It is not that there are doubts about Yang Mi's acting skills, as a Yang Mi fan who has been "pink age" for more than ten years, he naturally has a number in mind. More is a distrust of the structure of the play, the combination of the real world and the virtual world, which is very difficult.
After watching the movie come out of the theater, the heart hanging in mid-air fell instead.
There are no unexpected surprises, but the gorgeous special effects also present a luxurious visual feast.
Behind the seemingly fancy structure, there is a shallow macro theme. It is still director Lu Yang's best dystopian critique, and the reference and humiliation of reality is more interesting than "Gatling with blue fire".
Lu Kongwen (Dong Zijian) and Guan Ning (Lei Jiayin) are stripped of the nihilism that belongs to Shuang Xuetao, and are replaced by the trek and determination of exploration. The difficulty of finding children, Andy Lau and Zhao Wei have shown in "Lost Orphans" and "Dear", this time it is Lei Jiayin's turn. Yang Mi's performance was also qualified, and the fans were ecstatic.
However, the disadvantages are still obvious. Some of the laugh points are indeed boring, and there is a sense of abruptness in the Spring Festival file to "say sorry". The determination to oppose the power of science and technology can not be turned into a practical method, and in the end it can only be deconstructed, and the people at the bottom of the way to resist tyranny are forced to choose the comical "mechanical séance".
From the perspective of the market, the counterattack of "Assassination of a Novelist" should be difficult to complete. The crazy sweep of "Detective Chinatown 3" and the well-known "Hello, Li Huanying" have already squeezed too many rehearsals.
Under the viewing atmosphere of the Spring Festival "Tu Yi Le", this special effects blockbuster does not have too many advantages. But in the author's opinion, even for the sake of the red-haired ghost of the law, it is still worth going to the theater to see.
(Spoilers in this article)
"God Killer"
"Assassination of a Novelist" gives people the most intuitive feeling, which is a sense of paradox.
This sense of paradox first comes from Shuang Xuetao's novel. This young writer who loves to describe the story of the old city in Shenyang's Tiexi District always reads a little strangely. The text of The Assassination of a Novelist is even more bizarre.
A novelist who has never published a work, the fate of the villain boss in the latest story is closely related to the real-life "old man". So, not wanting to be the "old man" of the experience package, he hired a depressed patient who lived a nihilistic life and wanted to go to the North Pole to see polar bears, to kill the novelist.
The novelist's story can affect the development of the real world, which is more or less incredible. In particular, when the novelist (who does not even deserve the honorific title of "home") is just a loser who has no fans and the person who is influenced is a "successful person" with a large number of fanatical believers. Grasshoppers shake trees, who believes?
The whole movie tells the story of a typical ant biting an elephant. Of course, in the movie, this action has a nice name - "killing god". Lu Kongwen, a novelist who is frustrated in reality and eats at home, is creating a fantasy novel called "Killing God". In his otherworld, the gods and red-haired ghosts rule violently and kill innocents indiscriminately. In order to avenge the murder of his sister, the young Kouwen decided to fight back and kill the gods.
The original book is short, more than 20,000 words. Adapting it into a two-hour film requires a lot of filling in the gaps. The biggest difference between fiction and film is that it adds a wealth of clues to the search for women for depressed people.
This is a hidden line in the novel that does not know whether it is true or false, and the film becomes the main motivation. From the perspective of normal people's thinking, it is illogical to kill people in order to see polar bears. Novels can be imaginative, and adaptations on the big screen need to inject some realistic footnotes. And the parents' feelings for their children are enough to override any dramatic technique.
The film is quite a long time, and is used by Lu Yang to find a daughter for Guan Ning. The two scenes in which Guan Ning beat the traffickers did indeed achieve fist-to-flesh and full-bodied. But that's not the point of the story. Again, this is a film about "killing god". God is the red-haired ghost of the god of heaven and the successful person Li Mu (Yu Hewei).
Li Mu reminds me of Harold Krecker in "Survival in the Pen", whose fate is also manipulated by writers. However, the latter is a real fictional character, while the character played by Yu Hewei survives in real life.
In the other world, the young void text does not have the ability to challenge the red-haired ghost. Although his father was also a general under the emperor and came from the same source as the red-haired ghost, he did not inherit the mantle of his elders since he lost his father at an early age.
In reality, Li Mu is the founder of Aladdin, and the mobile phone program developed by him is universal across the network. And Lu Kongwen? loser。 When behemoths want to take your life, crises are always everywhere.
Interestingly, this time, the "killing god" actually succeeded.
There is no "god" without weakness, and Achilles still has the Achilles heel, which is the fatal weakness. Heaven is angry and complaining, and even the greatest power will be overthrown. Such was the rout of the red-haired ghost. What defeated him was a force called faith. As slogan on the poster says, "Just believe, you can achieve it".
However, faith is not invincible. The young Kongwen was able to enter the imperial capital and kill the red-haired ghost, and it was not the secret book called Faith that taught him the Divine Protective Body. He just relied on kindness and blood to walk forward. In fact, the strength on which this belief rests happens to be something that God lacks—the emotion as a human being.
When the red-armored samurai appeared with a blue-hot Gatlin, the people in the theater laughed. Dramatically, this is abrupt. But if you put yourself in the role of father, it seems reasonable again.
Intertextuality
The most commendable thing about "The Assassination of a Novelist" is the wonderful intertext between the real and the virtual world.
The film actually shows a world similar to the "Möbius belt". Lu Kongwen wrote novels because of the influence of real life. When it came to the novel Calvin, it was Guan Ning's dream that provided him with inspiration.
And this novel, in turn, affects the fate of Lu Kongwen and Guan Ning in reality.
Can the plot of the novel really change the real world? To the audience, this seems like nonsense. Ma Liang also had to rely on the magic pen, and Lu Kongwen used a laptop to write novels. Is this his ability, or the computer's ability? I want to say, here should be a laptop advertisement, everyone to buy.
Of course, it doesn't matter whether the audience believes it or not, Li Mu "believes" anyway. This cloaked entrepreneur appeared before my eyes as a pyramid scheme leader. The owner of this Aladdin company, who prides himself on the beliefs of the masses, calls the brand he developed "Divine Lamp", and the believers of the Divine Lamp are all people who are manipulated by capital.
Through the projection device at the press conference, his body was magnified a hundred times, and his palm crossed the scene of the "believers" in the seat, full of the smell of "God loves the world". It is also at this moment that the story really surges up.
At that moment, presumably not only did Guan Ning become suspicious, but the spectators present probably began to believe that there was a wonderful connection between the novel and reality. Lu Kongwen's story may really change reality.
As the two threads of reality and fiction unfold in succession, we can find that the two worlds have more and more correspondences. The imperial capital and Liangjiang City are both steep cities with mountains and mountains. The relationship between the red-haired ghost and Jiutian also corresponds to the relationship between Li Mu and his entrepreneurial partner (Lu Kongwen's father) in reality. The red-haired ghost wants to kill Jiutian's children, and Li Mu is also secretly assassinating Lu Kongwen. The relationship between killing and being killed reached a fit at a certain moment.
After Guan Ning and Lu Kongwen met, the intertextual relationship between the two worlds further deepened.
Guan Ning, who constantly has nightmares every night, dreams of the city that happens to be the imperial capital in "Killing God". His "Notes on Finding a Woman" became the nourishment in Lu Kongwen's novels. The little orange in Baihanfang has a father, and Guan Ning's image is directly transformed into a red-armored samurai chasing girls all the way. The two worlds overlapped.
However, when the audience watches the whole film, they may have a different view of this intertextuality. Looking back, it is not difficult to find that the so-called novel affects reality, more like a kind of extermination of the sin-fearing person.
At first, it was Li Mu who accidentally saw Lu Kongwen's novel, thinking that he had discovered the truth about his father's murder, and the red-haired ghost in the book was just an allusion to his own criminal behavior. The reason why he sought Guan Ning was only because he had already lost everything and was the best scapegoat. As for behaviors such as nosebleeds and fainting, acting skills are just that.
What Li Mu did not expect was that Guan Ning really dreamed of the city in "Killing God". What he did actually made Guan Ning and Lu Kongwen embark on a road of counterattack. As a result, the novel really affected reality, the "Killing God" action jumped from the imperial capital to Liangjiang City, and the heavenly angry people changed from red-haired ghosts to Li Mu himself. Causal loops.
Killing gods and seeking women are like two sides of a coin. The real-life Guan Ning and the otherworldly red-armored samurai are both looking for their daughter Xiao Tangerine, but in the end they become the key figures in defeating the red-haired ghost/Li Mu. The otherworldly teenager Kufumi only wants to kill the red-haired ghost, but he helps the red-armored samurai find his daughter. In reality, the little orange that died early actually came back to life. What is the relationship between fiction and reality?
In addition, Lu Kongwen's body must also have the shadows of Lu Yang and Shuang Xuetao.
The pride of repeated defeats and battles is not only a unique item of the writer in the film, Lu Yang and Shuang Xuetao are also estimated to have experienced that kind of "symbol of bitterness". This may be what Lu Yang said in an interview, "We have experienced the same suffering at the same moment, constantly being denied by others... I saw myself in Xuetao's novels. ”
As a result, the English name of The Assassination of a Novelist was changed from "assassin in red" to "a writer's odyssey", a writer's Odyssey. Around that moment, the creator and the work were also intertextual.
Dystopia
The film also has a superficial macro theme, dystopia.
This is Shuang Xuetao's own creative style. Born in the old industrial zone of Northeast China, Shuang Xuetao has expressed in many works in the past the upheaval of an individual's fate under the great changes of the times. The novel "Assassination of a Novelist" is no exception, which is full of criticism and reflection.
After being adapted into a film, the bitter social criticism was relatively weakened. The background moved from the northeast to Chongqing, which also relatively eased the helplessness and resentment of the old industrial zone. But what is relatively magnified is a critique of monopoly in the post-industrial era.
In general, dystopian novels have two main themes, a critique of abuse of power and technological monopolies.
The former is aimed at totalitarianism, while the latter is aimed at entertainment to the death. In Assassination of a Novelist, both of these points are involved. In the other world, the control of the red-haired ghost is a kind of totalitarian rule that oppresses the freedom of the people, while the Aladdin Company in the real world is a super enterprise that controls the human spirit.
The critique of totalitarianism, after Lu Yang's secondary creation, Candle Dragon Fang and Bai Han Fang killed each other and evolved into a romantic imagination of exclusive literature and art. The critique of technological monopolies is a product of the moment. This fantasy (science fiction) film born under the industrial system is opposed to the monopoly control of technological powers at its core. Attacking the shield of the son with the spear of the child suddenly became interesting.
What's even more interesting is that movies are commercial. And what this film satirizes is the cold and ruthless business empire. Guan Ning and Lu Kongwen are believers in nihilism on the surface, but inside they pour out the humanistic values of existentialism.
Shuang Xuetao's novels or Lu Yang's films, the individual narratives in the common macro background, under the inevitable tide of the times, show ordinary people's feelings about the living environment and the world they live in from a very specific and microscopic perspective, and be gentle to those who are overwhelmed by the dust of the times.
Unfortunately, neither totalitarianism nor entertainment to death can provide an effective solution, and Assassination of a Novelist is no exception. Although he eventually killed the red-haired ghost, the blue-hot Gatlin and the representative of the moon destroyed you as soon as they came out, and the seriousness was suddenly dissolved. At this moment, the red-haired ghost has completely become a fictional character, and life and death are not important. The trial of Li Mu has not yet arrived, and the solid super enterprise is even more unbreakable.
But why be demanding? What reality can't solve, movies can't solve. Instead of asking it to provide a dream, it is better to go to the North Pole to see polar bears.
【Text/Feng Yi】