If I don't say it, maybe none of you realize it's science fiction.
In my opinion, "Journey to the West" is by far the best Chinese sci-fi film.
It is not because of how powerful sci-fi core it has, but because of the powerful driving force brought by the concept of "traversal", which makes it possible to deduce many possibilities under the framework of traditional elements; such a trend-seeker, if you don't make clear If so, the strong stylization can even make people lose sight of its nature as a sci-fi film.
How can our sci-fi films be grounded?
The concept of science fiction can be said to be the natural evolutionary result of Western civilization. In China, there was a chance, but capitalism in the mid-Ming Dynasty (15th century) did not sprout, and Europe was not destroyed by the Black Death, so Kim Stanley Robinson's rice and salt era did not arrival.
Because there is no asymptotic process of westerly winds—there are also extremely short-lived gales—they lack the shock that the Industrial Revolution brought to the transformation of civilization. Modernity has eroded, distorted, rather than elevated, our civilization.
This is the tragedy. Because negative emotions are hardly the essence of "science fiction", even if dystopia and doomsday are all the rage these days. It's just being used more and more for entertainment.
In my opinion, in another parallel universe, our Film Noir may arrive early in the Ming Dynasty:
The detective who retired from Jinyiwei woke up in the streets of Suzhou with a cigarette in his mouth. He was scalded by the burning cigarette. Beside him lay a dead Portuguese man who came after his ancestor Zeng Dezhao. Chinese Jesuits...
But you know what, the 17th century Dutch introduced North American Indian pipes along with tobacco to China via Taiwan, and the subsequent widespread smoking made Ming rulers extremely panic. So the superiors decided to stop smoking. No Cigerate, No Film Noir.
Is there anything worse? The government's smoking ban fueled the proliferation of idle pipes that lost their tobacco and the combination of opium native to Asia Minor - yes, it's official history. This is the prelude to the prelude to the prelude to modern Chinese history that was opened by the Opium War.
Our history is like a heterogeneous invasion. A blunder. From time to time, the wrong combination of yin and yang, which can be seen everywhere, does not strike any aesthetic texture. Zheng He went to Europe, and Columbus went to America. Zheng He brought back giraffes from Africa, and now they are kept in zoos; while those brought by Westerners from America are kept in cinemas around the world: it is like our fate, we have nothing, no corn , tomatoes, potatoes, no popcorn movies, Rotten Tomatoes, potato chip nerds; no tobacco, no film noir, and no cigarette burns in movie clips.
We went through a mis-edited civilizational experiment.
An overly large population base has created immeasurable possibilities, but it has been bound for a long time by the inertia of civilization that is not easy to break. Has the repression one hundred years ago continued to the present one hundred years later?
In the end, we didn't ask to untie this kind of inertial straitjacket of civilization, but it was half-pulled and half-pulled, given by external forces... Are we really untied now? Perhaps in our subconscious mind, science and modern civilization are not a good medicine, they just bring a more unequal status quo to our nation.
We are nothing more than Galapagos penguins carried from the South Pole to the equator by an ocean current. The whole nation is a detective body with lost memory. After a century-long sleepwalking, you can't get a transformed Wukong, and you can't let the Supreme Treasure kiss Fairy Zixia when you wake up. We are in a trance like the last neurotic in "Lonely Soul".
In fact, we should not consciously create our "science fiction". Our entire reality is an illusion, a sci-fi deity. We should first summarize the "sci-fi" features of the possibility between ups and downs, just like "Journey to the West" or "Lonely Soul", our "sci-fi" exists in what we have not yet recognized by ourselves. In the midst of identity doubts - yes, of course your cosplay status allows you to not think so at all, "how can this be called sci-fi, lunatic" - so wouldn't it be instructive to look at it from a different angle?
Science fiction, Speculative Fiction, speculative broad nomenclature is inherently subject to interpretation, doesn't it?
Brain-burning martial arts punk
Because the concept of "science fiction" has become a villain for the elements of civilization that represent the future in the past, and cannot really integrate into our shell like a ghost, but has become a situation of incompatibility. Our current state. How to break this barrier, or how to take the initiative to break the barrier, can write a very good science fiction work, just like - which also uses the "traversing" element - abolishing Fu Li's "Ten" Two Kingdoms".
tbc...
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