Retreat to our original intention and start again
2024-08-13
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Hua Mingyue
"The lie we tell most often is 'you'll be fine when you grow up.'"
Will growing up be better? Not necessarily. However, if you put the second-year passion of an 18-year-old street boy into your mature 38-year-old body, you will understand this weird and unique movie: there may be more tests in the future; when you really come to the future, what you miss is the youth that you are eager to leave today.
The story structure is very simple: In 1999, on Planet K, three 18-year-old boys, Wang Zha, Cheng Yong and Paopao, accidentally gained superpowers due to an unlucky incident. As long as they inhale dandelions and sneeze, they can travel to their own bodies 20 years later. In 2019, they accidentally ran into the villain boss who wanted to destroy the earth. The three boys with clear eyes but extremely second-year students tried their best to destroy the villain's settings. In order to prevent the villain from destroying 1999 with their blood, they had to decide to sink with the ship. This tragic and heroic thing is like our youth that we can't go back to even if we try our best. Of course, the villain was destroyed in the end, and the three boys returned safely to 1999.
The viewing experience of "Safe Escape from the 21st Century" is beyond expectations. The style is "random punches to kill the master". The film camera shuttles between the two-line narrative, evoking adults' nostalgia and mourning for the lost youth. It is like a daydream of a hero that middle-aged audiences had in their childhood. The teenagers break the barriers between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds through their humorous imagination, and show youthful fantasy and passion with ubiquitous cyberpunk elements. You can call it a "2.5-dimensional Chinese superhero movie."
The experimental nature of this film has already been revealed in director Li Yang's two previous short films, "The Adventures of Li Xianji" and "Bad Future". Strictly speaking, the K-planet setting of the film is nothing more than creating a parallel time and space for storytelling, making all kinds of brain-opening pictures become logical. The details of the story are still within the framework of realism, and it still talks about the youth memories of the post-80s and post-90s on Earth and the fantasy world in their minds. In order to make the two narrative main lines clearer, Li Yang used different movie pictures to distinguish two completely different eras: the picture in 1999 is a 1.55:1 frame, and the background is a nostalgic yellow film, which reminds people of the "big hunchback TV" of the year; the picture in 2019 is a narrower 3:1, and the background is a dark cyber purple, which is very similar to the online game screen today. When many directors use black screens to represent the sacrifice of the protagonist or heart-wrenching transitions, Li Yang also uses it. However, his black screen shows "projection failure", which consciously restores the audience's "sense of watching a play" and immediately relieves them; and just as the characters in comic books will jump out of the picture frame to show anger and strength, sometimes the characters in the movie will also "go out of the frame", especially in the narrow screen of 2019. Coupled with the moderately exaggerated performances of the actors, the absurdity of the movie is even more intriguing. Yes, it can be seen that whether it is Zhang Ruoyun, Song Yang, or Wu Xiaoliang, they are actually not so second-year students. They perform that outrageous frankness entirely based on the actors' sense of belief. Even Wang Zha's sudden shout at the critical moment gave people goose bumps: We were once such passionate teenagers.
After watching the whole movie, the most impressive thing is the bold and wanton way of presenting the pictures, that is, on the pictures of real people, the two-dimensional animation special effects are wantonly exploded. This kind of integration of "breaking the dimensional wall" is rarely seen in previous domestic films. On the big screen, it conveys to the audience a sense of presence that "you are playing a game, and you will dominate the fate of the character." For example, the heroine drove a van carrying Wang Zha to avoid the pursuit of the villains. In the middle of the journey, she turned on the "special effects gear" and a two-dimensional special effect light wave was thrown out from behind the van; when Wang Zha used a computer cable to take Liu Lianzhi to jump down from the building, the two-dimensional fire and explosion special effects like Spider-Man's arrival, combined with the exciting background music, Zhang Ruoyun and Zhong Chuxi seemed to have instantly become two-dimensional cartoon characters. Even the dizziness that the three teenagers felt after drinking strong liquor for the first time was presented by the director through visual animation of the intracranial experience, which should resonate with the audience who have experienced drunkenness. The hand-to-hand combat between the killer Han Guang and the protagonists, the sound, light and electricity that splashed out with every punch, are all animation effects, which not only greatly avoids the sense of bloodiness, but also feels light and in line with the overall tone of the film.
For the majority of middle-aged people born in the 1980s, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" also provides a wave of "face-to-face memories" that make people smile. Director Li Yang uses a somewhat clichéd storyline to break up and knead together the classic images we have witnessed in the past 20 years, which really gives the audience the privilege of "going back after a sneeze". For example, the way that the male protagonist Wang Zha thought of to defeat the big boss Han Guang was to travel back 20 years to stop Han Guang from fighting Street Fighter. At that time, Han Guang was in the studio of "I Love My Family". Mr. Wen Xingyu, Yang Lixin, Song Dandan, and Guan Ling who played Yuanyuan were all present. This scene made you laugh; and Wang Zha has the aura of the protagonist, and he can't die in any sneak attack. The reason is that "99% of water has entered his brain", which is also quite nonsensical; have you seen the protagonists playing the weeping "Erquan Yingyue" on the French trumpet together? Have you ever imagined that a short person has a height propeller, which makes those tall and strong bullies retreat? Have you ever experienced the embarrassment of going to a classmate's house to copy homework during the summer vacation, and suddenly running into the other person's parents? If the other person's parents calmly prepared the answers to your homework for you, just to exchange them for a bag of instant noodles with a hero card from "Water Margin", would such a "premeditated plan" make the teenager even more at a loss? This kind of "Inside Out" plot from childhood was put into the movie by the director. Because this rhapsody-like work is mourning our lost youth in a surreal way. The movie deliberately uses a series of "memories" to let everyone experience the "growth traps" lurking everywhere. Even the lines in the second half repeatedly emphasize: Adults must not become greasy, selfish and sophisticated -
"We are only 18 years old, we have time to become better people."
"So, don't become bad!"
At this point, we can finally see the firm core of the story: to safely evacuate from the 21st century is to evacuate to our original intention and start again. Even if this original intention is Sisyphus-like, requiring you to push a boulder with all your strength and forge ahead to cope with the unknown future, this attempt to supplement our calcium is not the only way to grow into an "adult that we respect ourselves." (The author is an essayist and a media person)
(Source: Beijing Daily)
