Yet no matter how dull, bland, and lengthy a movie is, if it's a good movie, it must still be an engaging movie. How to attract people? There must be ingenious plot design, or deep meaning. In the end, we have to come back to the text and details. Movies and novels are essentially the same.
So I think one of the common features of a good movie is a good story. A movie that lets you not guess how the plot will develop, or the ending, or find ingenious details in retrospect, is a good movie. Returning to the essence, in fact, whether the special effects are good or not is not the factor that determines the quality of a movie. That's why many people still enjoy old movies.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that the film reaches some sort of ideological depth of Bergman Yang. It wasn't meant to target depth in the first place. However, I don't know if I expected this to be another "vulgar comedy" before, but the feeling after watching it is actually quite good.
The point is, the story it tells is actually not bad. There is also ingenuity in the details. It can be seen that it is a film whose text has been carefully thought out.
It is dressed in an outdated coat, but in fact it is not conventional.
It's another thing to tell a good story, even if it's still the same old themes as humans, animals, ghosts, and the like. In fact, it doesn't matter if the subject matter is old. Mainly depends on the way of narration.
The characters in Journey to the West have been given a new interpretation. The most amazing interpretation is of course Sun Wukong. Coupled with Huang Bo's acting skills, there will be double the good effect. The appearance of Sun Wukong in the cave is easy to think of the Golum in the Lord of the Rings. Both are tortured into an extremely contemptible appearance by a great desire. Sun Wukong's lines in the cave are very good: he began to court the Tang monk, pretended to be affectionate, and wanted to trick him into letting him go; saying that he had read the scriptures well, but his desire to be released showed his demonic nature. Finally, it became a real monkey when it was released, and the extreme contrast between the front and the back was very dramatic. However, in fact, if the audience still carries the image of Monkey King in Journey to the West when watching the movie, in fact, when they see Huang Bo's performance, they will be very confused at first, and they are curious about what this Monkey King is going to do and what it will become. When Sun Wukong was in pain in the cave, you didn't know whether the director wanted to humiliate the Buddha and let the Tang monk finally abandon the Buddha and return to the world, or something else? Of course, later you found out that just as people are easily deceived by demons, audiences are also easily deceived by Sun Wukong's painful acting skills. Here, another advantage of the movie is highlighted: its plot is revealed to you little by little; or, the director knows how to tell a story.
I also didn't expect that Shu Qi's weapon later became Sun Wukong's hoop curse. When Shu Qi was thrown into the air by Sun Wukong and scattered into countless dust, was it a bit like the scene in Ang Lee's youth pie? You find that in fact they also have a common theme: human nature, divinity, animal nature.
I think this movie is better than Stephen Chow's previous films.
When Zhou Zaiqiang said in a three-person line that it is difficult to make a comedy effect and it has to be pondered over and over again, I thought this was a pure comedy film. After watching it, I realized that this film is actually a very serious story. Its point is not to be funny. What's also gratifying is that, unlike other "blockbusters", this movie doesn't pretend at all. What you feel is the sincerity that it wants to tell you a good story. Of course, there is also a little taste and shadow of Stephen Chow's previous movies (I mainly mean that he acted himself, not the director. Of course, he also acted some of the films he directed). But on the whole, I think it is quite different from the previous films by Stephen Chow himself. Maybe this is because, in the past, Stephen Chow's films were actually the self-deprecation of the common people in Hong Kong, but this time it was dominated by mainland and Taiwanese actors (more importantly, the lines were also mainlandized, and they were well written, not like What mainland actors are talking about a script written by a Hong Konger so bluntly), so the feeling is actually very different. It's not just the tone of the continent here. For example, when Huang Bo entertained the article as a guest in the cave, it can be seen from the brief exchange between the two of you. This is not how Hong Kong films say hello.
All in all, the film is still quite watchable. A final word of warning: If you've read this review and your expectations are suddenly too high, then you don't have to. Just like an asteroid hitting the earth, unexpected surprises are real surprises.
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