A month ago, "Aquaman" was released, and my brother told me that he thought this movie was very beautiful and he liked it very much.
My brother represents the mainstream aesthetic, and I have never been able to represent it.
I just told him at the time: "Do you believe this film will not get much praise after it is released in the United States?"
It is true, but to say why, it is a topic that is too long. Today I want to say another thing.
It is said that "Aquaman" director Wen Ziren is angry that the film failed to be shortlisted for this year's Oscar for the "best visual effects" award. Maybe many Chinese audiences are also angry. I personally think it's quite normal. Although it is normal to mix nominations with the special effects of "Aquaman", I am not surprised that the opposite happens.
It needs to be explained in advance that the light and shadow of "Sea King" are beautiful and pleasing to the eye, and its exquisite performance of sea water is commendable. However, romantic and beautiful light and shadow depiction are far from all the special effects. If the overwhelming "light effects" are equivalent to "special effects", our "Swordsman of Shu Mountain" or "Legend of New White Lady" may have been ahead of "Star Wars". It's been several times.
And what are the top special effects? One category is "Blade Runner" and "Avatar", the former deliberately put a layer of cyberpunk aesthetics on a decadent future world through technological means, and the latter, in addition to portraying foreign planets beautifully, And many special effects serve the unique details in Cameron’s imagined world (such as the way aliens communicate with war horses);
In the other category, I will give you two familiar examples, "The Lord of the Rings" and "Titanic." When I watched "The Lord of the Rings", I was still in junior high school, and the amount of movie watching was not large, so the movie watching experience at that time was very uncomfortable, because those orcs and half-orcs were too ugly and imperfect, even supposed to be the most dreamy The elves also seemed too real. It was not until many years later that I understood how much effort the director Jackson put in to create a living world that is just like what we have experienced while retaining the magical essence. And "Titanic" is even more extreme. If you count currency depreciation, this movie is still the movie that has spent the most money on special effects. It just turns a model into a giant ship on the big screen, and that ship Above the great wheel that does not exist, everyone's fate is enough to affect people's hearts.
Speaking of "Aquaman", after watching this movie, from a visual perspective, I was very disappointed. As a person who doesn't love the ocean at all, the underwater world described by Director Wen Ziren still doesn't give me anything new, and its degree of fantasy is not even as good as the documentary "Ocean". Atlantis in "Aquaman" just "oceans" the urban building blocks in science fiction movies. If the sea water is removed, Atlantis can instantly become a city in the sky.
Wen Ziren belongs to the kind of director who is very smart and hardworking, but really not particularly educated. His rise in the popcorn movie era is inevitable, but it does not mean that he is a film master. The cultural immersion he has received belongs to the commercial society rather than the film academy, which leads to a natural emotional connection between his works and mainstream audiences, and also leads to his limitations. In this underwater world, everything seems a little superficial. For example, the speeding car has become a "fish-shaped speeding car" and the seahorse has become a war horse. Director Wen’s idea may be that once the seahorse is used as a war horse, it can correspond to the horses ridden by land people. He thinks this is cool, but I think there is a lot of prejudice and arrogance in it. I didn't want to understand those marine creatures that were our ancestors in the past. He has many opportunities to create some real deep-sea monsters, just use a marine science book as a reference, but he chose to use the reins to trap the great white shark.
After all, the imagination conveyed in "Aquaman" cannot be said to be absent, at least not enough. To give two examples, one is the undersea tunnel leading to the world of Atlantis. Humans invented the undersea tunnel to isolate the sea. Why do people in the undersea world refer to the engineering form of tunnels?
Then there is the section where Neptune pulled Mela into the whale’s belly (or mouth). He mentioned Pinocchio. My mind immediately recalled the adventures of the little puppet I had read many years ago. How he was caught Swallowing the belly, how to distinguish seaweed, rocks and small fish in the dark belly of the fish, and this whale belly is not as interesting as the one Pinocchio encountered, it is like a gorgeous but boring nightclub with ambiguous lights VIP room.
So this is the essential question. The special effects level of "Aquaman" (especially the pure technical level) is definitely above the average of the Hollywood film industry, but if you want to pursue excellence, then the special effects are not just laid out, but Your comprehensive understanding of the world depicted. Although Cameron never boarded the Titanic, I bet he must know every door and every plywood of the cruise ship, and know where the 2207 people who boarded the ship are and what they are doing. And the paradise in "Aquaman" is so beautiful that it is breathtaking from a distance, but neither the Sea King nor the audience have really walked into that world, because what is buried in it may be nothing.
Why did the Oscar jury not even give a nomination to "Aquaman"? Perhaps the judges were also irritated. This happens when viewers and netizens think they have all the right to speak and experts and authorities are ignored. When marketing accounts all over the world are claiming that the special effects of "Aquaman" put pressure on "Avatar 2", Wen Ziren is a visual effects madman comparable to Cameron; when any fair (or thinking from a different angle) comment is met With Keyboard Man, it's hard for professionals not to feel ridiculous and angry about it.
And when "Avatar 2" was born, I don't think many people will come up with "Aquaman" again for comparison. This is the reason.
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