In 2019, a low-budget thriller, "Escape from the Chamber", became a box office dark horse.
The film cost less than 9 million, but eventually earned $150 million at the global box office, making 15 times the profit.
Not only was it a great success in the North American market, but it also had a double harvest at the box office after being introduced into China.
The film grossed 230 million yuan in the mainland, winning the first box office of imported thrillers in mainland film history.
In terms of word of mouth, the film has so far scored 7.1 on Douban, which is quite good for a low-cost thriller.
The success of the film proves that as long as the creativity plays well, there is no big scene and big card division, it can still be applauded.
According to Hollywood convention, the first blockbuster, the sequel naturally has to be put on the agenda.
As early as the first release of the film, the producers began to prepare a sequel, which was originally scheduled to be released worldwide in April last year. As a result, due to the impact of the epidemic, the film was postponed to meet the audience this year, but the mainland was unable to introduce and release it.
At present, the Douban score is 7.2, which is basically the same as the previous game.
In this issue, let's talk about the sequel to this blockbuster thriller suspense film, how good is it in the end-
Escape from the Chamber of Secrets 2
escape room 2
As a sequel, "Escape room 2" is still filmed by the original team of the previous game.
The series is produced by Neil H. Moretz, the producer of the "Rush" series, and director Adam Robbitell is known for low-budget thrillers, having shot "Lurking 4" and "Ghost In the Shadows 5", among others.
In terms of starring, the two protagonists in the previous game, Taylor Russell and Logan Miller, are worth mentioning that this episode added a new character, Isabella Furman, who starred in the thriller "Orphan Complaint" at the age of 12, leaving a psychological shadow on the audience with her amazing acting skills.
The previous game "Escape Room", inspired by the "escape room" game popular among young people in previous years, tells the story of six strangers with different identities, in order to win a high prize, under a mysterious invitation, invited to participate in the world's top escape room game, and it turns out that the participants of the game will face the horror test of nine deaths.
In fact, similar settings are not new, the same type of movie "Panic Party" series has long been this "room battle royale" setting to play bad, as for the selection of the protagonist to participate in the game of death, similar movies also have "13 Scary Games", "Moving Maze", and even more famous "Chainsaw Horror" series.
"Escape from the Chamber" actually feels a bit like the stitching monster of the above two, because it is ridiculed by netizens as:
A decrypted version of Chainsaw Horror.
However, stitching is stitching, but as a low-cost genre film, the film is better than the clear positioning of the genre.
The film combines the indispensable selling elements of suspense thrillers: compact plot, suspenseful brain-burning, death games, human game, the story is simple and clear, the whole film has no cold field, to thrillers and thrillers, to suspense and suspense, the final big sale of the movie is really expected.
Now this two-year "Escape room 2", the choreographer is obviously interested in continuing the successful experience of the previous game, in addition to fully upgrading the difficulty of the game levels in the film, the game has become larger and more exaggerated.
At the same time, it undertakes the suspense at the end of the previous part, introduces the story into a larger world view, adds a family line to the story, and finally closes the echo, expanding a richer text space for continuing to dig deep into the story.
Viewers who have not yet seen the last episode do not have to worry, the opening of the movie has a little review, so that the audience who has just entered the pit will not be confused. However, it is still recommended to make up for the previous work in advance to facilitate the understanding of the ins and outs of the whole story, because the story of the sequel is still closely related to the previous work.
In the previous film, the male protagonist Ben Miller and the female protagonist Zoe Davis, with tacit cooperation and double business online, experienced a series of life and death crises, and finally became the two survivors of the escape room game, and after completing the level, decided to go to New York to stop Minos's next game.
Meanwhile, the Room Masterminds, hiding behind the scenes, intend to create a crash-themed escape room scene, ready to be used as a second round game on the plane that Zoe and Ben are about to board.
The sequel opens with a rewinding timeline of the story back to 2003.
Henry, the Chamber of Secrets planning engineer hiding behind the scenes, finally revealed his true face, he was responsible for designing various game chambers for Minos, and he was extremely enthusiastic about it, and was a genius chamber game designer.
However, at this time, Henry was stuck in a bottleneck in his design creativity, shutting himself in his room alone, and even his family could not see him. His wife, Sophia, dissatisfied with her husband's obsession with designing secret room games, came to his office to talk to him about her daughter's education, and planned to take her daughter Claire away from her husband Henry.
After the couple quarreled, the husband Henry turned around and locked his wife in a sauna room. In the end, although the wife Sophia cracked the clues left by her husband in the secret room, because the temperature of the secret room rose too high, in the last step of the operation, she fell in the secret room and died.
Time is now, Minos designed the air crash chamber for the protagonists Ben and Zoe, but Ben retreated before boarding the plane, refusing to take the plane because he was afraid, and mistakenly avoided the secret room game.
On the other hand, after Henry killed his wife, his creativity in the design of the Chamber of Secrets game gradually dried up, and unexpectedly, he found that his daughter Sophia had inherited the talent for designing the Chamber of Secrets game.
So he locked his daughter in a glass chamber and constantly threatened her to help her design a more difficult chamber game.
Back to the male and female protagonists.
Ben and Zoe gave up the plane and drove to New York to find the Manhattan Tower, where minos was located.
When he first arrived in New York, Ben was worried, because the shadow of death in the previous game made him afraid to single-handedly stop minos' adventurous moves. On the contrary, the heroine Zoe has always been determined to personally stop the manipulators behind the madness.
Upon arriving at their destination, manhattan tower, the two found that the building had long since been abandoned.
As a result, a strange man nearby rushed out and snatched the pocket watch that Ben was carrying. Ben and Zoe rush to the subway station to retrieve their belongings, only to be led by a strange man to a train at the end of the subway.
Ben and Zoe didn't feel relieved, but they found that the moving carriage was actually separated from the front car in the middle of the car, and only then did they notice that there were six passengers on the car, including the two of them.
Just the number of players at the beginning of the Escape Room game.
Ben and Zoe realized that a new round of the Chamber of Secrets game had begun since the two of them got on the subway!
Next, we entered the highlight of the film, a variety of tense and exciting game breakout links. But since it is a sequel, the creators will definitely change the method to increase the difficulty of the game to create stronger sensory stimulation, so the design of the Chamber of Secrets is more complex and dangerous than the previous game.
The six game participants in the sequel, in addition to the male and female protagonists Ben and Zoe, the other four game participants are also survivors of previous escape room games, each of whom is an expert in solving puzzles and finding clues.
In other words, the game in the second part is itself a high-end player game.
In terms of game difficulty, the previous game played the glacier fire, the floor disappears at any time of the upside-down room, the sequel game is more complicated, the suspended subway car is connected to high voltage, becoming a cell with 100,000 volts, and the puzzle left for the protagonists is the subway coin machine in the main control room of the carriage.
The protagonists quickly analyzed that some letters were missing from the advertising slogan in the carriage, and each letter corresponded to a subway token. Players need to interpret the meaning of the missing English letters, while beingware of the fatal danger of being shocked, cracking the code to find out these subway tokens, and finally successfully coin-casting, in order to successfully get out of trouble.
After escaping from the subway, the second level is more difficult, is an underground bank vault full of laser rays, the door of the bank vault is closing in the countdown, the player must follow the trajectory of the indoor clock in a limited time, through the laser array, and find the corresponding password to complete the escape.
In the third level, the survivors came to a beach in the sun, but the ground was hidden with quicksand.
In the fourth level, the protagonists think that they have escaped from the Chamber of Secrets and come to the streets of New York, but they end up in a happy situation, they are still trapped in the Chamber of Secrets, and here will not be a strong acid rain that can corrode everything.
The two female players who broke through the level with the heroine Zoe, because there is no protagonist aura, are directly melted by the strong acid rain...
When the male and female protagonists experience a dangerous four-wheel game, they accidentally arrive at the game's behind-the-scenes control room and meet claire, the game designer who is locked in the control room.
Claire tells Zoe that she is locked up here and is forced to help her father Henry design the Chamber of Secrets, and that in order to stop the Chamber of Secrets, she must first save herself from the trap. So Zoe and Claire, as the two most intelligent women in the film, cooperate with each other to successfully open the secret room where Claire is being held.
Out of trouble, Claire lets Ben and Zoe go to the police and destroy the Minos Company behind the scenes. Claire, on the other hand, imprisoned her father in the glass chamber and completed a revenge that had been years in.
But there is a layer of reversal in the story at the end, in fact, everything is the innings set by Claire.
Influenced by her father from an early age, Claire has a high talent for the design of the Chamber of Secrets, but at the same time she has a strong antisocial personality from a young age, with a cruel and cold-blooded personality. His mother, Sophia, noticed this and wanted to take him away from her husband, Henry, in the hope of correcting Claire's character.
As a result, Claire discovers her mother's idea in advance and uses her father's secret room to kill her mother. Later, his father Henry discovered Claire's talent and locked her up to help him design a secret room. When Claire meets Zoe, a high-end player in the game, she uses Zoe to release herself before completing her revenge on her father.
As a commercial popcorn film that pursues entertainment, "Escape from The Chamber of Secrets 2" obviously does not have much ambition in creation, although the investment in the film has increased to $15 million, nearly double that of the previous game, but the film's main creators are only creative and upgraded in the design of the difficulty and complexity of the game level.
The biggest change from the previous game in this episode is the uncertainty of the game Chamber of Secrets.
The game is not limited to the traditional chamber of secrets hidden in the building in the previous game, but can happen in any scene anytime, anywhere, and players may open the game at some inadvertent moment, such as: the first level is a subway car, and then the last level thinks that the escape room comes to the downtown street, and the result is just another larger chamber under the holographic projection disguise.
The story of the film is still simple and rough, almost the vast majority of the entire film is used to show the players the process of escape from the room, starting from entering the subway car, electric shock, laser, quicksand and other traps are ambushed at any time, the crisis wave after wave, various thrilling scenes and intensive decryption and reasoning scenes emerge in an endless stream, so that the audience can not breathe.
However, as a sequel, the overall look and feel of the movie is still disappointing.
In fact, the film is basically uninterested at the story level, and even the layout of the script is even thinner than that of the previous work. The personality of the male and female protagonists has hardly changed, and the female protagonists are still omniscient and omnipotent. As for the other game participants, although the setting is the same as the protagonist of the high-end gamer, but in the film is still a tool-man-like existence, not in the group drama to show their strengths, let people have no memory points.
In addition, although the sequel designed the plot line of the villain Claire's father and daughter, the shaping of the two characters is extremely facial, and the most important thing is that the sequel still does not have much promotion in the main plot compared to the previous work, and the mystery of Minos Company is still not explained and abruptly stopped, obviously the choreographer wants to stay and shoot the third part.
Overall, "Escape room 2" is a commercial film sequel produced by the assembly line, and audiences who like the dense and compact adventure plot of the previous game may still be used for this film, and friends who don't like it may feel that the story lacks novelty.
Incidentally, the theatrical and streaming versions of this film have two different versions of the opening and ending, the biggest difference is the villain Claire's plot line.
The theatrical version does not have the storyline of Claire and Father Henry, but allows Amanda, the player in the previous game, to reappear. It turned out that she did not die, but was put under house arrest by Minos and became the designer of the Chamber of Secrets game.