is also a common routine of spy war dramas in recent years, the male protagonist can fight business, has a tough personality, walks between triple identities, participates in almost all major crises, and whoever becomes his opponent has to secretly complain.
Infernal is no exception. In the first episode, according to the teacher's request, Lu Feng wants to enter No. 76. So he went to the scene of the arrest mission on No. 76, and in addition to beating ten and overturning a group of agents with his bare hands, he also took advantage of the chaos to rescue the brothers of the past.
Faced with such a person with a suspicious identity, the leader of No. 76, Shen Xiao (played by Qi Dao), not only did not suspect, but also recruited him into the group, and the way he tested Lu Feng was to torture to extract a confession.
So the big problem came: in the face of electric shocks and a large amount of "spitting agent", Lu Feng not only remained awake at all times, but even transformed into a "Hulk", breaking free from the belt that bound his hands and feet, and also beat all three agents in the interrogation room down.
In the subsequent scenes, similar treatments are even more numerous, and the audience watches the Japanese agents' self-proclaimed shrewd plans easily destroyed by Lu Feng.
You know, in the spy war theme, the enemy is too weak chicken, the protagonist is always open, then the story is not good.
In fact, the spy war theme belongs to the unique genre films (dramas) of the same age as the Republic in domestic film and television dramas.
In 1949, the Northeast Film Studio filmed "The Invisible Front", which is about the secret battle between public security officers and Kuomintang agents lurking in the area after the liberation of Northeast China.
It's just that the saying at that time was "anti-special film (drama)".
During this period, anti-special films (dramas) have maintained a relatively high level.
Although the content is more main and the villain is also very facetious, it is quite deep when showing the desperate struggle between the two sides of the enemy and us due to different beliefs.
For example, "Yangcheng Dark Whistle" (1957), "Never Dying Airwaves" (1958), "Heroic Tiger Guts" (1958), "Wildfire Spring Wind Fighting Ancient City" (1963), etc., are all classics that you can't get tired of watching.
The turning point occurred in the early days of reform and opening up. At that time, film and television creators consciously added entertainment elements such as suspense, reasoning, thriller and even love to the value of the main theme, which greatly broadened the appreciation of this genre.
For example, "Donggang Spy" (1978), "The Gunfire of the Secret Bureau" (1979), "The Fog is Vast" (1980), the 10-episode TV series "Eighteen Years of the Enemy Camp" (1981), and "Harbin at Night" (1984) are typical representatives of this period.
In this group of lists, it is especially worth mentioning "Eighteen Years of the Enemy Camp".
In previous works, although there were many plots of underground party members lurking inside the national army, the focus was always on how the public security officers carefully laid out and destroyed the enemy's conspiracy.
As the first TV series in Chinese mainland, "Eighteen Years of the Enemy Camp" is more unique in that it shows how underground party members obtain and transmit intelligence for our army within the enemy army.
The freshness and tension of this undercover plot made it so popular as soon as it was broadcast, so that after it, the term "anti-special film (drama)" gradually disappeared, and people gradually renamed the genre "spy war film (drama)".
However, because the wave of reform and opening up has been fully rolled out, the main theme has been relatively reduced in number, and the trend created by "Eighteen Years of the Enemy Camp" has not been inherited, and there are only a few masterpieces of spy warfare in the middle, such as "No Regret Tracking" (1995) and "Zhou Enlai in Shanghai" (1998) starring Wang Zhiwen and Liu Peiqi.
The full bloom of the spy war theme will not wait until 2006.
In 2006, Liu Yunlong's self-directed and self-acted spy war drama "Dark Calculation" was broadcast. It pushes the undercover plot in "Eighteen Years of the Enemy Camp" one step further, that is, "catching the inner ghost".
Although today's audiences have long been familiar with this "catch the inner ghost" meme, it was very fresh back then: the audience was given a God's perspective, watching the people in the bureau be suspicious of each other and fighting wits and courage, which greatly improved the viewing ability.
In addition, the show also makes a lot of use of spy warfare techniques such as Morse code and code words that were rarely shown to the audience before, which enhances the authenticity of the story.
So with this drama, Liu Yunlong was regarded by the media as the "father of spy war dramas".
Three years later, 2009 was a landmark year for Chinese spy war films.
In the spring of 2009, the TV series "Lurking" starring Sun Honglei and Yao Chen was broadcast, raising the level of spy war TV series, so that today, more than ten years later, there is still no TV series of the same theme that can be compared with it.
In the fall of 2009, the all-star spy war movie "The Wind" became the most impressive movie in the National Day file, not only won the weekly box office champion for two consecutive weeks, but also ended with a box office result of more than 200 million.
With the advantage of the length and capacity of the TV series, "Lurking" has done enough details related to firewood, rice, oil and salt in spy war stories, which are close to life and close to the daily emotions of ordinary people. So at the end of the story, Yu Zecheng pretended to be an old hen in front of Cuiping's car to convey the message, which will be so moving.
What "Lurking" wants is to let the audience hear the thunder in a silent place. It is in those trivialities of life that we are familiar with, hiding the horror of underground workers' lives hanging by a thread.
"The Wind" is different. As a movie, it must give enough suspense, reversal and visual spectacle in a short enough time, in a tense rhythm and airtight and tense environment, so that underground party members can unknowingly convey the most important information.
What "The Wind" wants is to let the audience hear silence in the thunder.
In the face of such a harsh environment of struggle, it is still necessary to pass on the message, and behind this is actually an underground party member who has not yet been named.
"Lurking" and "The Wind", respectively, set up narrative samples for later spy war stories from the perspective of TV series and movies.
So after this, spy war films ushered in a heyday in China. For example, "Before Dawn" (2010), "Borrow a Gun" (2011) and "Cliff" (2012) starring Zhang Jiayi, and "Red" (2014) starring Zhang Luyi and Tao Hong have all completed the tribute to "Lurking" and "The Wind" on the narrative routine, and made their own new ideas.
A large number of classics are born, and naturally there are drawbacks, that is, there will be a larger number of shoddy works, which will be indiscriminately filled in the market.
This decline is doomed and cannot be avoided. Even if Noon Sunshine released the new benchmark "The Pretender" of idol spy war dramas in 2015, and Liu Yunlong, the "father of spy war dramas", released another milestone "Kite" in 2017, it could not save this situation.
And the bad thing is that after the explosion of "The Pretender", idol fresh meat and traffic companies also eyed this cake, acting skills are not good data to make up, script is not good data to make up, resulting in the spy war theme also slipped to neither follow the logic of facts, nor pay attention to the breath of life, let alone respect the audience's IQ of the "three no products".
Fortunately, the wind of traffic has been curbed in the past two years, but it is only that, if you can't start working hard from the script creation, this kind of chaos where the protagonist opens and hangs, the plot pulls the crotch, and the fans are embarrassed, it still can't be broken.
Seedlings