Spielberg's recent "Ready Player One" made a lot of money in the Chinese film market, while the previously filmed "Washington Post", although it was a big hit on the Oscar nominations, was mediocre at the box office.
And this has actually become a regular phenomenon in Spielberg's films.
It must be said that Spielberg is a director with great ambitions, he is not tirelessly complacent in the assembly line of concocting entertainment films, as long as he can seize the opportunity, or want to make a difference in the field of serious films.
However, the market is always merciless. Although Spielberg's works are more capable of touching people's hearts than entertainment films when he shoots serious films, often the box office is not satisfactory, which causes Spielberg to immediately pick up an entertainment film and make a wild fuss in it, and then money will roll in like a flood.
Spielberg is in his seventies, and looking back now, his entertainment films may have been a sensation at the time, but it is precisely those serious films that did not fare well at the box office but poured his deep thinking. Movies like Jaws and Jurassic Park created Spielberg's box office miracles that year, but now they seem to be empty and empty, far from representing the whole of Spielberg's profound spirit.
Looking at Spielberg's chronology, we can see that Spielberg has been deliberately leaving his image thinking for world history, although his films are produced intermittently like scattered dots, but in the case of Spielberg in the late life, the films he shot most of his life have dark veins, which can be coherent into a complete world history with the United States as the coordinate origin, and almost occupy important parts of the events in American history, Spielberg has used movies to review.
From this chain point of view, "Broken Lock rage" shows the black slave rebellion in 1839, initially showing the early voice of abolishing slavery in all classes in the United States; "Lincoln" followed closely behind, showing the imperative of abolishing slavery, and "Purple" is more like the abolition of slavery in the context of the abolition of slavery, the liberation of black women will go through a longer process, "War Horse" through the strange experience of a horse's left and right rush, the various plates of the European battlefield of World War I are connected, "Saving Private Ryan" Representing the events of World War II, Schindler's List and The Empire of the Sun show the two fascist atrocities of the East and the West, "Bridge of Spies" shows the Cold War, "Munich" recreates the chaos of the Middle East in the seventies, and The Washington Post reviews the political turmoil of the Seventies in the United States. It can be seen that Spielberg is good at grasping important nodes in history, and through the dramatic grasp of these nodes, he covers the big events of an era from a distance.
Among these series of films is "Empire of the Sun", which is set against the backdrop of the Japanese invasion of Huawei. Chinese audiences have mixed feelings about the film, as Spielberg has a clear tendency to demean Chinese in this film, but Spielberg cleverly adopts a child's perspective, effectively avoiding the accusations he can expect from the film.
Because the film "Empire of the Sun" focuses on a children's perspective, and children look at the world, with a strong subjective feeling of self-centeredness, just like Jiang Wen in "Sunny Days", the lens is filled with a sunny nostalgia for a special era, and the original author of "Empire of the Sun" also claims that he is in the Concentration Camp of the Japanese, because he is in a state of freedom and laissez-faire, but will feel very interesting, and did not feel a conceptual horror. Moreover, the author also said that Japanese people prefer children, and they are kind to these foreigners and children.
Children in the inferior situation will always have a different feeling, and when this feeling is transformed into a movie, it will present a fog of illusion that is not necessarily faithful to reality.
Spielberg apparently grasped this, wantonly exaggerating a child's imagination in the film, and this imagination, even the cruelty of war, was transformed into a spectacle, a point of excitement.
Many of the shots in the film are hard to say to be objective. For example, Jimmy, a young boy in the movie, throws a toy plane into the air, and we see the plane, like a drone, soaring in the sky, with ease, and has not fallen for a long time.
Jimmy in the Sassoon Building on the verge of the Huangpu River with a flashlight in the river, causing the Japanese ship to open fire, triggering the Japanese invasion of the concession, this kind of children's line of sight of the Lalang match, obviously not in line with historical reality, but in the lack of objective cognition of children in the world of thinking is very reasonable, but also became one of the classic scenes in the movie.
At the end of the film, Jimmy sees the intense beam of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, which is also a completely imaginary product, all of which, under the control of Spielberg's lens that does not truthfully reflect historical facts, clearly conveys the director's urgent need to express the subjective intention of the United States to save the world.
Spielberg needs a child's narrow perspective, a child's inability to see through the world, to create the kind of world that he feels in his movies. This unreal world has been created by Spielberg, and as to whether the Japanese are really cruel and violent, Chinese whether they are as nestled as in the movie, Spielberg is obviously not interested in thinking too much.
Spielberg once said that without Purple and Empire of the Sun, there would have been no later Schindler's List. Spielberg's initial attempt at the brutal atrocities of fascism in World War II, choosing a subjective child's perspective, gave Spielberg a test of his ability to control history, which gave him a useful experience in later producing Schindler's List, which showed the German fascists killing Jews more accurately.
Although the scene setting in "Empire of the Sun" has a child-specific shape and distortion because of the main narrative of the little boy, the realistic background of the film carries the sense of realism and fullness that Spielberg has always been proud of.
But the Wise Man of Guspilberg is a fool. Filmed in 1987, this film is an important sprint period of China's reform and opening up, and China is eager to go to the world to meet various needs and cognitions of China. In this mentality, China has unprecedentedly closed the Bund for three days, allowing Guspierberg to photograph the Bund escape tide.
This also allows "Empire of the Sun" to preserve a very precious and rare reality of the Bund in the 1980s.
However, Spielberg is too ignorant of China after all, and he strives to create the true appearance of the Bund in the 1940s in "Empire of the Sun", but the first shot of the film shows a ridiculous mistake.
At the beginning of the film, a Japanese sun flag flies, and then the background appears in the background of the Shanghai Bund's classic architectural group, which is obviously the face of the 1980s, not the real situation of the 1940s.
Spielberg was actually careful when filming "Empire of the Sun", for the modern buildings that appeared in Shanghai in the eighties, he adopted the smoke shielding method to cover up those untimely buildings, but he let go of the row of buildings on the Bund, and accepted it completely, and it was this unthinking acceptance that led to errors and omissions.
Notice the white building in the picture above, which is a little inconspicuous in the Bund buildings, and looks like a modern building. In fact, it is also the youngest of the Bund buildings, and was only built in October 1948, when the building was used by the Bank of Communications. During the Japanese occupation in the story of Empire of the Sun, the building did not exist.
Looking at the current style of this building, it is more like a little brother who is not amazing, relying on the imposing customs building, showing his presence without being insulted.
Spielberg's half-knowledge of China's geography is not limited to "Empire of the Sun." As early as 1984, when filming "The Legend of the Demon Palace of Raiders of the Lost Ark 2", he wanted to come to China to shoot, but he did not get approval from the Chinese side. It is estimated that this film is a pure entertainment film, which is difficult to gain China's interest, and "Sun Empire" has won unprecedented strong support from the Chinese government because it has the sign of exposing the cruel atrocities of Japanese fascism, and lent Spielberg from the Bund, which has never been filmed in closed live action. d
In the opening scene of "The Legend of the Demon Palace of Raiders of the Lost Ark 2", the film also sets the story in Shanghai, and then shows the protagonist flying from Shanghai over the snowy plateau to India. Curiously, after the plane flew out of Shanghai, the Great Wall of China appeared under the wings.
This Zhang Guan Li Dai directly affected the later "Tomb Raider 2" to make the same mistake, the film Laura sneaked into China, landed in the location probably in Guilin, and then prepared to go to Luoyang, halfway, Laura actually drove a motorcycle on the Great Wall.
This bend really went around a hundred and eighteen thousand miles.
Spielberg's films seem to give people a very real feeling, but when it comes to Chinese themes, because we have a more familiar understanding of the details he expresses than Spielberg, so his self-righteous expression will always make us laugh and feel full of mistakes, and even in "Empire of the Sun", he is too obsessed with an unreal children's perspective provided by the original work, which directly affects the performance and presentation of his vicious face of oriental fascism. This film is criticized even in the Western film industry, believing that the director is ignorant and the theme is confused, and it cannot be said that Spielberg has planted a heel in chinese-themed films, but at least his performance of China's true image is a failure and cannot be satisfactory.