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Some time ago, there was such a news in Japan
"In Japan, there was a roboticist who made a robot exactly like himself and asked it to go to work instead of himself, but it has not yet been discovered."
Although such news is known to be false at a glance, at the moment of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, it also makes people think.
Will "robots" completely replace humans in the future?
This problem, as early as 1986, director Huang Jianxin made it into a science fiction movie on the big screen.
This science fiction film is called "Dislocation", and the current Douban score is as high as 8.1. It is 33 years earlier than the media praise "The Wandering Earth", which opened the door to Chinese science fiction films.
Fans who understand the history of Chinese cinema should know that director Huang Jianxin is actually a real "sweeping monk" in the circle of Chinese directors.
Although in recent years, most of his films are "main theme blockbusters", but when he is young, he is a "rebellious" youth in the system, and his directing works are full of cult flavor and bold scale.
His debut film is the blockbuster "The Black Cannon Incident", which has been touted as a masterpiece of magic realism.
And "Dislocation" is actually a sequel to "The Black Cannon Incident", the protagonist is still the engineer Zhao Shuxin, but it is more bold, and it has changed its style into a science fiction movie.
The setting of the story in the film is very large, especially the wonderful satire of the real society is endlessly evocative.
Although 34 years have passed since its release, this "unprecedented" domestic science fiction masterpiece still seems to be amazing, and many netizens lament that even if there is hardware technology comparable to Hollywood, such a film is difficult to make again.
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The story of the film takes place in a highly technologically advanced city in the future.
Engineer Zhao Shuxin was promoted to director, and he was exhausted by the daily formal meetings and the issuance of various documents.
So Zhao Shuxin had a sudden idea, made a simulation robot exactly like himself, and asked him to go to the meeting instead of himself and sign those documents for himself. In this way, Zhao Shuxin had more time to devote to scientific research.
At the beginning, this robot stand-in was very easy to use, not only to talk at the meeting, but also to sign a good hand.
But after a while, he began to develop a sense of self, learned to observe the human world, and think about the value of life.
Through the lens of a robot, the film conveys a mockery of bureaucracy and a reflection on human social behavior.
With the awakening of robot thinking, he is gradually not satisfied with acting as a substitute, he began to carry Zhao Shuxin to socialize, learn to drink and smoke and talk about pomp, and secretly go on a date with Zhao Shuxin's girlfriend Xiao Yang.
Zhao Shuxin did not like to do, and could not do things, but the robot enjoyed it, and did a good job, and the identity of the person and the robot was thus misplaced.
The turning point in the story is that the superior issues a document about streamlining the meeting, and the robot realizes that if he does not need to hold the meeting, he has no value in existence, so he secretly hides the file.
After Zhao Shuxin learned of this, he began to realize the threat from the robot, and the master-servant relationship between man and the robot eventually came to an end due to the awakening and resistance of the robot.
In order to better carry out scientific research, he must be the director of the bureau, and when he is the director, there will be endless meetings and unsigned documents.
Robots are born for meetings, and there are also contradictions.
He was nostalgic for this human society, and when he knew that his "life was short", he wandered in the places he had been to, clinging to it.
These philosophical propositions about self-awareness and identity make the themes expressed in the film more profound, rising from the social level to the level of consciousness.
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The most interesting part of Huang Jianxin's film is to use Jing Da yi, and use some exaggerated background pictures in some scenes to create absurd effects.
In "Dislocation", this kind of expression is more bold, and the director tries to use the language of the lens to create a strange atmosphere that is both real and illusory, so that the audience can intuitively feel the state of mind of the protagonist in the film.
For example, large pieces of black, white and red light are used to express the psychological emotions of the engineer Zhao Shuxin's loneliness, fear, helplessness and confusion.
White windows and walls, red sofas and desks, black floors, the combination of colors creates a futuristic and surrealist.
Doctors in black coats, operating rooms like underground workshops, indifferent expressions on the faces of doctors, and butcher-like movements, which have a strong contrast between the scene in the dream and reality, make the audience feel great discomfort.
Just as the knife in the doctor's hand cut into Zhao Shuxin's throat, the tension also reached its peak, and all this turned out to be Nan Ke's dream.
The audience experiences such a dream with the protagonist Zhao Shuxin, which is understandable for what he did later.
The explanation of the background of the story is expressed at once through such a lens language, and the novelty of director Huang Jianxin's performance method and the magic of the use of the lens can be seen.
Three
The film spends most of its length and brilliantly portrays the multiple contradictions that arise from the dislocation of human and robot identities.
Unfortunately, when all these contradictions come together and cannot be reconciled, the film stops abruptly here.
Zhao Shuxin decided to turn off the robot, and at the same time, he woke up from the dream, and it turned out that everything about the robot was just a dream of his.
Although this ending is a compromise made for the sake of passing the trial, it also exposes the director's shortcomings in storytelling.
After all, in the 80s, "ideas" like "Misplaced" were only exploratory works, and there was still a long way to go from the truly mature science fiction literary films.
From the awakening of robot consciousness to the big proposition of "three laws of robots", the film does not delve further, but only stays on the surface.
Using a "dream" to explain it also seems to be a tiger, destroying the integrity of the film and making the audience feel unfinished.
It is precisely because of such shortcomings, coupled with the eerie style of the film also carries the director's personal strong Cult style, which is not acceptable to the public, so that the popularity of the film is not high. There are only more than 4,000 reviews on Douban, and it is precisely these reasons!
In Pigo's view, 1980's "Dead Light on the Coral Island" has the texture of a mature commercial science fiction blockbuster, and is an unshakable science fiction masterpiece from the 80s to the present.
"Dislocation" is more like a small-budget sci-fi thriller like "The Fly", and it also has a living space and market. If we had been able to go down this path at that time, the development would certainly be immeasurable to the present.
Unfortunately, these explorations of commercial films eventually came to an abrupt end, as the censorship tightened and the market environment deteriorated (the popularity of television sets made it no longer dependent on movies), and the explorations of mainland filmmakers in the 1980s were ultimately unsuccessful.
To this day, when "The Wandering Earth" was released, many people mistakenly thought it was our first science fiction film in China. The excellent works such as "Dead Light on the Coral Island", "Dislocation", and "Synthetic Man" are almost forgotten, and Pigo feels sorry for every time he thinks about it.
"The Wandering Earth" has made a good start for science fiction movies in the new era, and I only hope that we will not repeat the same mistakes, forget the "Shanghai Fortress", this year's "Tomorrow's War", and hope to fire the second shot!
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Bloody Dan Heart
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