"The earth is too dangerous, you should go back to Mars!" This sentence in Zhou Xingchi's movie is not casual. For the people on earth, Mars has a special meaning: it is a close neighbor of the earth, more like a brother of the earth-the rotation period is almost the same as that of the earth, and the revolution period is about twice that of the earth. The situation is very similar; there are also atmosphere and water on the surface that are essential for carbon-based life; gravity and temperature are also within the range where certain earth creatures can survive... so the Martians have become a fascinating dream for earthlings, and even There is a book about the relationship between men and women named "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus".
There are always many sci-fi movies with Mars as the background: from the silent film era "A Journey to Mars" to the sci-fi masterpiece "Total Memories" in the 1990s, from Tim Burton's comedy work "The Martians on the Earth" to lifelike Realistic "Mission to Mars", to last year's cartoon "Mars Savior"...
and the science fiction film "Alien Battlefield" that was released in China not long ago, its original novel is the source of these Martian fantasy-if You feel that the story of "Alien Battlefield" is similar to "Avatar" and "Star Wars", that's right! Because the directors of these two science fiction films grew up watching the original novel of "Alien Battlefield": "Alien Battlefield" was adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel "Ba The first book of the "Barsoom" series, published in the magazine "A Princess of Mars" in 1912. This year happens to be the centennial of the original novel! "Basum" is what the Martians call their planet in the novel. In the movie, the nephew of the actor John Carter used the name of the novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs as a tribute.
As a century-old science fiction novel, the imagination and groundbreaking of "The Princess of Mars" are very remarkable. Think about it, in the era when the Wright brothers had just let humans fly into the sky for less than ten years, the author Edgar Rice Burroughs had imagined a spaceship driven by light in his novels! It is a pity that novels are one thing, and adaptations into science fiction movies are another. After the baptism of countless sci-fi blockbusters, the audience has become more demanding on visual spectacles. Even though "Alien Battlefield" has an investment of up to 250 million U.S. dollars, behind it is supported by the special effects team of "Avatar" and "Star Wars", it is only visually good. Whether it’s the four-armed Sack tribe, the six-paw white ape tribe, or even the ten-footed alien dog Ula, they can’t bring us to see "Star Wars" or "Jurassic Park" for the first time. A sense of surprise like "Lord of the Rings." The barren Mars in the movie is nothing more than an enhanced version of the American West. "Alien Battlefield" is like a collection of science fiction and fantasy movies both visually and in terms of story: "Star Wars", "Avatar", "Star Trek", "Tarzan", "Lord of the Rings", " "The Chronicles of Narnia"...It's like a pot of ingredients, everything is good, but if you put them together and stew, the taste is always impure and the umami is not correct.
"Alien Battlefield" is probably too confined to the original, without the skill and courage of Peter Jackson to adapt "Lord of the Rings", it is a bit behind the times. Interestingly, the novels and movies set the protagonist John Carter as a soldier during the American Civil War, who traveled to Mars from the Civil War. The various factions on Mars look very much like the ancient Roman era on Earth, no matter how they dress up or behave. Looking back, isn't "Star Wars" the space version of "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"? The Senate of the Republic and the Senate of the Jedi Knights fight against the Emperor of the Empire (in fact, Caesar)! And "Avatar" rewrites the history of the raids and slaughter of Native Indians by white American immigrants; if you think about Asimov's classic science fiction series "Base" and Frank Herbert's equally classic science fiction series " "Dune", you will find that these sci-fi works are all based on a certain historical era in the past of the earth as a template. In other words, it turns out that science fiction and science fiction movies are often not "rewriting the new", but "recounting the old"! Baoyu once quoted the ancients in "Dream of Red Mansions": Carving the ancients will win the modern. It seems that this is true.
Regardless of science fiction or fantasy novels, it is difficult for a single author to construct a world system, especially difficult to create the history of this world. Although many fantasy writers are keen on "setting" and have spent countless efforts to set up a unique world, some writers even unite to construct a grand system (such as the domestic "Kyushu" or the foreign AD&D system). But this kind of artificial setting will bring about the problem that readers can hardly enter the author's world—because the whole world system is completely unfamiliar to the reader, he must re-correspond to the logic of reality before he can read everything. Even with great god-level authors such as Tolkien, author of "The Lord of the Rings" and George Martin, author of "A Song of Ice and Fire", they can only create some unique rules (such as the Elvish language in "The Lord of the Rings").
Therefore, borrowing history through fantasy reconstruction can not only make it easy for readers/audiences to understand the rules of this fantasy world, but also use the readers/audience's experience to let them invest in the story. Looking up at the stars and reconstructing history, almost all epic fantasy literature follows this path.
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