The setting of the story is in the near future. Because of the fatal blow, humans had to go underground. The life span of the "low-light city" they designed is 200 years. In these 200 years, the only lighting comes from electricity. As time goes by, the people in the dungeon live comfortably and peacefully, because some accidents have lost the way to open the passage to the outside world. As the life of the low-light city is approaching, the number of power outages is increasing, and the city is in a state of anxiety about its impending destruction, so someone looks to the sky again...
This is a typical dystopian story. The city of Glimmer is in order. The mayor seems to care about the citizens and is close to the public. People decide their careers by lottery, and life is full of joy. But when you really understand it, you find that everything is so different. The citizens don’t care about the future, they only think about the pleasure of the moment; the workers’ corpses are vegetarian, and they don’t pay attention to matters other than their duties; the gangsters and the managers are stubborn, generous on the surface, and privately encroach on the civic resources; the grand singing festival is only allowed to sing and discover the secrets. People are going to be imprisoned and put to death...
These plots are not unfamiliar. We can find similar stories in many movies, such as "Brazil", "V for Vendetta", "Flying Over the Cuckoo's Asylum"...the list goes on. From the plot to the ideological aspect, "Shimmer City" is much more naive than those classics, but it chooses a very clever angle-the child's perspective.
It is much simpler to observe the world through the eyes of a child. Du En and Lena are both 14 and 5 years old. They discovered the city's problems. He was not afraid of danger, and became a courageous explorer, finally fulfilling the unfulfilled wish of his father's generation and gaining freedom.
The setting of children as the protagonist is an important factor in the success of the story of "Twilight City". In addition to the simplicity of the child’s world, there is also innocence and untainted purity. For example, when Lena's friend told her "Don't try to find a way out, because it's illegal", Lena asked without thinking "Why is it illegal?" And when the old plumber always emphasized that "this is my job" and didn't want to leave the job, Dunn asked him: "How do you know what to do?"
If these questions are raised by an adult, if they are not well laid out, they will appear very artificial-after all, the genre movies that are messy and talked under the banner of "pursuing freedom" and "against the ruler" are already so dense that they are offensive. . When asked by the child, it is more touching than pure nature.
The film's presentation of the "low-light city" was very successful. In the ancient city that relied on electricity to illuminate, the lights were dim, and the buildings on the ground and all kinds of underground pipes were connected to each other, giving a fairytale-like industrial age steampunk nostalgia. Where there is light, people are like living in heaven, with strange and even excited smiles on their faces; while in the dark, distorted moles are devouring stray humans, and the unknown warehouse is full of people who should belong to all. Citizen's food...This kind of absurdity and bizarre intertwined with each other, giving the story a magical realism color.
On the night when the citizens celebrated, everyone laughed and praised the peace and prosperity of the city, ignoring the impending collapse; at the same time, the young Duen and Lena rode in a small boat and tried their best to finally see the outside world. The first ray of light.
I like this story very much. A few years ago, I also wrote a similar novel: Two children escaped from a singing competition in the kindergarten. By chance, they discovered the "truth" of the Chernobyl incident. That story is the same as "Shimmering City", both chose a child's perspective and used "singing" as an irony element (of course the movie is much more exciting than what I wrote). On the question of "how to express similar subjects", it broadened my imagination.
"Shimmer City" has a not bad ending. A small note that was thrown down let everyone in the city know where the way out. The desire for freedom is unstoppable by any force. Compared with the misery of "Brazil" and "Flying Over the Insane Asylum", "Twilight City" can even be said to be warm: children have found their future, and adults are not facing the end. It dispelled those sorrows that could not be eliminated, and kept a little hope in the dark.
When Du En and Lena took their little sister and looked at the gleaming city under the ground from the ground covered by free air, it was easy to think of Plato's "metaphor of the cave". People who have been trapped in the cave for a long time will choose to ignore everything that is true in order to avoid pain and confusion; but there will always be people who try to get out of the cave, into the world under the sun, and try to bring their companions out together.
In the lens, the shape of the exit of the city is quite meaningful, it is very much like the footprint of a person walking out. Du En and Lena, as well as their father, are brave men. They stepped into the unknown, saw the vast world, and gained freedom in a greater sense.
Freedom and shackles have been two eternal themes of mankind for thousands of years. Opening the scrolls obliterated by the dust of history, we read one hero after another: countless people paid the price of blood and life in order to get out of the imprisonment. If we extract the tenderest part of these stories, we may be able to write this: all promises that are done once and for all are false, and we must be vigilant about unprovoked praise and a happy life.
This article first published the WeChat public account: Burning Crusade (TBC1096), welcome to pay attention.
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