In fact, the whole movie is not bad. For such exquisite commercial production, the domestic "artists" can only be sighing and sighing, not only the special effects, but also the writing of the script. Our "artists" with Chinese characteristics often write scripts that only fascists can write, such as Zhang Yimou's "Hero", Lu Chuan's "Kekexili", Yang Yazhou's "Beautiful Feet", etc., using Susan- Sontag’s words are “sing praises of obedience, praise blindness, glorify death”, but these people usually regard themselves as elites and have always been hostile to Hollywood. In fact, Hollywood’s worst playwrights know better than them what humanism is. What is true "political correctness" and what is meant by standing on the side of the people.
Although this story is for teenagers, it has a strong political fable: "oppose obedience, praise the truth, and resist death." I don’t know how many of today’s Chinese children can feel this under the education of the party’s mothers. Perhaps more people feel the part where good and evil are incompatible and evil can’t triumph over righteousness, but this is exactly what Hollywood movies do. Smart, their preaching is not explicit and not compulsive.
The "dust" in the film is actually "free will", which in the West is a philosophical creed arising from confrontation with religious authority, meaning that people's choices follow their own wishes. In a conservative theological point of view, "free will" is the root of mankind's evil and is unclean. The fall of mankind is because he does not listen to God's words but obeys his own will. This school of view is ascetic, cold and harsh. The specific presentation in the movie is a group of evil priests. They prevent people from discovering the truth. They want to operate on their children and hope that they will follow the rules. And this little girl who refuses to be a lady undertakes the mission of discovering "free will". The golden compass in her hand helps her not to be confused by illusions and to discover the truth. In the end, it was relying on the "reality" that she defeated the evil authority.
Having said that, I don’t know if anyone who has watched this movie can think of their own lives, or ask if they have been passively operated on, and have been prevented from discovering the truth during their growth. I thought of it myself. I thought of the politics class that I was forced to take when I was in school, the political topics that I was forced to recite, and the Chinese textbooks, history textbooks and news broadcasts that we had surgery on. It is too much to think about. There have been countless political campaigns in our history to clean up the so-called "dust." There is a group of people in power who always use the banner of justice to harm others and castrate their minds. At this point, I feel that I can’t continue to write. After the operation, the self-censorship mechanism started to work again, which made me unable to accurately describe the reality.
However, it needs to be emphasized that the theory of "free will" advocated in this film is very different from "liberalism". Although the core value of libertarianism is also "freedom" and also opposes transcendental authority and determinism, it opposes both the laws of God and the laws of the world. It can even be said that the theory of "free will" has an anarchistic tendency. We can also see in this film: a group of "outlaws" who accompany the girls. "Liberalists" believe in "the laws of the world." They are not as romantic as "liberalists", and they will try to avoid the dualism of right and evil. Simply put, they believe that those in power can remove the "magic nature" by restricting power, without resorting to "violent revolution" to release "free will."
In the United States, "free will" theorists are leftists and are classified as "liberals", and there are more of them among the literati in the media. This view is often regarded as "progress", but it is not the only one in the Western literature and art circles. For example, the German film "Indulgence" about rapists, the literal translation of the title is "free will". The author of this film obviously has an unromantic or even pessimistic view of "free will". What we see from the mental struggle of a rapist is that “free will” may not be for good, but for evil, and this “free will” itself may be passively operated upon (for example, a child suffered from “sex” Violation”), and we continue to do it like an addiction. We want to control ourselves, but we are unable to control ourselves.
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