On the night of the military training, the film was played in the auditorium, and when the cast and crew were shown at the end of the film, the audience was silent.
Too heavy too heavy a movie. Whether in terms of subject matter or presentation effect.
When I was in elementary school, the teacher in the ideological and moral class had let go of the documentary about the Nanjing Massacre, which made me nervous. Even today, ten years later, I still remember the woman with her head raised in the documentary.
That period of history is a pain in the hearts of Chinese people forever. I can't imagine how desperate and helpless people would be at that time. I just realized that this is a terrible history, and then I stopped thinking about it. I was afraid that I would not be able to bear it any longer, and I would feel very sad.
From the very beginning of this film, I truly experienced the fear and despair that pervaded the doomsday city exposed to the wolves, the thousand-year-old ancient city wall ravaged by cannonballs, the abandoned army trampled on the corpses of compatriots and defeated, this kind of Fear and despair gripped me, from start to finish.
Hell on earth, rivers of blood, bodies in different places... One by one, people are harvested, crushed, abandoned, beaten, raped like crops in the autumn...background There are continuous gunshots, the crying of women and children, the sound of knives stabbing into the body, and the air raid sirens with desperate maneuvers... The footage makes the historical facts vivid and tragic, and the meaning of the massacre is no longer the cold explanation in the book. , became a living representation on the screen.
I was really scared after watching it. It's not that I'm afraid of being hurt by a specific person or thing, but I can't imagine what I can do if I enter such a desperate situation, and I know clearly that I can't do anything.
Let's talk about video settings. There is a lot of controversy about using the perspective of a conscientious Japanese like Kadokawa as the main line throughout the film. Choosing such an angle is a very innovative entry point. My understanding is that even the Japanese with a little conscience feel that the crimes they committed are unforgivable, while most Japanese soldiers are still insensitive and trampling on the massacre, in order to expose the absurdity, cruelty and innocence of this massacre. human nature. To be honest, I didn't have any emotions when I saw Kadokawa's suicide at the end, just: Oh, this Japanese died. The shocking sense of despair and hatred for the Japanese soldiers brought to me by the whole film has allowed me to treat them equally. All Japanese soldiers will never be whitewashed by me. What if Kadokawa has a conscience? He couldn't change the brutality of his teammates, he couldn't awaken the conscience of other Japanese people, he couldn't even save a life, his beloved Xiao Jiang was still dead, killed by his colleagues, and died in front of his eyes. And the awakening of Kadokawa's humanity was after witnessing the death of one woman after another, and he only had a partial conscience. So he ended up killing himself because he couldn't do anything but torment his conscience. What's more, what is the proportion of a special case like Kadokawa? Even one such person in a hundred Japanese would not have so many innocent lives brutally and wantonly killed. The reality is that such conscientious soldiers may not be able to find one out of ten thousand.
Looking at it, the director is Lu Chuan. He may have ambitions to make this film bigger and to interpret and view this painful and sensitive history from a different angle, so he took such a title. He also seems to hope that this movie can be released in Japan and shown to the world. I don't know if his expectations have been fulfilled. To be honest, it's a good movie, but at least, it doesn't deserve such a grand and ambitious name as "The Life and Death of a City".
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