The original name of the movie "Atomic Blonde" was "Atomic Blonde", so the Hong Kong region quite aptly translates it as "Atomic Killing Ji". In fact, the plot of the film is exactly the same. It focuses not on Berlin in 1989, an extremely cold city in the "end" of the Cold War, but on the extremely combative character played by Charlize Theron. Three-faced female spy Lorraine.
The main plot of "Arctic City" is not complicated. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was about to be dismantled. At this time, the city of Berlin was turbulent. A British MI6 officer was killed by a former agent of the Soviet KGB KGB, and his list of Cold War spies was also lost. In order to regain this list, MI6, KGB and even the CIA are all in action, so Lorraine, who belongs to MI6, went to Berlin to try to retrieve this list.
Clearly, this list is the "MacGuffin" of the film—something audiences don't care about, but the characters are fighting for. It records the intelligence of all spies on both sides of the Cold War, so its significance is self-evident (of course, how this thing came from is not allowed to care, after all, its existence is unreasonable).
Gradually, another McGuffin also appeared: who is the double agent Saatchi? Is it David, MI6's top agent in Berlin? Or someone else? It should be said that this is what the audience should care about, because it constitutes the core suspense of the film. Yet the film's narrative undermines the suspense's appeal.
The reason why I say this is because "City of Extreme Cold" adopts the method of flashback and flashback. At the beginning of the film, Lorraine, who is covered in scars, goes to MI6 for interrogation. In the process, she tells what happened during her mission in Berlin. The reason for this interrogation is very concealed. In fact, MI6 wants to find out who Lorraine and David are Saatchi, but at this time David is dead, and the only person who can be investigated is Lorraine. It is precisely because of this beginning that the audience is clearly told from the beginning that Lorraine's Berlin operation is at least back alive. As a result, one of the great pleasures of watching spy films was deprived.
If the question of life and death is one of the narrative cores of espionage stories, then the question of identity is another. However, "Arctic City" still has a lot of flaws in this regard. Since the reason for the interrogation at the beginning is not obvious, it seems to be just a mission report, so the audience does not care or even know what Sachi is. As the narrative progresses, the over-the-top action scenes stifle the audience's attention, and in the fights and escapes (and the girls' sex scenes), there may be no time to find out who Saatchi is. This directly led to the lack of excitement in the film's plot.
However, although one side is a slightly scribbled real body reveal, the other side is a heavy blow from the emperor's fist to the flesh. After all, it was David Ritchie who directed it, so the fighting scenes and car scenes in "City of Extreme Cold" are shocking enough, the so-called "viewers feel pain". Lorraine started killing people as soon as he arrived in Berlin, using a variety of techniques, from high heels to rubber tubes to T-shaped bottle openers, decisive enough and brutal enough.
It may be said that "Arctic City" contributed a nine-minute long shot that is enough to be recorded in film history. Generally speaking, fighting scenes prefer quick editing to highlight the tension of the fighting, and many Hong Kong action movies are good at this. "City of Frozen" takes a different approach, telling the audience with boldness that fight scenes can also be shot to the end (there are still hidden clips when entering and exiting the black screen of the building and close to the clothes). Undoubtedly, this placed extremely high demands on the action design (so individual actions appeared ingenious, such as smashing the refrigerator door and smashing each other in the face, and the rubber tube jumping off the building), as well as the actors - Theron later confessed, slapping She knocked out her teeth and had to undergo major surgery. But this long shot provides an incomparably real and intense movie-watching pleasure, which is naturally not something that "flower fist embroidered legs" and plasma bombs can match.
Also commendable is the choice of fighting scenes. Fighting in front of a Tarkovsky film is definitely impressive. One movement and one stillness ("Stalker" was playing on the screen at this time) created a kind of potential energy within the painting, and then suddenly broke the curtain and escaped, both proud and free and easy. Many neat and happy fight scenes make the heroine's "Charlie's Angels" image full of convincing.
Perhaps it is inappropriate to call it "baby", just as the original title of the film, atomic, emphasizes the huge inner explosive force. And Lorraine can not only fight, but also dare to love. Lorraine easily convinced the French female agent Dai Fen, and also showed a certain tenderness in her relationship with her. Although this is a routine that Hollywood never tires of (no matter how unsuitable the subject matter is, it must be filled with love elements), but after all, it portrays Lorraine's heart from one side.
It's just that an agent is an agent, murder and blame are innate skills, and a lover is just the usual embellishment of popcorn movies. Lorraine killed David and returned to England, failing to turn in the list, as if the mission had failed. But she is a three-sided spy, and the CIA is her real service object. She subtly made MI6 think that David was Sage, and that killing her colleagues was just to complete the task of eliminating traitors for MI6. The mystery of who Saatchi is is not solved until the end of the movie, when she boarded a plane back to Virginia and said "go home" to the CIA agent in a lighthearted and pleasant way—even though the suspense is already very high at this point. tedious.
Many critics criticized the layout of the film, arguing that the method of flashbacks and flashbacks reduced the tension of the narrative. This conclusion is naturally good, but in the author's opinion, such a plot is actually a more appropriate form than the tension of the narrative, because the film chooses to put the disclosure of the identity of the three-faced spy at the end. Lorraine knew very well that MI6 deliberately let her fall into the Berlin situation, in order to find out who she and David are Saatchi, her life and death are actually secondary. Just as Lorraine is always deceiving MI6, the director is always deliberately misleading the audience ("yes she's not dead, but it's not that simple"). The flashback is only the Berlin mission that MI6 instructed Lorraine, and the reveal of the identity is still at the end. As a result, a "sense of ending" was deconstructed instead, full of stamina, and the ingenuity of narrative arrangement was shining, and it also secretly echoed the sentence in the film: "Double the pleasure of cheating liars" .
Interestingly, at the beginning of the film, the original film of President Reagan's speech was used, and the sentence "This is not our story" came out. The Cold War landscape isn't really what "City of Frigidity" really cares about, and history is just a lacquer here. Otherwise, how could Lorraine's room look so futuristic, and her costumes and makeup are so gorgeous (straight advertising placement, an excellent tradition of the 007 series); and those golden songs of the era that sounded a little overwhelming have also become A kind of conspicuous nostalgia. The film's transitions are so smooth, with a hint of gamification, that I suspected I was playing Grand Theft Auto 5.
However, the paradox of "City of Extreme Cold" is here again.
The indifference to history may convey a kind of arrogance to history. Lorraine, a three-faced spy serving the CIA, slaughtered the Quartet, the David of Berlin who pursued a chaotic balance was eliminated, the Berlin Wall fell, and the United States was the ultimate victor after all. Lorraine's motives as an individual have been obscured ("going home"?), and a larger institutional system is behind it. The confirmation of the transcendental meaning of the individual that we finally saw in the "Bourne Bourne" series has been obscured. A silent rewind to the political anxiety that spy films have long soothed.
The master of spy fiction, John Le Carré, said that "spy stories were not born or died because of the Cold War," but for a long time and today, spy stories are still intertwined with the Cold War. This is not only to say that many spy films use the Cold War as the story background, but also to say that the fact that spy films are still prosperous today is a so-called "post-Cold War pattern". In this way, "Arctic City" may be a retelling of "the end of history". But that is the subject of cultural studies.
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This article was first published on the WeChat public account of "Iris" film magazine 20171106
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