[3 stars +] spoilers
Sometimes I think it’s not easy to be a screenwriter now. From the depth to the breadth, most of the things that can be written have been used by predecessors. It is difficult to write new ideas. Honestly make some qualified popcorn movies, the recent "Escape Room" personally thinks it is such a movie.
This film combines the game shell of the escape room, the form of escape from the panic, the trap mechanism of the chainsaw, the screening conditions of candidates commonly used in detective films, plus a little dark net legend of perverted bloodthirsty dignitaries playing with human life, and psychological The story of patients with disease coming out of the shadows to face life again.
But when it comes to showing the details of human nature or revealing the social system, this film presents a touch of water, and more emphasis is placed on telling a customs clearance story.
The correspondence between the secret room and the characters, background, and knots in the movie is as follows:
1. The oven burns the secret room - female soldier - war explosion - all comrades sacrifice
2. The Secret Room on the Frozen Lake - Elite Man - Shipwrecked Frostbite - Killing a friend by stealing a coat
3. Upside Down High Falling Room - Physics Girl - Air Crash - Mother's Death
4. The back room of the gas hospital - game boy - gas poisoning - the whole family died
5. Drugged hallucinogenic secret room - alcoholic brother - drunk driving accident - personal negligence kills friends
6. Squeeze the study secret room - uncle miner - mine collapse - brother death
The secret room game design concept is as follows:
1. The behind-the-scenes Boss has a demand for watching bloodthirsty real-life games, and has a lot of financial and material resources, power, and human support.
2. The theme of the game needs to be continuously updated to keep it fresh.
3. A very low escape rate is set to enhance the viewing interest.
A game that is too simple is worthless, and the difficulty setting of 100% death is also boring. Only if there is a trace of life, there is infinite expectation.
4. Limited time, scarce resources, and mutually restrictive agencies can easily lead to competition and confrontation.
5. The loser of the game will send the corpse to various places to fake the scene of accidental death according to the corresponding death method.
6. Those who successfully escape will be killed by the game designer, so that the killing game will be completely kept secret from the outside world.
7. The so-called rules are not so strict, but unexpected factors can bring unexpected surprises.
8. Even if there are survivors who eventually escape from the police, the behind-the-scenes boss has the ability to destroy evidence and get away with it.
The theme of the secret room in the film is the secondary screening of the only survivors in the disaster. The 6 types of disasters experienced by the 6 survivors are connected into 6 levels to see if any of these 6 people can survive again. It can also be analogized to the previous theme of college athletes, which is likely to be multiple tests of classmate friendship and athletic ability under extreme conditions.
Probably for the perverted audience of the behind-the-scenes Boss, the interest of the survivor theme comes from the following points:
1. Multiple challenges to game participants' intelligence, physical strength, psychological quality and the bottom line of human nature.
2. How survivors deal with the catastrophic distress and psychological trauma they have experienced.
3. Whether the survivor can continue to be lucky in the face of the catastrophic plight that other survivors have experienced.
4. If there is a winner, it will be a resource-challenging type, a cooperative and mutual-aid type, or a moderate and lucky type.
The aforementioned scarce resources and restrictive mechanisms, like the cotton-padded clothes in the frozen chamber and the antidote in the hallucinogenic chamber, are too obvious to say much.
It can be said that, for example, the push switch in the oven's secret room, if there are insufficient props to assist the push switch, it is likely to evolve into such a situation that the last one or two people responsible for the push switch are unwilling to be left alone and cannot leave. It is possible to give up pressing the switch and try to pry the door of the secret passage, so that other people can't leave the secret passage, and it will cause several people to perish together.
The same is true for the door handle in the high-fall secret room. The safe where the door handle is located and the door leaving the secret room are located on both sides of the secret room. The floor has long since fallen. It is very possible to give your hands directly to others, use them to restrain others to rescue you, or even choose to die together in a desperate situation.
It is mentioned in the film that no one has escaped from the previous secret room games, which is likely to develop into such an ending. Because the previous participants are ordinary people who have not experienced disasters in their lives, it is difficult to say that all kinds of tragedies will not happen when they suddenly encounter extreme difficulties. As for the participants in this theme, except for the elite men who kill to survive, the other five, although in different circumstances, can be said to have survived because of luck.
At the end of the film, the alcoholic brother comforted the physics sister and mentioned a psychological concept called " survivor guilt ". The survivors feel sorry for the victims, full of guilt for their salvation, and even feel that it is their own fault. "Survivor's guilt" is the theme of the film, and it is probably also an important reason why the survivors did not completely repeat the mistakes of others' games-because of their guilt towards others, they are reluctant to live selfishly, even if they are in danger. More willing to try to help friends.
Let's take a look at the background and ending of these 6 survivors in turn.
1. The game boy is lively and cheerful, with a kind personality. It is reasonable to speculate that the gas poisoning incident he encountered in the past was purely accidental. When he came out of the grief of the death of the whole family, he may become more open-minded and love to play games. Maybe it’s because I live in the moment and have fun after watching it, and of course it may be to distract the attention of my lost family, so I indulge in games to escape reality. The game guy has been subconsciously rationalizing the dangers in the game, which seems to be in line with the escapism mentality, and numbing himself can be regarded as a common way to deal with pain.
From a macro point of view, the game boy survived because of luck in the gas poisoning incident, and died because of misfortune in the secret room game, his luck and misfortune are chaotic and random, or it can be said that it is because of self The paralysis caused him to lose his acute sense of danger.
From a realistic point of view, there were two illegal props in his hands at that time, one was a lighter that could be used to make a fire to melt ice cubes immediately, and the other was a mobile phone that had a risk of leaking a selfie just now. The former will greatly reduce the fun of the game, and the latter is a big taboo. As I said before, the rules of the game are not very strict. For example, the alcoholic brother smoked and drank alcohol, and he didn't see the boss ignite the organ in advance if he fouled with a wine bottle. Will not hurt hands.
And the game's little brother is selected by the Boss to be the first to be eliminated, which is inevitable. Throughout the whole film, he is also the only player who was directly killed by the behind-the-scenes Boss. The reason is also due to his self-paralysis - a bullfighter who faces danger but does not know fear, how exciting to the perverted audience, this is the most realistic side of the game.
An unplayable toy became a sacrifice for the boss to kill the chicken and warn the monkeys, used to scare other survivors, "The game is real, and the player will die."
2. Female soldier, brave and persevering, but with obvious PTSD, she has not been able to come out of the shadow of burns. Traumatized in the oven chamber, fortunately, with the help and comfort of my companions, I survived it.
The friendship between soldiers on the battlefield has always been extraordinary. She has the guilt for the sacrificed comrades in arms and the sacrifice of the soldiers. The last time a comrade-in-arms sacrificed her to live alone, this time she sacrificed herself to save her companions. At the moment of her sacrifice, she must have untied her heart.
3. The uncle of the miner, an insecure person, once listened to his younger brother's breathing slowly disappearing, waiting for death alone in the dark, desperate and fearful. After being rescued, I changed jobs, still fearful and anxious, and just wanted to save more money to cope with possible future dilemmas.
He was afraid of losing his job, afraid of death, and wanted to live. In the high-fall secret room, when the shelf was about to bear the weight of the three people, someone asked him to move the place, but he didn't dare, because he was afraid of death, and it was the physics girl who took the initiative to take the risk. He didn't do much in the whole process of the secret room, and usually sat back and enjoyed the results. In the gas secret room, he was finally persuaded by the elite man. Seeing that death was imminent, he could only make a gamble.
The death of his younger brother and the desperate waiting for death made him more afraid of death than others. This fear of death made him choose to retreat, and he also chose to gamble his life.
Fear, sometimes life, sometimes dead end.
4. An elite man, a self-interested person, good at taking advantage of others, unscrupulous in desperate situations, ignoring morality and emotion. In order to survive, he killed his friends and robbed them of the survival resources belonging to them. After being rescued, he exercised more diligently. From his point of view, a strong body was the biggest cost for him to defeat others and steal his life.
Be the first to escape in the oven chamber, be the first to ask for a coat in the freezer chamber, be the first to grab the key and run to the exit, use the alcoholic brother and the miner as a test in the gas chamber, kill the miner, and finally In the hallucinogenic secret room, he stole the antidote found by the alcoholic brother and was beaten to death.
The elite man has a decent appearance and a humorous conversation, but inside is a mess, like the ugly truth hidden under his lies. Compared with the uncle of the miner's "fear of death, self-protection, and inaction", the elite man "exchanges other people's death for his own life". He is the only one of the 6 survivors who survived not by luck, but by cruelty. person, he does not have the "survivor guilt" of the other 5 people, only the self-affirmation of "living by one's ability". He is also the only person in the game who has actively done harm.
In the hallucinogenic secret room, the alcoholic brother exposed the lies of the elite man. The elite man tried to rob others of the survival resources again, but was killed. Here I agree with other netizens. It is precisely because the elite man pays too much attention to exercising that he has insufficient tolerance to hallucinogenic drugs. This is the key to his death. It is "born strong and died strong" .
From a macro point of view, his crime of murdering and stealing things has also been finally judged in the process of repeating his old tricks.
5. The alcoholic brother, a condescending person, but his conscience is not lost. He once killed several friends because of personal mistakes, but he survived alone. He was not only the survivor's guilt, but also the culprit's guilt. His psychological trauma is not mainly in the car accident, but in "I killed my good friends". Because the guilt was too painful and too painful, he failed to stop drinking, but lived a bit of a mess. But he is still a person with more courage and reflection ability. In addition to not forgetting those friends who were killed by him, he also has the will to try to get out of the trauma and start a new life, such as applying for a transfer to the front desk.
In the secret room game, the old events happened to repeat themselves. Probably the boss behind the scenes also did it on purpose. He just reminded the alcoholic brother of the names of the dead friends in the cabin, and then let him throw the lighter and indirectly killed the game brother. In the following process, the game brother was no longer fooled. He also tried to rescue his companions again and again, and did not want to leave his companions. This is a survivor who dares to face mistakes, has the ability to reflect, and has the spirit of redemption.
He was finally redeemed. After leaving the game, he was finally able to start a new life. He was even willing to leave a stable life and go to danger in order to accompany the physics girl.
6. Little girl in physics, with high IQ and serious PTSD. It's just that her psychological trauma did not come from the plane crash. It was evident from the reaction in the high-falling room. Her real psychological trauma was watching her mother die tragically in front of her eyes, but there was nothing she could do. It was "I can't save my mother."
What kind of meaning mother means to everyone, I don’t think I need to say more. We can imagine how much psychological trauma the physics girl has suffered.
Therefore, the little girl in physics is full of energy throughout the game. She has been actively looking for clues, and she is also desperately taking the initiative to rescue her companions. She is the only survivor among the six who has a strong will to help and save others.
So the ending is as she said, "I don't want to be the one who survived alone anymore." She successfully saved a companion, unraveled the knot, repaired the wound, and even had the desire to save more people. Go heads-up with the mastermind behind the scenes.
It is precisely because the physics girl has the clearest mind and high IQ, so she can look beyond the game itself to see the problem, and then see through the essence of the problem.
1. As a game participant, the real object of resistance is not the rules of the game, but the behind-the-scenes Boss, which destroys the monitor and also destroys the behind-the-scenes control of the game.
2. The rules can be broken. If you continue to find the exit and enter the next secret room, you will still be a toy behind the scenes. There is a dead end. Only by jumping out of the rules can you resist at the same level.
3. Since the game is artificially designed, the players who died in each link must have someone to take care of the aftermath, and the game has other outlets.
4. Based on the high degree of simulation of the game, all items that do not seem to be clues can still be used, such as oxygen masks. The poisonous gas in the gas chamber should be carbon monoxide, which comes from the game's experience. As long as the oxygen is inhaled in time, there is no danger of life. The monitoring vacuum period brought by the destruction of the monitor has given the physics girl a chance to survive.
As for the game designer who tried to kill the alcoholic brother, according to the original plan, there was no bonus. It wasn't because the Boss couldn't afford it, but he never regarded the participants as human beings. They were just toys in the Colosseum. No trouble, no matter whether you pass the customs or not, you are not ready to let people go out alive.
The designer was killed by accident, but it was a rare surprise for the Boss, so the avatar of the designer also appeared on the screen, and the underlying minions were just toys for the Boss. Dead, maybe there is a real-time gambling game behind the scenes.
In the big boss's territory, is it not easy to find a few to kill the physics girl and the alcoholic brother? so easy! In the same sentence, what the big boss wants is a good-looking and exciting game, such an interesting player, let it go. Since the movie sets the boss to have the ability to reach the sky, the horizontal and vertical police will not catch any handle, keep these two The next time you play it again, there will be an airplane secret room at the end of the film, which is tailor-made.
Movie creators always want to leave a little aftertaste to their works. Some movies say that disasters may be political conspiracies in addition to accidents, but this movie has opened up a brain hole, and disasters may also be a game for some people to enjoy. Game of Thrones - Are those who die unexpectedly really just accidents? As a horror-themed movie, it still has to fulfill its responsibilities.
And I am more willing to think about the perspective of the idea, put aside all the horror parts, and return to the matter of psychological trauma. I am more willing to view the film in this way.
Psychological trauma is like a terrifying secret room that can hurt people. It will trap the patient in it and it is difficult to escape. Even in the seemingly normal life of others, it is always haunted by shadows that cannot be escaped, and even endangers the patient's life.
The order of the 6 survivors in a row from death to escape is the numb, the victim, the self-protector, the victim, the atonement, and the saver, which just reflects the theme of the movie. How survivors deal with psychological and moral trauma”, escape, fear, face, etc. are all attitudes. I hope that the survivors will face it positively, be able to save themselves or be rescued, and finally get out of the shadows and have a better life. I guess it is probably a wish of the creator.
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