Before entering the cinema, I didn't know what kind of story it was. I don’t even know who the protagonist is. I think maybe this can avoid preconceived impressions?
Then the story begins. Taisho Japan, like Beijing at the beginning of the Republic of China, was mixed with familiar traditions and unfamiliar modern times, or the backwardness of the East and the advancedness of the West. A teenager born in such an environment, with a longing for the blue sky, struggled through the borrowed dictionaries, and tried to touch the new era through books from faraway Europe. Such young people are no strangers to us, just like the young Zhan Tianyou and Yuan Longping, including Lu Xun and Guo Moruo.
Then the boy grew into a young man. He learned more about building airplanes and was immersed in the joy of building airplanes. He is a genius, he works hard enough, his dream has not changed, but the times have changed. As it has been said repeatedly in the film: "The wind is rising, you must live well." The wind of war has blown to Asia. In the face of strong Europe, the poor and weak Japan will rise, and it must rise at all costs. Even starving children in one's own country has to pay to send technicians to Germany to learn technology. On the one hand, there is hunger everywhere in the country, and on the other hand, the advanced technology that our country takes 20 years to catch up. The moment the German aircraft warehouse opens, the all-metal modern huge aircraft brings not only shock, but also humiliation and humiliation to the protagonist. Hate—this kind of humiliation and hatred, modern Chinese have tasted enough. The young man sitting in a German hotel looked at the gray night and smoked a cigarette and said: "The technology that Germany has acquired in 20 years will take us five years to achieve." Does this sentence sound particularly familiar? Yes, at this point in time, facing the powerful West, our position is the same as that of Japan.
Then, like young people in every age, young people meet their sweethearts, but the sweetness of love becomes difficult and precious in this time and space. She was seriously ill and had to go to a hospital in the mountains to receive treatment, but he had the heavy responsibility of building an airplane, and had to be tracked and monitored, and might even be life-threatening. In order to be with her beloved, the girl chooses to endure loneliness and cold, and goes to the mountains alone for treatment. The young man can only hide in Mr. Kurokawa’s house and communicate with her lover silently through postcards and telegrams.
Perhaps, the girl realized that her disease could not be cured. She walked out of the mountains, came to her beloved, married under the witness of Mr. Kurokawa and his wife, and exchanged her last life for a short and happy marriage. However, even so, the youth still cannot give all their time and energy to their wife whose life has passed away like an hourglass. I still remember when he heard that the girl was sick with vomiting blood, put on clothes and ran out desperately, crying while still calculating the data made by the plane on the tram. His tears wet the traces of the pencil, but his pen never stopped, he was still working, and he was still racing against time to seize five years of time! Before my eyes, the figure of the young people unconsciously overlapped with other figures: in their early twenties, they left their hometowns and came to Beijing or Shanghai, propagating, speaking, marching, and even fighting for the country and the nation. Who has no parents? Who has no brothers? Who has no lover? Who has no family? Some of them have not been married in their entire lives, and some of them wrote with tears, "I am probably going to be an unfilial son." But their steps did not stop, because the times did not allow them to stop.
Finally, the genius young man built an airplane that best met the military's requirements, but this was not what he wanted. He said that he just wanted to pursue the technology of human flight. In his dream, the happiest people are those flying in the sky. His plane is for people, not for bombs. He even lost the last chance to accompany his wife because of this. After he finally completed the design, the girl silently left him and returned to the mountain alone to the end of life. However, the tree wants to be quiet but the wind keeps on. The Zero he made flew into the sky, carrying a bomb to China on the other side of the strait. And what was left to him in the end was the wreckage of the plane on the ground, the wreckage of the plane he designed by himself like his own child. He drew every piece of iron and every string with his own hands, but only the shattered remains, and the lives buried under the remains.
Here, China and Japan have parted ways. My feelings became complicated in an instant. In that era, the pursuit of military strength was the dream of every country, even now. Because everyone knows that if you fall behind, you will be beaten, and weak countries will be bullied. But what happens after being strong? Is the end of military power really happiness and peace? The Japanese after the war might be best suited to answer this question.
What happened in the past 100 years? This is the question I have been lingering in my mind since I walked out of the cinema. Everyone knows the basic historical facts, but how do we tell the mood behind the historical facts? It is the easiest thing in the world to criticize the evil on the other side from a righteous standpoint, just like a father scolding his son should not smash other people's glass. But everything has a cause, and the fault of not reflecting will not stop. As said in the film: The wind is blowing, and you must live well. But after the wind stops, the survivors always have to do something for the next strong wind.
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