From 7:30 p.m. to almost 10 p.m., the film length of more than two hours is indeed a bit too long for a martial arts film with a plot that is not tortuous. But my disappointment was not because of the length of the film. In fact, on the contrary, the lengthy plot lengthened my experience of the film. In contrast, every time I watch "New Dragon Inn", I feel that the film is only about an hour long.
I haven't read Liang Yusheng's novels, so it's not clear to what extent the current story is faithful to the original. Since the film will be officially released in a week, I won't mention the specific content here. Basically, a small village with a background of the Heaven and Earth Society is threatened by a group of bandits with a government background, and two young people have recruited several swordsmen with strong martial arts from the Tianshan Mountains to protect them.
Sound familiar? Yes, a team of talented people works together to fight against a powerful and numerous enemy. "Seven Samurai" is the originator of this type of film, and it is also a leader. But comparing this film with the Seven Samurai, it's too far behind. The first one is that the narrative is protracted, the story is loose, it lacks a main thread that attracts the audience from beginning to end, and it cannot be convincing in some key plots.
In terms of character settings, in order to please the Korean audience, a Korean mm was forcibly placed between the black boss and the white boss. This triangular relationship takes about 20 minutes in statistics. And what frustrates me the most is the role of Zhang Jingchu, who reminds me of the peasant's daughter in the Seven Samurai. But the role of the latter is to intensify the conflict between the peasant and the samurai through the love of young people, and here in Seven Swords, it seems to me purely to delay time. This woman would go crazy every time she went to war, and she was always swaying, just wanting to find a man—more than one! She took me about forty minutes.
So this Seven Swords, if you cut off both of them, and the film length is controlled within 100 minutes, it will definitely look a lot better.
Liming successfully played the role of a tireless political commissar and psychiatrist.
Liu Jialiang's role, as the elder in the Seven Swords, did not show admirable leadership and decision-making ability.
It should be said that the villain of Sun Honglei, I have a lot of opinions on him.
On the question after the screening of the film, an audience asked Sun Honglei if he thought his acting was bad enough. His answer was that he didn't want the character to be too bad, he wanted a flesh-and-blood villain -- which was exactly how I felt, not only flesh and blood, but flesh and blood.
It seems that the bad guys played in mainland China are all flesh and blood. It seems that only in this way can it be close to reality, and it can be called art. So one by one, the villains started to fall in love, to show everyone their siblings, their living parents. It’s okay to do this in a series, anyway, directors have to think about how to delay time; but it’s a bit unreasonable to do this in a movie theater, no matter how we say it, it’s paid!
It can be seen that Sun Honglei played very hard. He talked about a mess of love, and called it blood; he talked about life and ideals, and called it flesh. He thought that what came out like this would be a three-dimensional villain with flesh and blood, but he used the wrong force completely. Don't forget that there is flesh and blood in the butcher's workshop. Our bad guy was covered in blood, and his body was covered in raw flesh. From a distance, his flesh and blood were connected and blurred.
Why do you have to be so thankless. I remembered a point he mentioned when he was talking about kung fu with Bread. He said that it is necessary to establish a typical villain in martial arts films. In most cases, the only role of the villain in the film is to make the audience feel that he is bad, and then generate hatred. Only on this basis can the process of abuse by good people against bad people be rationalized and moralized. Only the violence of good people can finally be called chivalrous. I forgot whether I agreed with him at first, but now I want to agree with him.
In my opinion, the best thing that martial arts films can bring me is happiness and hatred. The ebb and flow of good and evil has affected the audience's nerves again and again, whet their appetites. If this process is not done enough, there will be no climax of the final battle. It's a very simple equation, and good martial arts movies must be good and bad. And what Sun Honglei did was to make Qijian break this equation. Just imagine, if Donnie Yen in "New Dragon Inn" also came to fall in love, how would this movie look like.
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