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Some people say that "On the Cliff" reflects Zhang Yimou's innovation.
People who comment on this may really not watch Zhang's films. In my opinion, "On the Cliff" not only did not innovate, but fell into Zhang Yimou's own trap, which once again proves that the old man is old, and he can only repeat himself continuously.
"On the Cliff" tells such a story:
A man named Wang Ziyang escaped from the Japanese bacterial virus experiment, and Zhang Yi, Qin Hailu, Zhu Yawen, and Liu Haocun, four underground parties with special training in the Soviet Union, returned to Harbin by parachuting back to Harbin, with the mission of finding Wang Ziyang and sending him to an international court to expose Japan's crimes against humanity.
All the plot revolves around this setting.
Zhang Yimou's specialty is photography and color, and he seems to be not very good at telling complex stories and showing a rich social life. From the early "Qiu Ju Fights a Lawsuit", "No One Can Be Less", "My Father and Mother", all the way to "One Second" released last year, etc., it is like this - around a very simple setting, like a rubber band to continue the plot monotonously.
If according to Hollywood classification, "On the Cliff" belongs to the "ghost house" type, and its elements are only two: an enclosed space (such as a hotel, yacht, town, etc.), a "ghost" (such as monsters, dinosaurs, anti-human scientists, etc.), and then add characters. There is only one rule: don't be eaten! The plot is simpler, mainly to hunt down and hide, and eventually ends with the survivors escaping from the enclosed space or killing the monster.
Chinese audiences are familiar with "Jurassic Park", "Jaws", "Deadly Temptation", "Escape from Desperate Town", which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2018, etc., all belong to the "Haunted House" genre.
The same is true of "On the Cliff", an enclosed space - Harbin under the occupation of the Japanese Kou; a "monster" - the secret service chief played by Ni Dahong and his men, and then hiding and hunting down. The poster for "On the Cliff" has always been based on a cold-faced killer wearing a top hat and an overcoat, which accurately reflects this characteristic of the film.
Therefore, from the perspective of form, the innovation of "On the Cliff" is not, it has neither broken through the routine of general commercial films, nor has it broken through Zhang Yimou himself.
However, the lack of a breakthrough in form is not a problem, the problem is that in terms of values, Zhang Yimou has not broken through himself.
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After watching "On the Cliff", I immediately remembered Zhang Yimou's "Jinling Thirteen Chao" [click to read] filmed 10 years ago, and at the same time, a deep doubt surged in my heart: Why is Zhang Yimou so keen to be rescued by the "international"?
"Gold" and "Hanging" seem to be two completely different stories, but the theme is only one: to pin the hope of salvation on the "international", the former is the United States, the latter is the Soviet Union.
This is a rather "Republican-style" mode of thinking, or a colonial and semi-colonial cultural elite, and the real logic behind it is that japan cannot be defeated by its own strength anyway, and can only hope for the intervention of other major powers.
In the 1930s, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government were in this mode of thinking.
When Japan launched the September 18 Incident and invaded and occupied northeast China, Chiang Kai-shek did not think of mobilizing the strength of the whole nation, vigorously fighting against the horses, and recovering the lost land, but going to the "League of Nations" to complain, but the League of Nations was partial to Japan and did not play any role in stopping Japan's aggression.
The loss and recovery of the Northeast was the result of the complete victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War and the smashing of the three Axis powers of Deyi and Japan.
It may be understandable that the elite of the Republic of China has the psychology of relying on "international" salvation, because since the late Qing Dynasty, China's anti-aggression war has basically been a loss in every war, and every defeat must be paid compensation, and they have not yet tasted the taste of victory and have serious defeatist sentiments.
However, since the founding of New China, we have so far won all the victories in the war to defend the homeland and defend the country, especially the victory in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, so why can't cultural elites like Zhang Yimou still get out of the shadow of defeatism?
As I have pointed out many times, Zhang Yimou did not get rid of the narrative framework of the "fifth generation", that is, to represent the West (the Soviet Union is half of the West) as "modern" and China as "traditional", as a metaphor for the necessity and legitimacy of China's move to the West.
This narrative framework actually includes a more implicit but more lethal premise: denying that the Chinese revolution is also a kind of modernity, and that it is the only way for China to modernize.
Movies such as "On the Cliff" and "Jinling Thirteen Chao", together with Zhang Yimou's "Alive", may be able to taste their true meaning.
By the way, the idea of relying on other great powers for salvation is very harmful, there is no free lunch in the world, all gifts will be secretly priced, and if they are saved, they will inevitably be ruled, calculated, and even betrayed.
Take the Soviet Union, for example.
In the early days of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, although the Soviet Union gave Great Aid to China, in 1941, after the Soviet Union and Japan signed the "Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Treaty," they stopped aiding China and announced the recognition of "Manchukuo." This was a very heavy blow to China, which was fighting bloodily with the Japanese and the Kosovars. As for Yalta, the United States and the Soviet Union betrayed China, not to mention.
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In essence, "On the Cliff" is still a "divine drama" rather than a "human drama", and Zhang Yimou is just using the background of the War of Resistance to tell the mythical story of the elite's omnipotence.
Many reviews have compared "On the Cliff" to "The Sound of the Wind," which was released in 2009. In fact, from an ornamental and gripping point of view, the former seems to be inferior to the latter, but these two films, like a series of popular spy dramas in recent years, share the same view of history, that is, the elite view of history, and make a wrong performance of our party's underground work throughout the period of the new democratic revolution.
If you only look at these "spy dramas," it seems that the work of the underground party is mainly to engage in intelligence, assassination, and sometimes even to use great tricks, but the real underground work is not like this.
The real history is that our Party's underground work in the Kuomintang and Occupied Areas – especially after the Zunyi Conference established Chairman Mao's leading position in the whole Party – certainly included intelligence, but the focus was on mobilizing the masses, organizing the masses, and engaging in the labor movement, the student movement, the peasant movement, the military movement, and so on.
In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan's novel "Red Rock", which reflected the underground work of "accompanying the capital" in Chongqing, was closer to the real situation of the underground party.
In the novel, what are the underground party heroes xu yunfeng, Jiang Jie, and Cheng Gang doing? They propagated the masses in the Printing of the Advance Newspaper, went deep into Chongqing University to mobilize students, went deep into the Kuomintang arsenal to mobilize workers, and went deep into the Huaying Mountains to organize and arm the peasants...
The reason why the Party's underground work regards mass work as its main task is determined by the basic nature of the Chinese revolution, which is essentially a people's revolution, and the complete manifestation of underground work as the intelligence work and assassination work of a small number of "espionage elites" is a distortion of underground work.
"On the Cliff" is a historical theme, but in this historical theme film, history does not exist, and even the International Court of Justice, the destination where Wang Ziyang is going, has not yet been established in the era when the film is shown.
The heroes in "On the Cliff" are all external to history, as the film shows, they are "parachuted" into history, they are meticulous, astute, fierce, and murderous, but they have nothing to do with history!