Two years ago, a niche dark horse film "Escape Room" made many fans shine.
The exquisite mechanism design, the deciphering and breaking of the level, coupled with some thrilling scenes, make the whole movie appear smooth and full, attracting attention while ensuring the amount of information, and the emergence of the mysterious company makes the pattern of this enhanced version of "Cube" become grand.
Seeing that the first one sold well, the sequel "Escape room 2" was naturally put on the agenda.
Overall, the second part continues the design of the mechanism in the first part, but the sense of surprise is greatly reduced, and the appearance of each organ is more deliberate, less of the excitement of the "surprise attack".
In fact, the first two organs of the film are the most interesting.
The male protagonist encounters a trap in his sleep, the ceiling is constantly pressed down, suffocating and desperate, unable to escape, and finally gives up.
However, everything is just a nightmare, after experiencing the first escape room, although the male protagonist retreated completely, but left a mental trauma, afraid of suddenly being put into the secret room again, he had to live a fearful life.
After the dream kill, hoping to find the answer, the hero and heroine who brought down the company behind the scenes were introduced to the train by thieves, and the seemingly ordinary life scene suddenly changed to a deadly train with high-voltage electricity.
The seamless switching between life scenes and exquisite secret rooms is the narrative highlight of the first "Escape room", which makes the audience always in a state of anxiety, due to lack of security, and the nerves are highly tense, bringing an immersive movie-watching experience.
After the high-pressure train, the subsequent mechanism design of "Escape room 2" is still exquisite, but because the way it appears is too conventional, it gives people a sense of "pushing", the preset is too full, and there are fewer surprises.
The narrative follows the continuous advancement of the organ, taking the scene as a sequence, the scenery goes with the people, and pushes forward, so that the film is like a passing variety show, and the big duel is to ask for help from the guests outside the venue before finally escaping. Coupled with the fact that the first pearl jade is in front, it is inevitable that people will be aesthetically tired.
The bank's mechanism killing line, with the numbers and map decryption is still a bit interesting. The acid rain and quicksand traps in the back are only fairly passable, but the decryption pleasure is greatly reduced, losing the original characteristics of the film, and being biased into the genre mode of disaster films.
Disaster films pay attention to "big and complete", but "Escape from the Chamber of Secrets 2" should give people a "small and clever" delicacy and delicacy, and the switching of genre elements not only affects the aesthetic coherence of the film, but also greatly reduces the immersion of the movie, which is also an important reason why the score of the second part is not as good as the first part.
Director Adam Robbitell wanted to find a breakthrough, so he might as well add some ghost elements. Adam Robbitell, who joined the Wen Ziren camp and directed "Lurking 4: The Dead", can completely add some private goods of warm-style horror films to it, add some thriller and horror elements to escape the chamber, enhance the excitement, and complete the organic fusion of genre elements.
Unfortunately, Adam Robbitell lost sight of one thing or the other, the new things were not attractive enough, and they lost their original characteristics, which made the film's perception discounted.
It is worth mentioning that the director seems to have left room for the future third part, and the suspense and big reversal at the end are one of the few highlights of the film.
At the beginning of the film, the emotional problems between the male engineer and his wife are laid out, and then the high-IQ daughter is introduced. This dark line plays a big role in the narrative development of the entire film.
The daughter not only rescued the heroine, but also successfully escaped herself, got rid of her father's control, and even finally killed back and seized control of the company.
This belly black anti-killing line, with a bit of the "inner taste" of "Orphan Grudge", also provides a potential big BOSS for the story behind the series.
Overall, "Escape room 2" is still a qualified popcorn movie, and the director tries to create some depth, add new elements, and create a genre template for the entire series, but it seems that some of them are not enough, and they can only see if the third part can have a breakthrough.
Speaking of chamber movies, the famous Cube, as well as the genre variant The Cabin in the Woods, as well as David Finch's Panic Room, recent rising star "Hold Your Breath", and even Wen Ziren's "Chainsaw Horror" are high-quality reference objects.
Cruel and deadly organs, the human trial ground of room escape, the atmosphere of psychological horror, or the big entertainment ghost stew are all effective narrative rules that have never changed in the escape room genre.
The dark horse appearance of "Escape from the Chamber" provides some highlights, but by the time of the second part, the freshness disappears, indicating that the genre logic and highlights are still not strong enough.
This time, Wen Ziren in "Fatal Induction" (Malignant), the use of dreams to blur reality and imagination, the way to create a horror killing machine, in fact, is quite in line with the type model of room escape.
Connecting nightmares with reality, supplemented by various "true and false" indistinguishable chamber mechanisms, so that the characters are caught in it, life and death are unknown, blurring the real and fictional, and even putting on the narrative nesting doll structure of "dream within a dream", can inject new genre elements and surprise points into "Room Escape".
Adam Robbitell, who has already worked deeply with Wen Ziren's team, is still worth looking forward to, so let's wait and see his breakthrough in the later films.