There is a scene in the film: Jiang Wen, Fage and Youge stand on the stage together to hold a bandit suppression mobilization meeting. Jiang Wen was the first to appear on the stage. With the beating of the drums, he was dressed in military uniform, and he was pompous and strode toward the camera. This scene reminded me of the classic beginning of "General Patton". Scott conquered the Oscar judges with this large speech. In "Let the Bullets Fly", Jiang Wen conquered the audience in front of the screen with his body and temperament. In his comparison, Brother Fa's figure looks so old-fashioned, and Brother You looks so weak and slender, and he doesn't have the heroic style of the former actor at all. After all, it's all the skeleton and muscles to blame!
The ending in the original novel is like this: Zhang Muzhi killed Huang Shilang, but was beheaded by the security team and the team defense team. The people in the county town were filled with grief and indignation, but they could do nothing but grief and indignation.
As an amateur writer who has spent most of his life in the party and government organs, the author of this book may not be able to escape his ideology until his death. The only powerful reason why a bandit leader can openly become the master of the people, and use violence to eradicate dissidents without mercy, is that the current regime is corrupt enough. However, does this situation work as well today? The director is a smart person. If he follows this plot trajectory, "Let the Bullets Fly" will definitely be made into an extremely reactionary political fable.
At the end of "Seven Samurai", Kanbei, played by Takashi Shimura, looked at the new tombs of the four samurai and said: We were defeated again, and it was the peasants who won. The ending of "Let the Bullets Fly" has the same effect: Zhang Muzhi tried his best to eradicate the bullies, but at the end he ended up alone and alone.
Akira Kurosawa and Jiang Wen are the same, always clinging to their elite consciousness, thinking that the common people are cowardly and cunning. They have always been the slaves of the strong, and they will always applaud and celebrate only the successful side. However, when the crisis came, they huddled behind the hero and obtained their own selfish interests at the expense of the hero. It is also like the ending set by Lu Chuan in "Nanjing Nanjing": the battle took the lives of the strong and the backbone, but made the cowards, women, children, young and old to survive. The creators of these films are without exception representatives of the social elite (of course, their skills and qualities are different). Although they strive to be close to the common people, their ideological differences make them completely different from the common people.
In fact, the lonely hero is just trapped in the prison of tragic self, unable to extricate himself, escape from this feeling, who is the real winner? Those common people or peasants may have acquired two reclining chairs, an iron gate, several bags of rice and even some gold and silver jewelry today, but when these spoils of war are exhausted, the lives of most people will still return to their original state. There won't be the slightest change. As for those bandits, local tyrants, and bad gentry, they will still make a comeback, and it is a matter of creating another Zhang Shilang and Liu Shilang to loot the people as best they can. And Zhang Muzhi: No matter whether he is the tragic hero Zhang Muzhi who sacrificed his life generously in the novel or the philosopher Zhang Muzhi who was reborn on the screen, they can't really save the people from misery, and they can't even guarantee that they won't transform into a more powerful person than their predecessors. A fearless authoritarian regime. And at this point, countless historical facts support it: it
is never the people who will win, but the "small group" of the people, who are the wisest, the bravest, and even more precisely———— -
The most despicable person.
View more about Let the Bullets Fly reviews
