news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Breaking the conventional film framework and not playing by the rules, "Safe Escape from the 21st Century" and "Negatives Make Positives" are challenging the public's established viewing habits. Behind their "playing something very new", their original intention of seeking innovation and change may just be to "make a real movie".

Author: Li An, Editor: Ding Yu

This year's Qixi movie looks a little different. There is no adolescent rebellion, no bloody love story, only blue-haired Zhu Yilong, red-haired Qiu Tian and a group of aliens.

After the release of the movie "A Positive Effect", some people liked its light and unconventional romance, while others felt that it was just an art film focusing on self-salvation in the guise of a commercial romance movie... But the specific classification does not seem to be important, the fact that the movie itself is fresh enough is a breakthrough.

The narrative mode of conventional love movies is mainly linear and dual-line. As the audience's aesthetic needs increase, non-linear narratives that can increase the suspense and surprise of the story are also widely used in this type of subject matter. However, "Negatives Make Positives" breaks all the above types, using the bizarre life experiences of me being "monitored" by aliens and my almost imaginary lover as a link, telling a story of "unusual love".

The clues of the story are like scrambled puzzle pieces, which are put into a beautiful bottle with a unique visual style created by director Wen Shipei. Every audience can piece together the "look of love" in their own mind.

In fact, most of the movies that have attracted much attention recently have appeared in a "very new way of opening". The movie "Safe Escape from the 21st Century", which was released on August 2, created a crack in this slightly dull summer season with its crazy but logical madness.

With still half a month to go before its official release, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" has already started previews in many cities. Reviews such as wild imagination, wild brain hole, passionate and imaginative... have spread from person to person, making the film, with an attendance rate of nearly 80%, the best performing film in the past five years among the more than 100 previews nationwide during the summer season.

The impressive preview results made the audience curious about this less than 100-minute film.Whether you like this story or not, you cannot deny that the film bravely and "willfully" shatters the narrative safety card that has long been built on box office and public reputation by theater movies.

Director Li Yang brought this K-star growth story. At first, "even the actors couldn't understand the script", but it did not prevent it from having a nostalgic core that resonates with people. Although it is an unconventional narrative that is not dependent on the plot, the seemingly nonsensical editing techniques have a set of internal logic, which makes people speculate that "maybe the director just wants to go crazy." Everyone who likes it will be nailed to their seats for a long time after the movie ends because of this pervasive "crazy feeling".

This summer, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", known as the "Chinese Film Easter Egg", and "Negatives Make Positives", about "atypical love", broke the shackles of routines for audiences who have been tired of movie routines for a long time. For the future of domestic films, innovation may be more valuable than the safe card of mass replication.

A "small but beautiful" audio-visual spectacle

Whether it is the movie "Safe Escape from the 21st Century" or "Negative Negatives Make a Positive", the audience is first touched by its unique visual effects and artistic expression. Unlike the shocking visual effects created at great expense in Hollywood blockbusters, these two films have created a sophisticated and unique aesthetic style that complements their own narrative core.

In "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", this unique aesthetic style is reflected in the clever use of animation and comics, as well as the scene design with great artistic texture.Most of the fighting scenes in the film adopt a combination of animation, comics and real scenes, which makes the originally straightforward violent conflicts more passionate and immature.

In a fight scene in an abandoned factory, the light and shadow effect of the oil tank falling into the water perfectly connects with the expansive feeling of traveling into the future, bringing a moment of visual impact to the audience and adding an artistic texture to the original violent scene. In another scene, Wang Zha (played by Zhang Ruoyun) and Liu Lianzhi (played by Zhong Chuxi) jumped from the window of a high-rise office, and countless computers fell with them. As the two landed safely, the exploding computers created a dazzling and magnificent "battlefield-like" scene around them.

Wang Zha and Liu Lianzhi jumped from the window of a high-rise office

There is no shortage of such visual spectacles in "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", for example, the dense flock of crows spreading "Chengyong 1" over the city, the capsizing cruise ship silhouetted against the night sky of the Red Sea... and when the world in the movie collapses and the teenagers run into the scene of the classic sitcom, this sense of time travel will instantly pull the audience into memories and smile knowingly.

If "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" is a brain-opening lens language created by director Li Yang based on personal expression, then director Wen Shipei staged a tipsy sci-fi romance in "Negatives Make Positives".

The most striking symbol of this sci-fi romance is that Zhu Yilong, who plays Huang Zhenkai, has changed his previous image and put on blue hair that seems to never fade, as well as the sexual tension he presents in different scenes with such cold tones.Light, shadow, color, and stylized spatial layout provide a visual atmosphere for love, the most intangible concept.

In other words, "Negatives Make Positives" creates a visual effect and artistic aesthetic that suits the essence of love: light and dark interweaving, hazy, ambiguous, and changeable. The interweaving of warm and cold tones in the picture itself has a sense of story, and with the sound design that fits the environment, love is appropriately integrated into every frame of the story, creating an immersive viewing and empathy atmosphere for the audience.

However, the visual ambition of "Negatives Make Positives" is not just to create an atmospheric love story. As one film review described it, "it gives science fiction a literary tone."When the cold-toned steel forest echoes the neon-lit Buenos Aires beach hut, the alien who only follows the script looks at the person who breaks the cage. It is a choice of love and also a choice of life.

In addition to the visual effects, the music and sound design of the two films are also unconventional.

In "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", the sound of the erhu played by the French horn opened the horn of "charge". The piano piece "Friendship" composed by music director Hu Xiaoou appeared in the gorgeous scene where the three protagonists fell into the sea. In the final battle with the villain, each of the protagonists has his own "theme song" behind him.

The music design of "Negatives Make Positives" forms a harmonious appeal with the visuals. Whether it is the ending song sung by Zhu Yilong or the promotional songs sung by Yuan Yawei, Enli and others, many viewers added them to their playlists immediately after watching the movie. A concert at the seaside during the movie promotion made the atmosphere of reality and the film blend together.

Narrative anti-routine, forget the routine first

In recent years, using reality and truth to create public empathy has become the mainstream and trend of film creation. On the domestic film box office list, most works are realistic themes. One type is based on real events, and the other focuses on social hot issues. Typology, event-based, and topical have almost become the basic plate for film producers to gain box office revenue.

Similarly, love movies also have their own box office and audience routines. Melodramatic plots, industrial saccharin and forced tear-jerking are almost the three common sets (routines) of domestic love movies in recent years, and the Valentine's Day and Chinese Valentine's Day periods have also become the "hardest hit areas" for bad movies in recent years.

Therefore, "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", which combines reality and fiction, and "Negatives Make Positives", which deviates from the three-piece set, appear to be alternative, rebellious, but rare.

Some people describe "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" as "a middle-aged man riding a bicycle with his hands loose on the highway to chase an airplane". It looks like a reckless madness, but it is retro and nostalgic in nature. Even if the audio-visual techniques make people feel satisfied after watching it once, a closer look reveals a unique innocence and "rustic".

The project of "Safe Escape from the 21st Century" was shelved for a long time because no one could understand the script. But director Li Yang has his own people who understand it. Director Guo Fan described the film as "the easter egg of Chinese movies". The two had worked together on the movie version of "The Adventures of Li Xianji"; actor Zhang Ruoyun played the role of Wang Zha, the man in the movie who "has a brain as small as a death-free gold medal" because he could understand the script and the director's intention.

Breaking away from the anti-routine narrative in the film, the setting that a sneeze can travel through 20 years, and the splicing scene that combines reality and animation,"Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" is an ordinary coming-of-age story, the core of which is "Don't become a bad person when you grow up". It fits the choices and entanglements that most people experience when they grow up, and uses pure heroism to heal those parts of their growth that may become bad, or praises the courage of those who do not become bad.

Its "rebellion" against narrative routines is more like a kind of youthful spirit of doing something knowing it is impossible. It is putting aside the market, audience and box office that are most important in creating a movie, and using heart and imagination to lay the foundation for creation, which is pure and reckless.

After the release of the movie "Negatives Make a Positive", many people felt that this was a "pseudo-love movie", not the sweet or sadistic love that should be seen on Chinese Valentine's Day, but a growth story of a boy who has been patted by aliens since birth. Love is just a small climax that must appear in the boring life script of this boy named Huang Zhenkai, just as unreliable as his resignation from his job at an old age and traveling around.

After all, the heroine in this love story has vague personal information most of the time, just like the lies Huang Zhenkai wove himself or the fantasies born out of his boring life. The sudden disappearance of the girl played by Qiu Tian (who doesn't even have a more precise name in the first half of the film) and his pursuit of her all the way seem like an outrageous dream. Instead, the alien filming team who has been with him since birth not only serves as the movie's easter eggs, but also steals the spotlight at every key point.

In traditional love narratives, audiences are easily choked by industrial saccharine. Even if the plot is illogical, as long as it is extremely sad, it can bring a few tears. However, after the lights in the theater are turned on, they may keep cursing themselves for falling into the trap of cliché love.

"Negatives Make Positives" is different. The ambiguous atmosphere it provides is more special. There may be dating scenes and intimate relationships in the general sense of the word, but there are also unexpected scenes of fighting with aliens in order to revive the beloved. This is not the love narrative that the audience is used to, but when the male protagonist plays Bruce Lee and even soap in the script controlled by aliens, they are immediately caught.

All the audio-visual languages ​​are ambiguous, but the narrative constantly challenges the audience's habitual appreciation of romantic movies. "Negatives Make Positive" uses an atypical love context to tell the most profound philosophy of love: love is mutual redemption, and love is discovering the true self.

Whether it is "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" or "Negatives Make Positives", behind the seemingly rebellious narrative style, "breaking the conventional pattern and getting rid of the constraints of routine" is not a method or purpose. The original intention of the narrative of both can be attributed to the creation itself - telling the story you want to tell most.

“A very new kind of” natural rebellion

If you look closely at the resumes of directors Li Yang and Wen Shipei, you'll find that these two "anti-routine" directors have one thing in common: they haven't produced many works and both maintain a very distinctive personal style.

The former's first work was a 20-minute animated film "The Adventures of Li Xianji" and his first live-action film was "Bad Future". Although neither of these two works was released in theaters, their Douban scores were both above 8 points. Li Yang's first feature film released in theaters was "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", which sparked heated discussions among the audience. This was actually a story he wrote ten years ago.

Directors Guo Fan, Kong Dashan and Director Li Yang (center)

Director Wen Shipei has directed more short films than feature films. His first feature film was the crime drama film "Tropical Past" released in 2018, and "Negatives Make Positives" is his second. To some extent, the reason why they can play by their own rules is that they are "still newcomers" in the film market.

People who are familiar with director Li Yang know that his creative style is always the same. Whether it is a short film or a feature film, he never returns to the road of letting his imagination and self go, but he has a simple core and self-consistent logic. When he commented on his creation of "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", he said: "The fantasy of the future that I shot in the film seems to come from my childhood. When I was a child, I would have unreasonable despair and complacency about the future without any reason."

Director Wen Shipei

Director Wen Shipei wanted to make an anti-genre film as early as when he was shooting the movie "Tropical Memories". He explained: "You have to try different things within a certain genre framework to create your own language that cannot be copied." In fact, the story of "Tropical Memories" is based on a normal single-line chronological narrative, through clever reorganization of time and space, combined with iconic sounds, pictures, and music for jump cuts and connections, and ultimately presents a crime-themed movie with a long and poetic feel.

"Negatives Make Positives" continues Wen Shipei's idea of ​​shooting anti-type films. As a love movie, he still values ​​the story's ability to have more room for interpretation. Six years after his first work, his ability to implement his ideas has become more mature and more in line with the current new film language and creative context.

For example, he invited Kong Dashan, the director of "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department", to be the editing director in "Negative Negatives Make Positive", and screenwriter Wang Yitong played a cameo as the alien director in the film. As one of the most acclaimed science fiction films in 2023, the participation of the main creators of "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department" may also be an important reason for this science fiction love to be perfect in terms of anti-type routines.

The director's innovation also brings more opportunities for actors. Whether it is Zhang Ruoyun, the male lead of "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", or Zhu Yilong, the male lead of "Negative Negatives Make Positive", they are both 85 students with both popularity and acting skills. Compared with starring in genre films that are double insurance in terms of box office and word of mouth, they choose to challenge themselves in less safe niche films. The type of role they rarely try is a breakthrough outside the comfort zone of performance.

For creators on and off the stage, attempting innovation is not an easy task. Whether to choose a creative type that has been verified by the market and supported by viewing data, or to choose a creative type that has been honed through self-experience and condensed into a personal style over time, are relatively complex considerations, and there is never a simple answer.

In addition to the actual box office pressure, the actual audience reputation will also affect the confidence and determination of the creators. For example, although these two films have received a lot of praise, they are also questioned. How to make more people accept "playing something very new in the movie" may require more determination and courage of creators who dare to "play new things" like "Safe Escape from the 21st Century" and "Negative Negatives Make Positive".