This article was first published in [curtain flavor]
Text/Li Zhen
The most heartwarming news in recent days is that "Kris Wu was detained by the police on suspicion of rape".
After so many days of uproar, the Weibo hot search has been on for several rounds, and the people who eat melon have repeatedly jumped between various confusing fake materials and real hammers, and now the dust has finally settled.
The sudden collapse of a generation of top-notch not only proves to us the unbreakable truth of "the legal network is extensive and omissions are not missed", but also shows us the courage and strength of female victims such as Du Meizhu who are not afraid of power and dare to speak out.
In recent years of domestic and foreign film and television works, we are also pleased to see that more and more courageous, resourceful, thoughtful and powerful female characters have emerged, and they are committed to breaking the confinement and oppression of patriarchy and power. , to prove the power and value of women with practical actions should not be underestimated.
The protagonist Ashin in the movie "Kingdom: Ashin of the North" is also a distressed and admirable female character. As a side film of the American drama "Kingdom", "Ashin" not only explained in detail the origin of life and death grass and the ins and outs of this zombie disaster, but also told us that in the feudal era, a bottom-level woman was used, raped, After being deceived, he came to his senses, and the history of the suffering of the Jedi counterattack.
01 The Elegy of the Bottom Under the Trample of Feudal Power
What makes the movie "Ashin" extremely unusual in its script is that its first act is particularly "long". How long does it grow? In a one-and-a-half-hour movie, the protagonist has not entered her "hero's journey" in the first 45 minutes, and the audience has not even seen her a few times. This is actually very contrary to the rules of commercial film play.
As a high-concept movie featuring zombies and big star Jun Ji-hyun as its selling points, the creator hides them in the second half of the movie, which can easily make the movie fall into the danger of "frauding the audience". Facts have proved that since its release, "Ashin" has been criticized by countless audiences for this.
So what exactly is the first act of "Ashin" about?
As we can see, the first scene of the film focuses on the two male characters, Master Yi and Ashin's father, focusing on the hierarchical oppression and political power struggle between the three regions of Joseon, Pozhuwei, and Fanhu tribe. This scene begins with 15 Po Zhu Wei Cai Shen people being shot and killed by North Korean soldiers, and ends with the horrific extermination of the Po Zhu Wei tribe by the Fanhu tribe.
On the surface, the power struggle and slaughter between these men has nothing to do with the protagonist Ashin. In the movie, it is often only used as a historical background to explain the past with a paragraph of text or a few sets of shots, but the director of "Ashin" Photographed in great detail. is this necessary?
have.
This is determined by the theme of the film. Only by fully understanding the history can we truly enter the inner world of Ashin.
Ashin's father once said: "The army is more terrible than the monster." This sentence is the title of the film. If combined with the context, this sentence can also be translated into: "The grass of life and death is only a tool for making zombies, and the selfishness and brutality of feudal power desire is the culprit that turns people into ghosts."
From this, we can understand the creator's good intentions: the purpose of lengthening the first act is to trace the origin of the zombie scourge, while the compression of Ashin's scenes is an allegory for the insignificance of individual fate in the face of the evil of the system.
What "Axin" wants to express is not only the upheaval and displacement of individual destiny, but also the silent sad song of the people at the bottom under the trampling of feudal power.
At the same time, in the first act, the screenwriter analyzed why the Fanhu tribe suffered massacres from both internal and external levels.
In this process, we can clearly see how the feudal desire for power corrupted and oppressed people from the inside out, which led to the doom of this tragedy.
The inner level mainly starts from Ashin's father.
In the film, the biggest problem faced by Ashin's father and the Fanhu tribe he led was the lack of a sense of national belonging.
They belong to the Jurchen family, but they live along with North Korea. As a result, they are in the embarrassing situation of "neither the Jurchen nor the Koreans".
There is no sense of national belonging, let alone national blood, so they consider themselves humble and are engaged in the most dirty and dangerous jobs. When North Korean officials come, they have to pay tribute to all the furs they hunted hard.
Such a nation is destined to be bullied no matter what era it is.
But can't they think of a way to find a sense of national belonging?
In the film, Ashin gives a solution: go across the river and go back to the clan. But how did Ashin's father answer? He said that North Korea was kind to its ancestors and could not be ungrateful. At this time, Ashin retorted: "Perhaps North Korea treated our ancestors that way, but now everything is taken away from us again."
It can be seen that Ashin's father turned a blind eye to the fact that even an underage girl could see it, preferring to watch the tribe live a humiliating life, and insisted on bowing to North Korea, which shows that the feudal power has been very successful in domesticating his thoughts.
And what method does Ashin's father want to turn over? be an official.
This can certainly be seen as his beautiful vision as the patriarch who wants to lead the clan to prosperity, but isn't this a little selfishness that he is trying to satisfy his desire for power?
In order to please North Korea in order to seek an official and half-office, he was willing to cross the river to be a spy to spread rumors and help foreigners to deceive his own clan. In the end, he was swallowed up by the desire for power and ended up in the tragic end of a "human stick". the irony.
The external perspective is mainly from the gang of the adults.
If you review the story of "Ashin", it is not difficult to find that this genocide disaster was completely a "butterfly effect": due to the indiscriminate killing of the Jurchen ginseng collectors by the second rich generation of the Zhao family in Haiyuan, the adults were forced to pay attention to the mother-in-law. Wei lied and put the blame on, which in turn led Po Zhu Wei to kill the innocent Fanhu tribe.
It can be seen that a willful decision of the upper-level elites is enough to "chain" to the demise of a nation, and it is a selfish, cruel, and efficient feudal system that operates in this process.
Every "screw" in the machine makes what it thinks is the right decision out of selfish desires, but considers the lives of the people at the bottom as less important than the grass.
However, just as the "price" repeatedly emphasized in the film, this butterfly effect finally pointed to the blackening of Ashin, who used the grass of life and death to create the scourge of zombies and let the world bury her clan with her.
Of course, this is because the creator conforms to the attributes of the movie "dream-making machine" and uses surreal techniques to let the audience see the bright ending of evil and evil, and then obtain psychological comfort and satisfaction.
In fact, we all know that in the real context, this butterfly effect would have come to an end long before Ashin turned black.
02 Where does the cool feeling of watching movies come from?
As a 90-minute film, the "longness" of the first act will inevitably lead to the compression of the narrative length of the second and third acts. How to tell the story clearly and wonderfully in a limited time is a difficult problem that tests the creator's skill.
How did the screenwriter of "Ashin" do it?
We can see that in the second half of the film, the screenwriter of "Ashin" clarified the narrative goals and improved the narrative efficiency. Through the organic weaving of the plot, Ashin's growth was not dragged down, and her revenge anger was completely ignited. Bringing the audience a long-suppressed emotional release and a refreshing feeling of watching the movie.
Let us analyze them one by one.
First of all, Ashin's only purpose is revenge, and everything she does is to avenge her clan's hatred. This is the narrative goal that the screenwriter must make clear.
In order to ensure the purity of this goal, the screenwriter of "Ashin" abandoned the B-story that would make the plot more exciting and tortuous. In other words, Ashin was not bound by any male emotional lines.
This also sets "Ashin" apart from many so-called "female revenge movies" on the market.
Secondly, the screenwriter showed that the young Ashin was working as a cow and a horse in the North Korean barracks while practicing archery in private, and turned around through a character to seamlessly connect the young Ashin and the adult Ashin.
This not only improves the narrative efficiency of the film, but also makes the actor Jun Ji-hyun's appearance unique and exciting.
Third, Ashin is one of the rare female characters in women's revenge-themed movies who is "black" to the end. She has no emotional fetters and does not belong to any camp. The clansmen she once relied on have now become walking dead.
Undoubtedly, this kind of character who is driven to a desperate situation by fate and has to be the enemy of the whole world can easily arouse empathy from the audience, but at the same time, it is also difficult to write well, because a little carelessness will make the character become hypocritical, or turn abruptly. For example, the movie "Black Widow" has such a problem.
And "Axin" does a better job in this regard.
Due to the full foreshadowing of the first act of the film, we deeply understand the tragic background of Ashin being despised, exploited and sacrificed as a Fanhu.
However, the tragedy of the tribe pushed Ashin to the brink of revenge at most, but it was not enough to completely blacken her, because she still had fantasies about the world and emotional fetters.
In order to push Ashin's situation to the extreme, the screenwriter has arranged three events:
One, Ashin considers himself a "lowly little girl" and pines his hopes on a powerful male force, but the men in the barracks covet her beauty and think about how to rape her all day long.
When the officer bumped into a soldier and raped Ashin, it was only a verbal warning, and no actual punishment was given. This shattered her last shreds of fantasies about patriarchy.
Second, Ashin accidentally discovered her imprisoned father during her mission. Under her father's hard pleas, she killed her father herself and cut off her only emotional sustenance in the world.
Third, Ashin broke into the historical archives and found that she had been living in the deception of the envoy. It turned out that North Korea, which had taken in her with false affection, was the culprit of the genocide that year, which made her completely lose her political stance.
It is not difficult to see that the blow to Ashin from these three events is gradually escalating: from physical to emotional to ideological.
The screenwriter pushed Ashin completely into the abyss of revenge by adding logical layers between events, so Ashin's zombie disaster in the third act is so reasonable and pleasing.
In general, the "refreshing feeling" of watching "Axin" comes from the emotional depression of the audience caused by the "lengthy" first act of the film, and it is also related to the screenwriter's perception of Ashin's transition from national tragedy to individual tragedy. The detailed description is inseparable.
At the same time, the lens design in some plot paragraphs of "Ashin" is also quite ingenious, and they bring the audience a "cool feeling" in the audio-visual experience in addition to the narrative text.
For example, in the spectacular "tiger wounding" sequence in the film, the director used the subjective shot of the tiger running, the chase shot of the driver's escape, the aerial shot of the North Korean soldier and the Pozhuwei chasing in the tall grass, the Pozhuwei Combined with various shooting methods such as hand-held photography when tigers are fighting, the entire sequence is both thrilling and dynamic, making people addicted.
03 Cold thinking after feeling refreshed
As an extra film of an American TV series, "Ashin" is undoubtedly qualified, and the filming and recording of the beauty by Fu Huadao reflects the maturity of the Korean film industry system and the intentions of the main creators.
And if you look at it as a biopic and a female revenge movie, "Ashin" still has some room for improvement in the script.
First of all, although the historical foreshadowing of the first act of the film is essential, it still accounts for too much of the whole film, which leads to the film's overall rhythm being dragged, top-heavy, and poor viewing.
As a commercial type of film, if it fails to retain most of the audience in the first act, what is the point of the ingenious and unique author's ingenuity later?
So I think, if the creator can simplify or move part of the plot content to the second and third acts without compromising the information expression and thematic presentation of the first act, it will make the overall proportion of the film more harmonious, and it will not Brings a greater psychological barrier to the audience.
Secondly, as a biopic, Ashin's image is still not three-dimensional and full. One of the most prominent problems is that Ashin is basically pushed forward by the plot in the film, rather than her driving the plot.
Under the circumstance that Ashin's life details and emotional depth have been weakened by the screenwriter, if the audience can't see her initiative, then she is tantamount to a tool person carrying the goal of revenge to the audience.
But considering that this is a side movie of the American TV series "Kingdom", maybe the creator wants to put Ashin in the third season and expand it in detail, so I won't list it here for the time being.
Third, some plot settings in the film are still a little deliberate. For example, Ashin accidentally saw the arrows used by the second generation of the rich Zhao family in Haiyuan to go hunting, and suddenly recalled that it was the same as the arrows he saw shooting the Jurchens in Waste Si County when he was a child. The same kind, then went to read the historical records to find out the truth.
If you look at the causal relationship from God's perspective, it makes sense, but from Ashin's subjective perspective, it is actually a bit far-fetched and deliberate.
Taking a step back, Ashin has lived in the North Korean barracks for so many years, and he should be very familiar with the arrows used by the rich second generation. Why does he only remember the strangeness of it now?
At the same time, there are still some logical questions in the film that need to be answered urgently, such as how can the young Ashin control so many zombies with chains? Another example is Ashin who knew how to use life and death grass to make zombies very early, why should he endure humiliation for many years and wait for North Korea to help her get revenge?
What's more, the film also explained such a scene: Ashin successfully sneaked into the Pozhu guard camp and stayed with his father safe and sound all night. This actually reflects two things: First, Ashin's skill is extraordinary; As a result, Ashin's burden of humiliation becomes even more untenable.
But the flaws are not concealed. "Ashin" is still a movie that surprised me this year, and its appearance also makes me look forward to the return of the third season of "Kingdom".
Welcome to pay attention to the personal public account and update film reviews from time to time.
View more about Kingdom: Ashin of the North reviews
