I watched the director's cut of 111min.
4.5 stars on my combined score. The film is reminiscent of Blade Runner (1982), The Truman World (1998), The Matrix (1999). The latter two were released after "City of Souls", and it is said that "The Matrix" was greatly influenced by the film.
It is indeed a good movie, with a very complete plot and enough breadth. The love part is not abrupt in this sci-fi, and it is sufficiently integrated with the plot. The visual effects of this film can be said to be top-notch productions in the last century. The constant transformation of urban architecture at night brings a very large visual impact, which is exciting enough.
The theme of this film is "what is a human being" and what is the difference between it and other "non-human beings". The specific manifestation begins with this city created by alien creatures. Since alien creatures only have collective consciousness and memory, their survival is gradually threatened. Therefore, they believe that with the help of human corpses and human souls, it is possible to make the races indiscriminate. perish. By constantly creating or exchanging memories in people's minds, they change each person's role and city layout, trying to find out the most crucial mystery of becoming a human being. Everyone here keeps changing roles, and the male protagonist suddenly wakes up in the process of changing his memory. As a result, the scientist's operation is not completely successful, and even allows the male protagonist to obtain a special ability that only alien creatures have. "tune" ”, i.e. being able to change the environment through one’s own will. Therefore, the male protagonist has become a threat of alien creatures and is constantly being hunted down. In the end, the male protagonist retrieved his original life memory with the help of scientists, and thus mastered the power strong enough to destroy this group of alien creatures, and finally restored the city to the appearance in his memory. Before the male protagonist was about to walk out of the city of eternal night, he encountered a dying creature. It wanted to know why they failed to become human beings. The male protagonist pointed to his head and said, "Because you have studied the wrong place." , the extended meaning: "Heart" is the secret of why people are human, because "Heart" will not deceive people.
The story setting is novel and exciting enough, and the puzzles are revealed layer by layer like an onion, without being boring. Why not give full marks? One of the reasons is that although this film wants to make people think about the reasons why people are different from other creatures, it fails to dig and analyze it deeply. The film focuses more on the linear progression of the plot; More than 20 years after the film was released, some similar genre films have flooded the film market, so the shock of this film is greatly reduced for me at present. From this perspective, it may be able to show that this film is not comparable to those classic works that are difficult to replace in terms of shooting techniques and depth of thinking, such as "2001 A Space Odyssey". But it's still a good work.
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