Last year, Netflix won three Oscars, including Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Cinematography, for Roma. After spending huge sums of money to create "Light of the Spirit" and "Clover's Paradox" one after another, he finally became proud in the field of film production.
And this award also marks that NETFLIX has truly become an emerging filmmaking force in Hollywood that cannot be ignored.
However, when it was rushing into the field of film production and preparing to further compete with several traditional Hollywood studios, Netflix has capsized in the field of TV production that once held a significant advantage.
The word-of-mouth and ratings of the two seasons of "House of Cards" are lower than the previous season. Although this season in 2018 has the halo of the final season, it is nothing new, and the completely retrogressive development of the plot still attracts countless former loyal fans. Chose to abandon the show.
Next is the "Copy" that we are going to talk about today. As a sci-fi TV series that Netflix executives have placed high hopes on, the production cost of a single episode exceeds the production cost of many TV series for a full season.
But the jaw-droppingly high production costs did not bring the same high returns for the show, which was mediocre in terms of ratings and word-of-mouth ratings. So is this show really lackluster?
Replica is based on Richard K. Morgan's science fiction novel Carbon Change, which won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award in 2003, one of the premier science fiction literary awards.
Then many people will ask, who is Philip K. Dick? If it is just a little confusing to mention Philip K. Dick, then when it comes to his famous science fiction literary work "Bionics Dream of Electronics" Sheep?" and the sci-fi classic "Blade Runner" adapted from it, I believe many fans will understand.
For future generations, Philip K Dick's most outstanding contribution is undoubtedly to promote the birth and development of cyberpunk literary works. Like "Blade Runner 2049", which achieved an excellent reputation the year before, but received a low box office, "Dungeon" obviously belongs to the cyberpunk genre with apocalyptic style in the classification of sci-fi themes.
Compared with the social problems caused by the creation of replicants in Blade Runner, the world in the story of Replica is undoubtedly darker.
In the future world described in "Copy", with the development of technology, people can achieve immortality, because when everyone is one year old, the government will implant an electronic chip "stack" for you, " "Stack" will store all human consciousness and memory.
So even if you die of illness, old age, or are murdered, as long as your "stack" is intact, you can achieve your immortality by constantly replacing your body and implanting the original stack. Under such a setting, the human body appears unimportant, and the most important thing is the materialized soul represented by the "stack".
So we can see that even if the hero is shot down by a group of riot soldiers at the beginning of the episode, he can still be resurrected with an intact "stack" after hundreds of years.
There are two main ways to get a new body, one is to buy it yourself, and the other is to wait for the government to distribute it. Generally speaking, those excellent bodies are often selected by the wealthy upper class at the beginning, and the bodies left to distribute to the lower classes are often inferior, and those who do not have enough funds to buy bodies and wait for distribution will never be You will know in what kind of body you will realize your regeneration.
In the first few episodes of the series, we witness the fading light of humanity in this extremely technologically advanced society.
Those who are waiting for the distribution of bodies may find themselves changing from male to female, or from female to male, from a young child to a dying old woman after exchanging bodies, and these people who are resigned to their fate and waiting for distribution are forever. You can only resign and you cannot make your own choices.
The confrontation between science and religion is also reflected and reflected in the drama.
For religious people, rebirth means desecration of the soul, so they have religious codes on their "stacks" and can never be reborn.
In addition to the gods in people's hearts, the wealthy upper-class "Maas" have also shaped themselves into god-like existences. They live in cloud palaces far away from the ruins of the dim cities on the surface of the earth, and have unattainable properties that ordinary people can't reach. The physical clone of the body is backed up, and it will remain young forever, and it will still be able to live for hundreds of years without changing its appearance.
They also have their own private satellites that can back up their data every 48 hours, which allows them to be quickly resurrected even if the stack is destroyed, achieving true immortality.
Benefiting from the technology of body replication, in the world of "Copy", those who have suffered murder or injury can also be quickly resurrected, helping the police to testify against the murderer, so as to achieve the purpose of quickly solving the case.
However, as mentioned earlier, if they are religious believers, they have automatically given up their qualifications for resurrection at the moment of believing in religion. Even if their death is due to others, they have no way to return to the world.
This leads to another story line of the show. The government wants to change the original law so that some people who believe in religion but were accidentally murdered can also be resurrected to help the police solve the case. On the other side, there are religious forces that firmly oppose it.
After the completion of the huge and rigorous cyberpunk worldview structure, the introduction of the story of the episode is made.
The story of "Copy" is very conservative compared to the background setting with wide-open brain holes. It follows a "Sherlock Holmes"-style reasoning story routine, and is exactly the same as the "Sherlock Holmes" movie series starring Robert Downey Jr. Yes, the "Detective" Kovac in this play was once an invincible "Space Marine" who was proficient in various martial arts and firearms.
At the beginning of the episode, Kovacs was outnumbered and shot by the government, and was forever deprived of his qualifications for physical resurrection, until he woke up again after countless years and found himself inexplicably become "Mas" Bancroft's Hire a detective and have to investigate his murder.
However, as the investigation begins, the bizarre deaths of a series of characters have put Kovacs on the verge of collapse. What is the truth? In the process of the continuous development of the current story line, another memory line is also slowly unfolding in front of the audience, and Kovacs' past and present are gradually intertwined in the expanding memories.
The high production costs laid the foundation for the film's grand future world scene construction and wonderful action scenes.
It can be said that the TV series basically restores the future world set by the original novel. The dark world under the neon lights, the towering palace in the clouds, and the urban train shuttle in the bitter acid rain all make the story of the series in While full of realism, it also has a strong sense of substitution.
In the drama, the large-scale passionate scenes and bloody scenes also make this drama bring the audience a hormonal visual experience.
Then there is the tribute to the classic works in the series, which makes "Copy" a science fiction work with special significance at the same time.
The first is the "raven hotel" where the male protagonist Kovac lives in the play and the hotel's artificial intelligence slope. This tribute is the "father of mystery novel" Edgar Allan Poe and his famous work "The Raven".
The second is the cartoon image of a white unicorn drawn on the small schoolbag that Kovacs got from the drug dealer in the play. This is an indirect tribute to the white unicorn that often appears in the dreams of the protagonist of "Blade Runner" Deck. beast. And the excellent gun battle scene at the beginning of this film has something in common with "The Matrix".
From these points of view, as a drama with a large investment in Netflix in 2018, "Dungeon" still has certain points to watch.
However, the criticized and mysterious narrative method of "Dungeon" finally allowed it to fail miserably while possessing classic IP, tribute elements, huge investment, and excellent visual effects.
If the sporadic memories of Kovacs in the previous episodes are supplements and extensions to the existing story line, the director and screenwriter can still distinguish the priority of the show. Then by the time of the seventh episode, the entire creative team obviously couldn't find the core and main line of the episode.
The memory line that was originally used as a supplementary narrative suddenly became a whole episode of the story. Many clues and mysteries that were painstakingly buried in the previous episode were all exploded in one episode. If this is the season finale, it seems to make sense. can understand.
However, when the story progressed to the seventh episode, there were still three full episodes of content, and the tone of the original detective case was instantly changed into a bloody soap opera.
Cyberpunk-style sci-fi dramas are very suitable for discussing reality and human nature to expand the depth and breadth of the plot.
The more successful series such as the "Blade Runner" series and last year's "Love, Death and Robots".
But in "Copy", the cyberpunk we see is more of a part of the background of the story, not really integrated into the story itself.
The multi-faceted and multi-angle story content that the audience wants to see, such as the polarization between the rich and the poor, the distortion of human nature, and social change, seems to have never appeared. The futuristic city with a cyberpunk style is completely blurred into the background of a dog-blood detective drama.
The so-called "Netflix products must be high-quality products" is really planted this time.
One season invested more than three seasons of "Game of Thrones", and it ended up like this. It seems that big investment may not necessarily bring good works. In the end, I still hope that through this failure, Netflix will be able to overcome the pain and polish up more real boutiques like "Stranger Things"!
The author of this article said that the article was first published on the WeChat public account "Cinephile Life". DC, Marvel, sci-fi, fantasy, Europe and the United States, classic movie recommendations, and in-depth analysis of popular blockbusters, just pay attention to "Cinema Life".
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