his "cash back" is a film that really moved me.
Fresh young boy's feelings, light artistic temperament, relaxed British ridicule, as well as unreachable romance and thinking about time and self. That movie made me cry a lot, and it was one of my favorite movies of the past two years.
This winter, I heard about the new film The broken, translated into Chinese as "Desire for Destruction". The poster is very beautiful and the trailer is not bad, so I looked forward to it for half a year.
A few days ago, I finally watched it, but I was so disappointed that I wanted to cry without tears.
Those sensibilities and fantasies are replaced by grey tones and slow rhythms, and there are many holes in the bland story.
The story is very simple. To sum it up in key words, it is avatars, mirrors, car accidents, and murders.
After the heroine had a car accident, she found that the people around her were abnormal. In fact, they were all clones. The clones jumped out of the mirror into the real world, and they brutally killed themselves and replaced them. In panic, the heroine searches for the memory she lost in the car accident, and finally finds out that she is just a clone.
Simple as that, similar stories are featured in many films:
Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train
David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers
Stanley Kubb Lectra's The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut
Christopher Chislawski's La double vie de Véronique
Brian De Palma Body Double, Snake Eyes
Stephen Soderbergh's Solaris
Mulholland Dr. by David Lynch
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Doppelganger (or Self-Vision) (ドッペルゲンガー)
Doppelganger: The Soul by Ivy Nash Evil Within)
"Ghost in the Mirror" (もうひとりいる) directed by Kazunari Shibata and produced by Takashi Shimizu (もうひとりいる)
"Anna & Anna" by Lin Aihua
There are so many listed on Wikipedia, I personally I think "Fight Club", "The Mechanic" or "Deadly ID" can also be counted among them. Although these are about split personality, they also have a certain relationship.
Many of the above-mentioned films are works of great masters, which means that such films already have excellent predecessors.
Under such circumstances, it is a bit risky to still make this type of film.
This film by Sean Ellies has nothing new in the story, and also fails in the shooting technique, trying to create horror and suspense with a depressing and dull atmosphere. And this technique has been used perfectly in "The Sixth Sense". The difference is that the story structure of "The Sixth Sense" is amazing, while "Destruction" makes people guess the ending after half an hour.
In addition, there are many fatal loopholes in the film, and there are many far-fetched places in the setting.
For example, why is the heroine's entire family competing with the clone? Could it be that they have a family history of illness? Or what's wrong? That's not right, the heroine's boyfriend and her brother's girlfriend are also separated, it seems that only her brother is clean in the end. There is no blood relationship between them! Or is this an infectious disease? So where is the origin?
The heroine is a doctor, her father is a diplomat, her boyfriend is an architect, and her brother is a painter. This kind of identity setting does not seem to be of any help to the plot. This is a genre film, not a personal and individual literary film. Such a humanistic identity setting is too easy for people to have other associations. Doctors deal with human or spiritual problems, diplomats are politically inclined, architects and painters are full of artistic temperament. However, these reminiscent places have nothing to do with the content of the movie in the end, which is really puzzling.
Everyone else has become a complete bad person after being cloned, but the heroine doesn't seem to be, but still thinks she is herself. The clone kills the person and then crashes the car. Can the clone be knocked back to the person after a single hit?
In this case, how could her avatar boyfriend be mysterious to her, anyway, they are avatars, it is better to tell their own kind of the ins and outs!
...
too many unanswered questions anyway...the more I talk about it, the
more sad it is.
A good director of a literary film, or a director with his own personal characteristics, most of them will have this problem when re-shooting a film with a commercial framework for the first time. Being caught in an inappropriate system, it is difficult to exert one's own strengths. Commercial films are actually pretty good, but I'm afraid I'm going to choose the wrong route.
Sean Ellis made the wrong choice this time...
can only wish him well for the next step!
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