The lively and unprecedented Spring Festival slot, when the competition at the box office has settled, it is time to start reflecting on the movie itself, which movie is the best to watch? Many netizens said that compared with the vulgar "Detective Chinatown 3" and the extended version of the sketch "Hello, Li Huanying", at least "Assassination of a Novelist" is still like a movie.
At present, the Douban score of "Assassination of a Novelist" is 7.0 points. The vast majority of viewers left the praise to the visual effects of the film. The plot of "Assassination of a Novelist" is parallel, and in the world depicted by novelist Lu Kongwen (Dong Zijian), the city in the clouds under the rule of the red-haired ghost is strange and colorful, and the gloomy forest is full of strange beauty. The three "Candle Dragons" swooping down from the sky with their flaming lights and the three "Candle Dragons" composed of multiple hot air balloons at the time of the battle between Candle Dragon Fang and Bai Han Fang are particularly impressive, and at the level of the combination of modern visual effects technology and Chinese imagination, it has to be said that the film does have something outstanding. In addition, the fight scenes in the movie are also more enjoyable. The martial arts scenes of the "Embroidered Spring Knife" series, which director Lu Yang once directed, are solid and smooth, and they are well received, and this ability to control continues to be retained in "Assassination of a Novelist". In short, as a visual effects blockbuster in the Spring Festival file, "Assassination of a Novelist" is quite qualified.
However, "Assassination of a Novelist" also has shortcomings, in terms of plot, in detail, the controversy of the film began to ferment, the most prominent of which is that the two world lines are mixed. At the beginning of the film, because of the feeling that Lu Kongwen's novel plot may have an impact on the real world and even threaten his own life and death, the black hand behind the scenes, Li Mu (Yu Hewei), is determined to hire a murderer and finds the protagonist Guan Ning (Lei Jiayin), and at the end, the boundary between reality and virtual is still in an ambiguous and plausible state. For example, some netizens pointed out that the obvious point is that the "assassination of the novelist" is because the novelist has the ability to change the direction of real events, and when Lu Kongwen is seriously injured and dying and cannot write, it is said that Li Mu's purpose has been achieved. But Guan Ning picked up Lu Kongwen's computer to continue writing the novel, the red-haired ghost was defeated, and in reality, Li Mu, who was originally triumphant and victorious, suddenly lost his fighting spirit, and even Guan Ning's search for his daughter who had been unsuccessful for many years appeared in front of his eyes like the end of the novel - so is it Lu Kongwen who should be assassinated, or this magical computer?
Digging a pit and not filling it is another place that people criticize in the movie. There seems to be a lot of foreshadowing buried in the film, such as why did Guan Ning dream about the content of Lu Kongwen's novel? What is Guan Ning's superpower similar to that of the mutants in X-Men? But until the end of the film, many questions remain unanswered. Perhaps, everything will be left to the sequel of the film to be revealed, but this also proves that from the perspective of "The Assassination of the Novelist" itself, it is not an independent and complete work that can be self-explanatory, and for more than two hours, it does not give the audience a logical and self-consistent answer.
In addition, in "Assassination of a Novelist", in addition to the protagonists Guan Ning and Lu Kongwen, other characters are too functional and thin, especially female characters. It is not difficult to find that whether it is the sister of Kong Wen in the novel, or the real-life Li Mu's subordinate Tu Ling (Yang Mi), Guan Ning's daughter Xiao Tangerine, in addition to the plot development, it has not been presented in enough three dimensions. Tu Ling is already the heaviest female character in the film, but her transformation from evil to good is still quite abrupt. Tu Ling was "brainwashed" by Li Mu from an early age, believing that she was a "garbage" abandoned by her parents, so when she mistakenly thought that Guan Ning had abandoned her daughter, she hated it especially. How could Guan Ning, who had only a few faces, easily untie her heart knot? Tu Ling's struggle and transformation, at least did not succeed in arousing the audience's empathy. Although Tu Ling is strong in martial arts and cool-headed, in fact, there is no essential difference between her and Xiao Tangerine, they are all waiting for Guan Ning's redemption, but the level of Tu Ling's salvation is more hidden - "Assassination of a Novelist" is a film with extremely strong masculinity, just like director Lu Yang's previous "Embroidered Spring Knife" series. How to make the female characters in male group portraits more convincing, rather than just reduced to lace? In the current public opinion environment, similar problems may be worth facing.
Source Beijing Daily Client • Art Bloom | Reporter Gao Qian
Edited by Jin Liwei
Process Editor Liu Weili