I like this Christmas film very much. Director Payne opened his mind at the end of 2017 with a concept of reducing the scale of life. The film has some elements from science fiction disaster films, but it does not want to discuss population and environmental crises on a purely technical level.
Payne is good at incorporating sharp social satire into comedy, and Mianli lashes out at all phenomena in society. The whole film begins with ecological and population issues, telling the story of scientists inventing the technology to reduce the human body to five inches tall in order to deal with the shortage of energy and food on the earth and the increasingly large garbage disposal and other ecological problems. Here, the director used the mouth of the male protagonist's seriously ill mother to throw out the first ethical criticism. Scientists focused on the grand environmental problem (collective and long-term dimensions) but could not develop cures (the personal scale in front of them). New medicine.
Ten years after the film jumped, the technology has matured. Real estate developers have seen the benefits from the scientists' rescue plan and developed a miniature paradise that looks like the world of Truman. Hedonistic consumerism middle-aged and elderly people rushed to send themselves into a single line of psychedelic paradise express, the other end is a miniature mansion life symbolizing elitism, a collective carnival after paying for the second half of life. The middle-aged anxiety in this world seems to fall on the word “poor”. By packing and compressing one’s own life, it can be realized when the other half of the world is still operating on a normal material scale, correspondingly magnified exponentially. The purchasing power of the world.
After poking the weakness of the middle class, the director continued poking the huge bubble of marriage. After visiting the miniature real estate park, the host and his wife were moved. They solemnly bid farewell to the family, sold the items, said goodbye to the real estate, and took off the wedding ring ceremonially and put them in the only portable portable that needs to be brought into the park. box. The setting here is that all the materials (including interpersonal relationships) needed in the second half of Mini Life Paradise are purchased in advance. Money can buy everything needed for comfortable communities, upper-level interpersonal circles, and transportation. Before entering the miniature surgery, all objects other than the body need to be removed, otherwise, during the operation, it is possible to explode and squeeze the human body, such as a ring or tooth and hair. As a result, the wedding ring was solemnly taken into the paradise as the only symbolic object after the couple signed the contract.
Then there are a series of fables of the operating room scenes. The male protagonist and the same group of surgical subjects experienced a series of medical self-farewell rituals such as shaving their hair and pulling their teeth, lying naked on the hospital bed, responding to the mouse at the beginning of the film. Experimental screen. At the end of the operation of the instrument, the medical staff shoveled the miniature Matt Damon onto the miniature hospital bed with a stainless steel shovel, and the miniature medical staff pushed it to the lounge. There will obviously be a reversal here. Matt Damon did not wait for his wife to come out of the operating room, but learned on the phone that his wife had temporarily repented and betrayed the agreement. Embarking on this train without a return ticket for the dream of his wife’s mansion, he has been tragically changed and has to be alone to face new social and interpersonal relationships. Birth, old age, sickness, death, poverty, wealth and wealth are obviously not the only yardsticks that can measure the fragility of a marriage. Can we face the unknown hand in hand, bid farewell to the habit of life trajectory, and quickly detect the loyalty of marriage and everyone's true values. Here, the director did not abuse the camera to slap the marriage in the face, but humorously to show you how the marriage is falling apart.
The first half of the film uses a sci-fi-like utopian setting to open the door to a miniature society. Payne's ambition obviously goes beyond criticizing the weakness of the middle class. Matt Damon, who roared and collapsed after the operation, walked into the paradise, looked up at the high wall, and looked sadly at the familiar world he couldn't go back to. The latter half of the film is where it differs from ordinary science fiction films. The director did not focus on Matt Damon's personal marriage grief for too long, but continued to use his eyes to start the journey of opening the protagonist in this extremely small-scale society.
What happens when society is scaled down? Matt Damon saw carnival parties where different races, skin colors, languages, and classes could gather together due to the shrinking geographic scale. In his neighbor Duchamp’s house, he met people from both extremes of society, drunken wealthy tycoons and celebrities, and a cleaning lady who was a former Vietnamese political prisoner who was cleaning in Duchamp’s house. Extremely unequal social classes collide here. Whether it's abandoning their own quiet personality bondage, participating in a party orgy, or waking up the next day and going home with a Vietnamese female worker in shock, it is not a huge bug in the film. The director arranged for the male protagonist to break free from the prejudices and restrictions that were defined by a normal society in the first half of his life. After being abandoned by his ex-wife, he lost his material and began to think about who he was. Without the family, without the social class corresponding to the material, without the work of the correctionist, the question of how to live a bare miniature life.
Duchamp's actor, Quentin's Queen Actor, Christopher, who is proficient in French/German/Italian/English, plays the suave old playboy at the age of 61. There is not much room for deliberate play in the film. But his expressive face added a lot of natural comedic effects to the film while Matt Damon needed to rely on decay and bereavement to complete the scene.
The director uses a Vietnamese refugee female protagonist to drag a confused naked male protagonist from the miniature paradise whitewashed by the elite into the miniature slum. The life of refugees, which was probably only seen on TV before, was staged in a huge vertical prison-style slum. The director's ambition is revealed here. In the same time and space, scientists are studying human environmental issues, worrying about the end of the earth, while the poor and refugees are thinking about their daily livelihood and how to die decently. The director did not express his political stance, but at the end of 2017, when natural and man-made disasters, the plight of people from all walks of life in all corners of the world was condensed in a miniature concept and presented in a dramatic way. It is clever. , Is a joking warning to the left and the right from the perspective of the observer.
Matt Damon followed the heroine to distribute food in the slums. The director did not pay too much attention to the good self-feelings of the hero after giving and favors other than shock, but interspersed with the prosthetic limbs of the heroine. Comedy bridge segment. The hostess status of a Vietnamese refugee with a strong bad accent is vulnerable to attacks from political correctness. However, most of the time in life, isn't it just giving you a whip in astonishment? The middle-aged anxiety of the male protagonist and the pain of divorce have been forgotten when he saw the female protagonist of another class stubbornly jump with prosthetic limbs. The heroine is not portrayed as a tall Virgin, nor is it used stereotypes to poke the patriotic feelings of the minorities. The director used the heroine's special identity to bring out the other side of society, and let the heroine understand and look upright in the astonishment.
The last conflict set up in the film comes from the male protagonist following Duchamp to the first batch of miniature villages set up by scientists to see the latest technology of scientists-scientists’ language The earth is about to die, they dug an underground one that doesn’t need sunlight The irradiated fully artificial paradise, and the tone of devotion to mankind calls everyone to emigrate to the last Noah's Ark of mankind. The male protagonist who has just established a sense of worry and wants to find a new meaning in life feels the call of mankind's grand mission and is determined to join.
The hedonistic Duchamp and the reborn female protagonist think he is crazy, thinking that the end is just a laboratory anxiety created by scientists. The male protagonist left them behind and entered the underground tunnel with a heroic complex. However, before the tunnel entrance was about to blow up at the last second, the male lead looked back at the entrance and fled like Fei. Through the mouth of the male lead, the director said that the male lead made the last-minute decision. He was himself. He did not follow a group of scientists to make the decision to save the world, but he was the most true representative of the weak human beings. Choice. The male protagonist realizes who he is at the last moment and realizes the emptiness of meaning. Meaning needs to be cast in the present moment rather than in the future. The female protagonist and Duchamp waited for the male protagonist to turn around at the tunnel entrance. After the male protagonist escaped hurriedly, the tunnel entrance door was permanently closed and the camera switched to the scale of the normal world. The so-called door is actually just a small piece in the real world. board. The camera has switched between different scales several times, seeming to remind the audience that the huge issue of salvation is insignificant in the eyes of another group of people. The world is so absurd and truly moving.
It can be said that the refugee setting of the heroine is just a shadow. In the setting of shrinking life, the male protagonist has gone through several decisions and looked back at the different worlds before the decision. The world is so big that it is unclear and unclear, but the male protagonist sees himself clearly, sees clearly the weakness of human nature, sees the size of the world, and compresses the height, but he sees many possibilities of horizontal life.
A good film at the end of 2017, a fantasy script, a realistic life.
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