The devil is in the detail, this famous English proverb, translated into Chinese, is a familiar "the devil is in the detail", usually considered to come from one of the pioneers of modernist architecture, American German architect Mies Van DeRo's famous quote, his other famous remark, "less is more", is also widely influential. These two sentences, in the Chinese context, correspond to a more concise idiom: Wei Yan Da Yi.
As a "product manager" in a sense, I often think about a question, what is a good product? If we follow the usual method of Jobs, I think it should be simple to use the interface, with extremely complicated user experience logic. According to James Cameron's usual method, it should be a simple plot with extremely complicated visual details.
The product logic of "Alita: Battle Angel" is such a visual film with countless details of the devil, and at the same time, it is subtle and righteous.
Jobs and Cameron are said to be the most valuable people in our era. I am afraid there will be no objection. One of them has created artistic miracles in the field of business, and the other has created a business miracle in the field of art. Miracle. On the back of their success, they are all trying to create technological miracles that surpass the times. Following the path of Jobs, today's world has become the era of smartphones, and along the path of Cameron, today's film art, the box office of 3D+IMAX has already surpassed the traditional 2D.
Of course, just as the 2010 iphone4 slogan "change the world again". After Cook, no matter how well he did, he could only be "bigger than big, not just big". "Avatar", which premiered in 2009, can naturally act as a work that changes the world of movies, and the current Robert Rodriguez can only be "more thin than thin, more than thin" at most.
Therefore, objectively speaking, "Alita: Battle Angel" is not another epoch-making work. Since the iPhone 4, I have been chasing the "Apple Spring Festival Gala" every year. I have long wanted to understand that every year Expecting Apple to come up with something different is actually unrealistic. After the future has come, there is actually no future. Figured this out, even "Avatar 2, 3, 4", no matter what kind of sequel, I don't think Cameron will be amazing again, he can only do it more technically, and then finer, this wave The leap of technology, like the previous generation who saw Lucas' "Star Wars", is already the peak of the generation we can see. For me, watching this movie is more like watching the world I am in. Whether it is the boundary of imagination or the boundary of technology, how many times will there be such an opportunity in my lifetime?
Many people are concerned about whether the sci-fi movies are hard-core enough, and there are also many original parties concerned about whether the film adaptation is suitable enough. Of course, more boring concerns, such as Easter eggs, the original author of OST, or ideological confrontation, revealing even the director Deep meanings that I can't think of, etc., these are understandable, which shows that the art of film, created, is handed over to the audience, "there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people" (by the way, this sentence is probably Chinese People rely on pseudo-English proverbs written by pseudo-Engels), the most undesirable thing in the world, in addition to eating beautiful women, is to teach others how to watch a movie. So in my opinion, what kind of work "Alita" is and what I can see, this is only the most important to me.
The most important of these is this frame that appears repeatedly in various trailers:
The picture looks so similar to the photo below:
Starting from this picture, I think this movie has little to do with the original "Gun Dream". Although there are many scenes in the movie that restore the original comics, it is obviously a movie about the reconstruction of civilization.
The ruins of Scrap Iron Town can be compared to the burnt Alexandria Library, the fall of Constantinople, and more like the aftermath of The Blitz. The rebirth of Alita also means that the dawn of civilization has reappeared. She has the invincible oriental mecha technique. Although it can be regarded as the self-setting of the original comics from Japanese culture, when did the destruction and reconstruction of various civilizations in history leave the entanglement of the East and the West?
The city of Salem in the sky is just a background established by CG. In a certain sense, it is just a reflection of the "ruling class". All the scenes and stories in the film revolve around the "scrap iron town" under the city in the sky. expanded. And this scrap iron town is not planned in Kansas as stated in the movie promotion, and finally filmed in South America. The most accurate template is London after it was bombed by the Germans for more than 76 days and nights between September 7, 1940 and May 10, 1941.
Destruction of civilization is an easy task for human beings. Showing how to destroy is nothing more than bombing. Fortunately, human beings still have a skill that makes God a headache. After bombing and rebuilding, this fateful cycle, sometimes hundreds Once a year, sometimes every few years, the scrap iron town in the movie shows a barely usable, reconstructed human civilization. Some commentators say that this town is bright and young, not in the original comics. The wasteland environment, if you understand the meaning of "reconstruction", you should praise Cameron a little for this setting.
Although rebuilding is one of human instincts, the most important rebuilding in Europe after the bombing of London is not architecture and technology (although it is also important), but as a rebuilding of the heart of the battered human being.
The girl in the picture is Czesława Konoka, a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz on March 12, 1943, when she was 14 years old. In 2018, after an artist on Twitter got her photo and rendered it in color, there was a huge response.
It was found that the colorful Czesława Konoka also has big bright and clear eyes, she is so close to us, like a well-behaved neighbor girl, but why did she die so innocently?
Simply accusing Nazi violence obviously does not fully capture our specific historical situation. If we humans still have tireless fun in destroying civilization, the first to be destroyed should be those who are tied to the most traditional gender roles like Czesława Konoka. , helpless girls, if they are destroyed, most of us are doomed.
In order to prevent a tragedy like Czesława Konoka from happening again, we have long believed that we should do our best to protect our Czesława Konoka like an eagle protects his young, but is this enough?
In the movie, Ide, whose character identity is the father of a girl, relies on the rocket hammer, a powerful weapon, to protect his daughter, but he lost one and almost lost the other. He can't do it, like the once German Jewish father, the Armenian father, or even the once Chinese father. I watched helplessly as my daughter lost. The movie addresses this with an abrupt transition: let go, and help. Ide personally sent his daughter Alita to the arena. This is just the beginning. The last scene of the movie tells us that Alita's future is the sea of stars.
I think this is the important reason why Cameron designed the protagonist Alita as a cute girl next door, and gave her a pair of special and spiritual big eyes (the most expensive big eyes in movie history). There are comments that this is justice, and I think this is a ubiquitous reminder and telling that Alita is the Czesława Konoka of the new era. The difference is that when this girl no longer needs to be protected, It means that she is no longer someone's vassal, she is herself, she is a weapon, to meet challenges and overcome bullying, the power in Alita can be regarded as a kind of pure violence, this power comes from love, tolerance and This, I believe, gives the film an identity-centric liberal undertone that echoes the #Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in the real world today.
In the film, we witness this transformation taking shape, we see the countless victories of Czesława Konoka who should not have been the underdog, and if you are angry at the stereotypes that exist in the world today, you should trust Alita Demonstrated independence and self-consciousness in personality
Of course, when I can still enjoy air-conditioning and IMX images in the cinema, the destruction of the next civilization may still be brewing, and pure violence does not need to enter actual combat for the time being. I sat in the movie theater until the last minute, when the last line on the screen read : "This film provides jobs for 15,000 people. "
Girls, you should be weapons like Alita, if there is no war, go to work bravely and fight for yourself bravely.
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