From the moment I saw the first poster of Ang Lee's "Billy Lynn's Halftime Battle," I thought it would be a remake of "The Flag of the Fathers." There are many films with battlefield syndrome as the theme background, from the early American war films "Deer Hunter", "Heaven and Earth", "First Blood" to recent years of "American Sniper" and other works, all of which focus on the various entangled conflicts between war and human nature. It stands to reason that Ang Lee chose such a grand theme, which included his firm determination not to be like others and not to repeat himself, and the great ambition to challenge and conquer various genres of films like Spielberg, but disappointingly, this time he became a philosopher with his feet hanging in the air.
In an interview about the film, Ang Lee explained that he had no interest in expressing the war, let alone that the Iraq War was not long determined. So you say that he is the main battle, Billy Lynn in tears when he solemnly saluted the flag, but at the same time fantasized about the picture of the spring supper passion with the first love he had just met; you said that he was anti-war, the scene of The squad deputy played by Garnett Hedland fighting back against the big businessman at the dinner table is gorgeous, and Billy Lynn finally chose to return to the battlefield only to settle in the deep sense of comradeship.
Whether it is the main war or the anti-war faction in the audience, they can see the details they want, and they have not come to the desired conclusions. This is the way Ang Lee has been pure fire, and it can also be said to be an unpredictable cloud shield. He put forward countless difficult propositions about war and the world in a philosophical manner, but in the end he left only a vague back that did not say anything.
One might argue that the director is not a politician or a critic, he simply reveals the problem and is not obligated to answer it. Then I would like to say that in all war-themed films, the director's attitude towards the war itself has received the brunt of attention, and if you want to make war films on this issue and mud, don't make war films. Also observing the wars of other countries as a bystander of a foreign nationality, Mr. Xu Huaizhong, a Chinese military writer, told such a detail in his documentary literature "Background Color": 50 years ago, as the leader of the "Chinese Writers and Journalists Group", he was interviewed in the south Vietnamese battlefield, facing the battlefield full of artillery fire, he heard a Vietnamese general deeply reciting China's Tang poems: "Drunkenly lying on the battlefield Jun Mo laughed, how many people returned to the ancient conquest? "At that moment, the eternal common feelings of mankind transcended nations, national boundaries and time and space, making people's heartstrings flutter.
If 120-frame technology deserves to be the so-called "breakthrough" that people talk about, then I suggest you go to the 1944 black-and-white war film "Dragon Seed" produced by MGM in the United States.
Like Billy Lynn's Halftime War, the film is about looking at war from the perspective of a foreign bystander. "Dragon Seed" is based on the novel of the same name by American writer Pearl Buck, who grew up in China, and uses a group of American actors such as Oscar-winning actress Catherine Hepburn. This film, which tells the story of Chinese anti-Japanese resistance, is all played by foreign actors as Chinese peasants, speaking English dialogue full of revolutionary struggle, although there are many details of the life of Chinese peasants behind closed doors in Hollywood, the choreographer's sincere sympathy for the great war misfortune that China suffered, as well as the deep thinking of the war and the paradox between people, and the accurate grasp of this tenacious national spiritual substance, which still impress us today. So even compared to Pearl Buck 70 years ago, Ang Lee's insight into the war is clearly not comparable. ★
About the Author: Wang Long, a famous writer, scholar of literature and history, and a member of the Chinese Writers Association, has created and published long-form historical documentary literature such as "Heaven Towards the Left, The World to the Right", "The Inflection Point of National Fortune", "The Distant Figure", "The Fate of Mountains and Rivers", as well as the long-form military-themed reportage "Lies Written by the Bayonet - The Truth of the Japanese "Pen Troops" in the War of Aggression against China", "The Late Medal", "Tibet on the Snow Line" (co-authored) and many other works, and his personal works have been in the United Kingdom, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Macao, and Other Works. Translators and distributors from Taiwan and other countries and regions have published various editions, and have participated in the writing of large-scale documentaries of the Central Propaganda Department, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, and the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission. He has won the Bingxin Prose Award, the Sichuan Literature Award, the PresenceIst Prose Award, and the Chinese Young Writers Award for Non-Fiction. Among them, works such as "Heaven Facing to the Left, The World to the Right" and "The Late Medal" have been listed as key support projects of the China Writers Association, and in recent years, more than one million words have been published in newspapers and magazines such as "People's Literature", "October", "Tianya", "Southern Weekend" and other newspapers and magazines, and have been selected many times in publications such as Xinhua Digest, Reader, and Writers Digest.