Text: McDull
The movie "Kidnapping Game", which was released yesterday, had a box office of only 3.757 million on the first day, and the predicted box office was only 36 million. This film, adapted from Keigo Higashino's novel, is expected to pounce again.
This is not the first time that Keigo Higashino's novel adaptation has hit the streets in China, from "Anxiety Grocery Store", "Murder in the Cloister Pavilion", "Wandering Blade" to now "Kidnapping Game", it seems that they can't escape the curse of doomed failure. It stands to reason that Keigo Higashino's novels, as the top of the East Asian reasoning community, have a tight reasoning logic and a critique of human nature, which can lay a solid foundation for adapting the screenplay. But the Chinese adaptation can only grasp the reasoning shell of the work, but it loses the soul of the work.
So what is the soul of Keigo Higashino's work?
In Guduo's view, it is a kind of beauty that belongs to Japan culture, the morbid character psychology, the extreme character relationship, and the crazy motive for committing crimes, which are the most essential inner charms that attract readers, not just superficial reversal tricks. If the creator cannot deeply understand the differences between Japan culture and Chinese culture, and make effective trade-offs and localized recreations, then not only will Keigo Higashino's novel be adapted to the streets, but all remakes and adaptations of Japan works will be poorly grafted, resulting in a fiasco at the box office and word of mouth.
Negative textbook "Three Pits"
"Kidnapping Game" is the latest negative textbook, after watching it, Gu Duo said with deep emotion, "Good movies are all similar, and bad movies have their own bad methods." "And the rot of "Kidnapping Game" is a kind of unconvincing rot of the characters, a kind of rotten that uses conspiracy as an open card, a kind of rotten that is full of makeup and a strong wind, and a kind of rotten that is overhead to the four dislikes.
The story of the movie is simply that the orphan Lu Fei (played by Peng Yuchang) accidentally owes a million gambling debts to the wealthy businessman Qin Haipei in order to treat the dean, and in desperation, he meets Qin Xiaoyao, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, and the two decide to cooperate in a kidnapping game and join forces to extort tens of millions of assets from the wealthy businessman. When the two successfully got the money, Lu Fei found out that the real Qin Xiaoyao was dead, and it was Qin Xiaoou, the eldest daughter of a wealthy businessman, who played the game with him. In order to win back the game, he decided to kidnap Qin Xiaoou with love, so as to reveal the truth and let Qin Haipei lose the district mayor election.
At first glance, this story seems to be reversed, but when you think about it, it is full of loopholes, which makes people speechless. The reason why this unique bad method is presented is that "Kidnapping Game" has stepped on at least three big holes in the adaptation.
The first big pit is "not hit, no day". The biggest feeling of "Kidnapping Game" is that this is neither a Chinese story nor a Japan story, all the characters and backgrounds are like castles in the sky, and they can't stand scrutiny at all. The filming location is in China, but the district mayor election is too far away from the Chinese; The male protagonist illegally buys blood and locks the dean in the house for treatment. The rich second-generation heroine is obviously favored but feels like a caged bird, which is again very Japan psychology; The Chinese environment, the psychology of Japan, and the plot of Southeast Asia are mixed up as a whole to create a particularly unreal feeling. And the audience has no way to substitute a story that they don't believe.
The second big hole is "casting failure". The character of the male protagonist is an extremely shrewd and deceitful person, but Peng Yuchang has a harmless young face, and the audience feels that he was sold and helped to count the money, how can they believe that he can kill the treacherous rich businessman played by Yao Lu. And the love between the male protagonist and the female protagonist in the original book is a sick and distorted love similar to Stockholm syndrome, but Peng Yuchang and Hu Bingqing did not perform the sexual tension of two crazy critics who fell in love and killed each other, but instead had a sense of youth like two high school students running away from home, and naturally it was impossible for the audience to believe that the heroine would be willing to be used by Lu Fei for love in the end.
The third big pit is "the magic changes the original work and loses the soul". Sakuma, the male protagonist in the original book, is not as desperate as in the movie, he is a very competitive advertising planner, because he was insulted by the boss of the car company, so he wants to kidnap his daughter to save his face, and his life motto is "I don't just want the flesh, but the highly exciting game." This is where the name "Kidnapping Game" comes from, a way for urban elites to use games to have fun and escape the meaning of life in a life of nothingness; It is the distorted state of people wearing masks and losing themselves in money under the bubble economy in Japan.
The movie takes the core trick of the original book, but ignores its theme and the background of the times, and drastically changes the male protagonist's design, and does not reconstruct it reasonably, but makes a fake that is not like four. Although it is still the same story on the surface, the internal logic has completely collapsed, and all the characters have completely been reduced from flesh-and-blood entities to conceptual marionettes, so the audience is drowsy and has no emotional waves. Who would shed tears for a dummy, a fake life?
Trapped in the curse of defeat
The failure of the adaptation of "Kidnapping Game" once again proves that when Chinese filmmakers adapt Keigo Higashino's works, they are indeed trapped in some kind of "curse of failure".
This curse of failure can be traced back to when Keigo Higashino's work was first brought to the big screen in China, when there were faint signs of adaptation. In 2017, Su Youpeng became the first director to eat crabs and directed "The Devotion of Suspect X". This movie basically follows the character and plot of the original novel, and the overall look and feel is decent, but compared with the Japanese version of the movie with a score of 8.4, what is most lacking is the concentration of emotions and subtle power points.
In the original work, the male protagonist would rather kill himself than take the blame for the heroine, and he thinks that he is not guilty, but repaying his kindness, because the heroine's smile inadvertently saved his life. This unique Japanese view of repaying kindness is a psychological characteristic that is difficult for Chinese to understand, and when reflected in specific love, it is an extremely forbearant self-sacrificial love, and it is this ultimate love that does not ask for anything in return that has touched tens of millions of readers.
However, the Chinese version of the movie does not portray the emotional relationship between the two to the extreme, not only does it not realize the pain of "he seems to vomit out his soul" in the original book and the Japanese version of the movie, but Lin Xinru's hypocritical crying scene makes the sublimation of the ending a disaster.
However, the 400 million box office of this work did successfully start the wave of adaptation of Keigo Higashino, and since then, Keigo Higashino's works have sold more than 20 IPs in the Chinese film and television industry with the advantage of high cost performance and high popularity. It's a pity that the film and television versions of these IPs not only did not reproduce the success of "The Devotion of Suspect X" at the box office, but instead went to the collapse of word-of-mouth, and there were all kinds of strange tricks.
The lowest-rated "Murder in the Cloister Pavilion", the heroine in the original book is ugly, so she will wholeheartedly avenge the perverted male protagonist of the "dead", and finally choose to die together after learning about the male protagonist's deception. The movie and drama versions have subverted the ugly character of the original heroine, and even the drama version has been changed to a sweet pet drama with a beautiful heroine and a little wolf dog, which does not match the suspenseful and dark style of the original text at all.
The most nondescript "Anxiety Relief Grocery Store", adapted from one of the few warm fantasy novels by Keigo Higashino, was made into a Chinese-style chicken soup collage movie. The most tangled "Wandering Blade" weakened the criticism of the law in the original book, and the anger of the revenge father stopped at roaring, and did not shoot the juvenile murderer like the original book, so the movie is always a breath of air, but it is not as emotional as the original "Wading in the Sea of Wrath".
Although each has its own bad methods, there are two fundamental reasons without exception, one is that this novel is not suitable for film and television or is not suitable for Chinese adaptation, such as "Anxiety Relief Grocery Store" is the best negative teaching material, even the Japanese version of the film adaptation has not fully gained the audience's recognition; The second is that the characters and character relationships in the original book are not localized, and many directors and screenwriters think that as long as they copy the core tricks in the mystery novels, they can let themselves fly and create some characters who think they can work.
But this is precisely the biggest problem, all tricks are made by characters, and only such extreme characters can do such extreme things. Once people and things are separated, it means that the motive for committing the crime is no longer reasonable, and the credibility of the logic of the case will collapse from top to bottom. is like changing the appearance of the heroine of "The Murder in the Cloister Pavilion" from ugly to beautiful, and instantly lost her morbid charm of avenging love.
Therefore, the Chinese adaptation of Keigo Higashino's works is trapped in the curse of failure, which is ultimately a cultural difference, and it is the special psychology of Japanese who only see things when adapting works, but do not see the special psychology of Japanese who manipulate things.
So how do you break the curse of failure?
Gu Duo thinks that he can learn from this year's Xiaohuo's TV series "Dislocation". This TV series is also adapted from Matsumoto Kiyohari's novel "Staggered Scenes", but the localization is in place. He changed the character relationship between the scumbag Yifu and his unknowing wife Jingzi in the original book to the character relationship between the phoenix man Gu Jiming and the powerful rich girl Su Zhenzhen. The audience thought that Su Zhen was really a little white rabbit deceived by Gu Jiming, but in fact, she was the wolf queen who controlled everything with money, and she was disabled and wanted to shape Gu Jiming into her most perfect clay figurine.
This kind of crazy criticism of the queen's character design, this kind of morbid sadomasochistic character relationship, is actually the most refreshing element for the audience, even if he has seen through the core tricks, he is willing to continue to follow the drama and swallow the sugar and knives in CP, because what finally impresses the audience is not the hardcore reasoning shell of a mystery novel, but every vivid and specific character.
In the end, it is still the same sentence, "It is better to believe in a book than to have no book." "Adapting an IP is not easier than an original script, not only to face the harsh requirements of the original author for adaptation, but also to consider whether the localization reconstruction is reasonable. Whether it is an adaptation of Keigo Higashino's novel or an adaptation of more Japan IPs, creators should bravely create characters and character relationships belonging to China on the basis of abiding by the soul of the original work, which may be a way to break the curse of water and soil.