Last year's chick movie "Happy Death Day" , with sci-fi creativity, a good comedy atmosphere, and the still young and beautiful heroine, created a cost of 5 million US dollars and an amazing return of over 100 million US dollars at the global box office.
A girl is trapped in a certain day for mysterious reasons. She will be killed by the murderer that night, and then miraculously resurrected again, re-experiencing the past day, and then being killed again, and so on until she finds the murderer.
This playful story, which was horrified and suspenseful, was processed at the same time, which left a deep impact on the audience last year.
But until the end of the story, it did not explain why the heroine was trapped in the cycle time node. Seeing the company with a good box office strikes while the iron is hot, it has launched a sequel "Happy Death Day 2" with enthusiasm . Increased penetration and increased production costs by 9 million U.S. dollars. With the popularity of the first film, the sequel won a good first week at the box office after it was released, but the follow-up was weak. As of March 25, the box office was only 28 million U.S. dollars. Due to the low production cost, the sequel still has a good chance of winning in terms of profitability, but it is difficult to become a hit. "Happy Death Day" puts the current period on Halloween, and the theme of endless loop death fits the schedule. This time, "Happy Death Day 2" advanced the schedule to Valentine's Day and was released in North America on February 13, which shows that the story is biased towards youthful love this time.
At the beginning of the story, the first major puzzle was solved, what caused the heroine Terry to fall into the loop of time. It turned out that Terry’s boyfriend Carter’s bedroom friend Ryan successfully developed a particle collider. This experimental product, which was originally a Ryan’s graduation work, accidentally opened the parallel space and involved Terry.
At the beginning of the film, the focus shifted slightly, replacing the first funny scene of Terry's endless endless loop with Ryan.
The many intersections between Ryan and Terry made Terry finally understand the reason. In order to bring Ryan to your death cycle, she designed to easily catch the murderer, but the identity of the other party was shocking.
Ryan, who was in another space, wanted to survive alone in this space and took the assassination method. In order to end the parallel space, Ryan activated the particle machine again .
The accident happened again, this time not only did not solve the problem, but took Terry into another parallel space. In that space, everything has changed. The murderer is no longer the first roommate, and boyfriend Carter has actually become the younger brother of the sister group leader Danielle. Although the murderer was not found, she was relieved that her long-dead mother actually lived in this space, and her biggest dream in her life was realized here, which made her reluctant to return to the previous space at all.
"Happy Death 2" is obviously more ambitious from the script, and the structure is more complicated. The first part is the story of a girl’s growth, self-nirvana and re-cognition, a typical Hollywood youth film template. In this one, the first act solves the puzzle of the first one as soon as it comes up, and at the same time triggers the motivational event, opening up the story gap for the sequel. "Happy Death 2" is no longer a growth, even the sense of suspense is weakened. The theme of this part is choice and farewell .
In the story, boyfriend Carter and mother become the two poles of tearing up the heroine Terry. One side is the desire for love, and the other side is the memory of family affection. Terry, who has lost her mother's love since childhood, is too greedy for the existence of maternal love, but in the film, she comes from another parallel space without the memory of her past in this space. In other words, she has been absent from the experience of her mother growing up with her. She has only retained her mother's present and future, but she still cannot obtain the precious past.
In this space, although I reunited with my mother. But in the last space, she regarded her death as home, but Carter, who truly loves her invincible, became someone else's boyfriend. She had to witness the sweetness and misery of the two in the cycle of death. This undoubtedly made her suffer a blow, very disappointed.
Staying can make up for the lack of family affection, but you have to give up the rare love; going back or staying has become a dilemma. In addition, the film still reproduces the playful death method in the first movie. In order to help Ryan solve the particle formula and reopen the parallel space, she must experience repeated deaths, and remember the previous formula, and let Ryan get the final correct formula by the method of elimination. So wearing a swimsuit and falling from a high altitude without an umbrella; a hair dryer was electrocuted to death; the clock tower rotated 360 degrees and fell off; imitating the bridge section of "Deadpool 2", jumping into the slag crusher and other various fancy suicide methods came on the scene again.
The theme of "Happy Death 2" is superimposed on the story of this multi-dimensional universe, and the theme becomes clearer. Our unique memories and experiences, painful, happy, sad, and happy, constitute our individual self. Even though we may look better in another seemingly "perfect" dimension, these are all based on those experiences that gradually lead to the formation of "I". Our unique memories and experiences, that is, the process ratio The result is more important.
We cannot jump directly from the process to the result, because that result does not belong to us. The "I" who jumped directly to the result cannot actually become the me in my imagination. We arrived in another parallel space, but because of our unique memories and experiences, we could only live in the parallel space that belonged to me in the end.
This is the importance of experience and memory . "Happy Death Day 2" has the ambition to expand the depth of the theme, but after actual operation, it still stays on the surface. In addition, it is a pity that the film must be implanted with easy and humorous funny clips, making it difficult for the film to go deeper. Moreover, the complexity of the structure also brings about the procrastination of the middle narrative, and even some distraction and dislocation . The first part is highly focused on "death cycle" and "finding the murderer", with prominent main lines and compact sections. But in this part, the entanglement between family and love has caused the side story to be cumbersome. The main story and the main character are in danger of being in the position of the bystander, making the position of the heroine observer very embarrassing.
It can be seen from the end of the second film that the company has the ambition to produce the third one , which also left clues and foreshadowing. It is hoped that the upgrading of the pattern will not lead to the downgrade of the story, which wasted the successful genre variant of this youth film. Finally, I have to say that the heroine Jessica Rhodes is still the highlight of the film, with playful and sexy acting skills and appearance, which looks pleasing to the eye.
Let us wait and see how this IP will go on.
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