(Observer Network News)
"Set Sail: When the Wind Rises" pounced, and those who pounced on this article may not know that it has been broadcast.
On October 13, this nostalgic film about the first generation of computer entrepreneurship officially came to an end, and the broadcast results were not proportional to word of mouth. And do not compare it with the 4 billion plays of this year's blockbuster "You are my glory", the current 800 million times of playback results can only be the same as the Douban score of 2.9 of the same film "Programmer So Cute".
But the Douban score of "Departure: When the Wind Rises" is close to three times that of the latter - 8.3.
Chasing the whole drama can be evaluated with two words: exquisite.
The team is exquisite, the details of the times are exquisite, the picture is exquisite, and the truth of the business war is also hanging a bunch of workplace films that hang sheep's heads and sell dog meat. At the beginning of a long shot, the person is taken back to the mixed Beijing of the 1990s.
But looking at the dismal ratings, the mood is two words: confusion.
The drama market has developed barbarically for so long, and the audience has been destroyed by bad movies. As long as the content is excellent, a good drama can always kill the bloody road.
How could "Set Sail: When the Wind Rises", which does not lose the chain in all aspects, fall to such a point? Is this "street-throwing" cauldron thrown to the title of the play, publicized, or...
Are there some, deeper reasons?
How exquisite is "Set Sail: When the Wind" is?
In September, "Departure: When the Wind Rises" starring Wu Lei and Hou Minghao landed on Tencent Video. The drama tells the story of Xiao Chuang and Pei Qinghua of the Computer Research Institute of Yenching University in the 1990s, who were coincidentally selected by director Tan Qizhang, joined the tide of computer sales, and "went to the sea" to create a career.
On October 13, "Set Sail: When the Wind Rises" broadcast the finale, and the Douban score stabilized at 8.3. Such a high score is not empty of fame - from the beginning of the production team, this film has engraved the word "exquisite" in the genes.
As an IP drama, the adaptation of "Qi" is not a network novel with its own traffic, but a new work "Our Time" by Wang Qiang, the author of the famous business war novel "Circle Trap". The story begins with the rise of the national computer brand "Huayan" in the 1990s, depicting the scene of entrepreneurs in the computer industry competing for hundreds of streams in the past thirty years, and also exposing the inside story of the business wars between many domestic brands and foreign companies in science and technology.
Image source: Douban Reading
And to win this IP, is the experience of the youth theme of the small sugar man company, although its works are occasionally spit on the end, but the overall play is still stable. Adapted from August Chang'an's work, "The Best of Us" and "Hello Old Time" douban scores were 8.9 and 8.6 respectively, and last year's "Chess Soul" was released in the face of controversy, and finally scored 8.3 and many original party recognition.
Obviously, the purpose of such a collocation is to make a connotation but slightly serious theme adaptation of youth and liveliness.
To do a good job in youth dramas, a major element is that the actors themselves must be young, otherwise the light group will mock the "green paint", and the heavy will be the acting career Waterloo. And the cast of "Kai" also continues the usual style of Little Sugar Man: young people, clean faces.
The looks of the two girls, in a word: comfortable.
Mao Xiaohui, who plays the female white collar Xie Hang
Xiang Hanzhi, who plays college student Tan Yuan
Wu Lei and Hou Minghao, who play the main roles of Xiao Chuang and Pei Qinghua, are also typical actors of what age playing roles of what age.
Wu Lei, who plays Xiao Chuang
Hou Minghao, who plays Pei Qinghua
In addition, another big killer of youth dramas is the right "sense of atmosphere". But this thing is difficult to grasp, and it is easy to make a boring picture of "backlit male and female protagonists looking in circles".
The atmosphere of "Kai" is very advanced.
Feelings, there are sunflower fields and other lovers ↓
After successful debt collection, he sang "Rolling Red Dust" on the shaking truck↓
However, as a period drama, in addition to the actors in place and the atmosphere in place, the details and pictures of the times must also be extremely "exquisite".
The original book of "Our Time" spans 30 years, and "Kai" chose the decade of the 90s to adapt. Many of these plots have distinct characteristics of the times.
For example, after Tan Yuan's love field was frustrated, she made up her mind to go abroad, and as a result, the number of places for the GRE (Overseas Examination) was only one hundred per day, and there was a long queue outside the classroom every day.
For another example, after Huayan moved to a new address, it deliberately opened an international long-distance service with a new telephone, and did not need to go to the long-distance center to make transoceanic calls in the future.
As for the subtleties of ironing clothes with an enamel jar filled with hot water, there are countless more.
Of course, no matter how good the actors and pictures are, the basis of a play is still a story.
"Our Time" is a typical business war novel, playing with means, in front of money, than being cruel and faceless. As an adaptation of "Qi", in addition to borrowing the framework of the original work, "Qi" has actually made great changes from the human settings to the main contradictions, and has taken a more warm route.
To take the simplest example, there is a character in the play version called Full of Joy, who is a stutterer. While the other characters are glowing on the computer sales role, he can only help everyone because of his bad speech.
This positioning has always made him feel that he is a small person, so that after the company moved to the new location, he was busy helping everyone arrange everything, but he was embarrassed to arrange a workstation for himself.
Upon learning of this, Director Tan immediately called him back to the office, and not only arranged for him to sit in the position of the head of the general manager's office, but also rewarded him with 5,000 yuan.
This kind of writing in the subtleties actually has little to do with the main line. And this kind of warm storytelling is also found in the cruel original work. Represented by full joy, it can be seen that the adaptation of "Kai" is longer than the delicate feelings, which is also related to Xiao Sugar Man's long-term experience in writing youth works.
But correspondingly, the cruel shopping malls and workplaces in the original work have been weakened, and the struggle between different forces has become more idealistic. Of course, this weakness is only relative to the original. Compared with many workplace dramas that now hang sheep's heads and sell dog meat, the characters in "Kai" are still engaged in careers in the Eight Classics, and commercial means have traces to follow in reality.
In the third season of "Kai", Huayan won the agency rights of the American computer brand CommScope, and the engineers who once worked in the research institute turned into sales and went south to trade. Different from Tan Qinghua's door-to-door sales of "selling coolies", Xiao Chuang let out a word: let others come to the door to buy.
In order to fulfill his promise, he chose the means of "suspense advertising" - for 6 consecutive days in the local newspaper "x days remaining" four-word advertising, so that the suspense fermented, and then on the day of the exhibition to open the brand news to the public.
The prototype of this marketing method is actually the popular "Aiduo VCD" in 1995. At that time, its founder Hu Zhibiao published "Aiduo" in the "Yangcheng Evening News" for three consecutive days, and occupied half of the page, which aroused the curiosity of many readers. On the day of the suspense revealed, Aiduo VCD also exploded throughout the city.
The "price war" drama occupies an important part in the original and the drama version of "Kai" - huayan preemptively reduced the price to less than 9,000 yuan in order to fight with foreign brands such as Jefferson, which mainly features high-end models, after launching its own brand of domestic computers. In addition, the announcement coincided with Labor Day in the United States, and although the Chinese team reacted, the system of approval at the headquarters of foreign companies caused them to miss the opportunity in the price war.
And this "price war" also has traces in the real business history - in 1997, an article called "Chinese and Foreign Brands Competition" mentioned that China's microcomputer market pattern is undergoing major changes, Lenovo, Tongchuang, Great Wall and Founder and other domestic brands have successively reduced the price of computers to less than 10,000 yuan, resulting in an immediate effect. In this price war, foreign brand-name machines are in a passive position throughout the year.
However, "Kai" is not limited to simple workplace struggles and business interests. As a tribute play, it has a higher level of intention. And this sentence is borrowed from the mouth of the character Director Luo in the play:
"At present, in the domestic computer market, foreign brands occupy 75% of the share. If we continue like this, our own products will fall farther and farther. ”
Huayan in the play, as the pioneer of the era of entrepreneurship, backed by the computing institute, the technology is beyond doubt, and the foreign brand agent of the past two years has also opened up the sales channel. "Independent research and development of national brand computers" - a great responsibility, so resisted to the shoulders.
But the better the show, the more obvious the confusion becomes.
On October 13, the day of the finale, the online film and television data analysis platform "Bone Blossom Heat: Shown that the network-wide popularity of "Qi" was 49.62, ranking 10th among all the episodes on the air.
Open the b station and cry it "nice but mushy" up master is not alone.
Paste can, paste to understand
If it is a low-cost web drama, the tenth result of the whole network can also be mixed. However, as a well-made and solid plot of the era entrepreneurship drama, "Qi" has achieved such results, which is really unexpected. Bone heat in the review euphemistic evaluation: performance is less than expected.
From its own point of view, it can be said. Although the title of "Departure: When the Wind Rises" fits the content of its entrepreneurial wave, it is indeed a bit confusing for the audience. Although the original work "Our Time" is of excellent quality, its own audience and the audience of the web drama do not coincide, and there is no excessive bonus for conversion to the ratings.
What about from an outside perspective?
Just as the so-called little red depends on praise, the big red relies on life, and the cleaning up of "Kai" is obviously affected by a variety of external factors, and only one point is written here: intergenerational contradictions.
There is a subtle similarity between the coldness of "Kai" and the rollover of "After the Wave" at last year's b station.
The day before May Fourth Youth Day in 2020, Bilibili Danmaku Released the video "Back Wave". In the video, national first-class actor He Bing took the stage to give a speech and send a message to young people in the new era. Accompanied by exciting music, He Bing called: "Rush after the waves, we are in the same rushing river." ”
At the beginning of the release of the video, the evaluation of "Houlang" in the comment area of station b was still biased towards "good burning". However, with the fermentation of public opinion, various doubts and dissent have emerged on social platforms. In the topic of "After the Wave", some subjects even directly described the state encountered by this video with "overturning".
In the Weibo comment area of @People's Daily, which forwarded "Houlang", several Weibo comments with higher numbers of likes were more intense:
"But the young people of this country are tied to houses, 15 years, 30 years... I don't dare to do what I want to do, and I don't dare to talk about the ideals I once had. ”
"Young people become middle-aged as soon as they graduate, and they are as meticulous as middle-aged people for the sake of rice, oil and salt."
The rollover of "After the Wave" is not sudden. For a long time, many young people on various social platforms have unabashedly shown their tiredness and resistance to "struggle".
Since the Internet has spread the word "35-year-old was laid off", many people's dreams have simply become "retirement at 35 years old". The Douban "FIRE Life" group gathered nearly 160,000 members, and the theme of the post was basically "Save xx million enough to retire before the age of 30/40".
In the group profile, "FIRE" is the English abbreviation for the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement, and the core principle of FIRE is to "reduce materialism, live a minimalist life, and quickly save 25 times the cost of living for a year."
In addition, the 120,000 members of the "Returnee Waste Recycling Mutual Aid Association" and the "985 Waste Introduction Plan" with 30,000 members have also frequently appeared in the media in the past two years, while the "Peer Pressure Research Center" group has gathered more than 200,000 netizens who have suffered from peer pressure.
Compared with the previous popular "thank you, people just got off the plane in the United States" successful narrative, the members of these groups are more sharing their confusion and anxiety. Flipping through the posts of these groups, you will find that the pressure of middle-aged people has appeared in young people, and students who have not yet graduated have begun to develop anxieties that are only found in social animals.
At the same time, words such as lying flat, Buddhist, and inner volume also frequently appear in people's daily communication. Strivers are no longer a positive word, but are more likely to be jokingly called "roll king", and the ugly "struggle x".
In such an atmosphere, although the era narrative of "Kai" with entrepreneurship as the main line is very burning, it is slightly misaligned with the current atmosphere.
The plot of the play mainly takes place in Beijing and Guangzhou in the 90s, each with an adventurer's temperament, every attempt is pioneering, doing what has not been done before, not to mention the late stage with a supreme sense of mission of the times: to develop a national brand computer!
But for the young people who are tired of struggling and are still regarded as screws, this surging mood is really a little lofty. What's more, what is filmed in the play is actually the group of people who are called "vested interests" by the current young people - "What? I went to work to buy a house and was cut by you, chasing a drama still has to see why you struggled to cut me this step? ”。
In short, for the plot, the audience is difficult to empathize with the entrepreneurs with heroic ambitions; for reality, netizens are equally full of resistance to the entrepreneurs who have achieved fame.
For example, a speech by Bai Yansong in the variety show "Dialogue" has caused public outrage. When asked about the contradictions in the hearts of young people now, he said that today's young people are much luckier than their generation, and each generation has its own difficulties, and asked the young audience: Are we now counting on low housing prices, jobs are everywhere, there is no pressure at all, and the girls we like are OK to pursue, right?
In fact, as far as the entire video is concerned, Bai Yansong's speech is not as extreme as the intercepted version spread online. But that rhetorical question made him fall into a huge controversy.
Some netizens commented: We want to reduce stress, not that we want something to reach out. I hope that everyone who is young has their own wonderful dreams, not that everyone's dream in the next few decades is to buy a house.
"Except for the girl's one, what else shouldn't it be?" Hoping that the living environment is good and the pressure is small, is it just the pursuit and extravagance that have become a sin? ”
Su Mang, former president of the fashion group and editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, was also scolded by netizens for his "inner volume" related speeches. When she participated in the Mango TV variety show "Us Who First Entered the Workplace", she said that the inner volume is a kind of competitive pressure, from the gap between desire and inertia, all the pressure comes from the desire is too high and the inertia is very strong, if the goal is clear, and can do without inertia, there will not be so much confusion.
This kind of inward volume is because of the "inertia" of young people caused by the statement directly angered young netizens, by many people accused of "inability to empathize".
In short, the spread of the Internet makes the views of different groups collide directly, but the fragmented spread cannot carry more comprehensive thinking. The inability of generations to empathize with each other makes this contradiction deeper and deeper.
The failure of "Qi" may only be a side manifestation of this contradiction. And the complexity of this contradiction is not something that can be said in a short article.
However, Wang Qiang, the original author of "Qi", borrowed a dialogue from the famous Pei Qinghua and Xiao Chuangzhi in the original work, and it seems that it can be placed here as an ending:
“...... Pei Qinghua immediately denied: "At present, many young people regard our generation as an obstacle, and always feel that they suppress them, in fact, what they now enjoy that they think is righteous is what the previous generation and the previous generation fought back and created... For example, loans to buy houses and housing provident funds, complaining all day long that we can't afford to buy a house, but if there is no system for us, where does this system come from? Private ownership is also a dream. ’
Xiao Chuang scoffed: "Just seeing the young people fighting with you, forget how you fought with the previous generation?" Intergenerational conflicts have always been so, the pursuit of any generation is not simply to accumulate wealth, but to establish a system, a set of orders and a set of rules, so collision is inevitable... Times are changing, and no individual can do anything about it. ’”