1.
I had a fight with a Taiwanese over "Operation Red Sea". After reading it, I asked him how he was doing. He said he didn't like it. I asked why, but he couldn't say anything.
Mainly because he was asked to take the "Chinese Citizen Pass" when he entered the airport at the airport the day before yesterday, so he was brooding and affected his judgment on the movie, but I don't think so. Look at china.
Once the outline goes live, it's over.
I have no opinion on this film, it was done very well. What is especially rare is that the details of the film are well done, including weapon specifications, actual combat scenes, and even the display of corpses. The reproduction of the Islamic world is also more realistic. got four stars.
The shortcomings are also obvious. The portrayal of human nature is a little weak. In the end, apart from Shishi's "eat candy when it hurts", I don't know what personalities, hobbies, and even weaknesses of other characters, and even what kind of person the captain starring Zhang Yi is.
But that's okay, even so, I still think this movie is very good, the plot is tight and even a little too much. Patriotism and mainstream positivity implants are kept at the right level and not too objectionable.
2.
I wish there were more films like Operation Red Sea, instead of tearing devils and wolves with bare hands;
I hope that with the progress of the film industry, the ideological connotation of the film can be further improved on this basis;
I want people to feel proud when they watch this film, but also realize that this "true event adaptation" is not the same thing as "true events adaptations" such as Captain Sully's bloody battle at Hacksaw Ridge;
Of course, what I most hope is that the reality of this country can be as presented in the film:
For example, they are willing to rescue a stranded ordinary Chinese, instead of the fact that the official media came out to pour dirty water after two Chinese people were executed by an extremist organization in Pakistan;
For example, journalists and leaders quarrel in pursuit of truth and media impartiality, rather than media supervision that is almost paralyzed in reality3;
For example, the illegal trade confrontation between military personnel and extremist organizations, which represents the national position in a sense, rather than the "unconditional foreign aid" that has been widely criticized in the international arena4;
It's not to raise the bar, I sincerely hope that the reality can be closer, especially the sincere kind.
A background note for the above:
- ①The film is adapted from the Yemen evacuation incident in 2015, but in fact there was no military conflict during the Yemen evacuation incident, which may be the reason why a country has to be fictionalized, because if Yemen is really used, it belongs to the level of a diplomatic crisis smeared
- ②In 2017, two Chinese people were kidnapped in Pakistan. After the death was confirmed, the Global Times published an article saying that the two Chinese people went to spread Christianity.
- ③ The clever thing about the film is that it not only uses the common combination of "military + reporter" in American anti-terrorism films, but also avoids the embarrassment of the lack of domestic media through the identity of "French-Chinese foreign media reporter".
- ④Due to the history of being colonized in the past, China has always pursued the principle of "non-interference in other countries' internal affairs" in foreign aid. However, many underdeveloped countries have serious humanitarian crises, and acts of genocide are also included in the scope of "internal affairs" without interference. criticized by the state and society. Take Sudan's aid in 2007 as an example. The cavalry regiment supported by the Sudanese government has killed civilians and raped women for a long time. Therefore, Western countries will not provide assistance on this condition. However, China considers it an internal affairs issue and gives Sudan 40 million in material aid, which constitutes a a crisis event. It is said that my country has adjusted the principle of assistance afterwards, but no relevant information has been found. (But in fact, who is better between interference and non-intervention, I don’t think there is a conclusion, both have their pros and cons.
3.
I think it is very interesting to see the state of the country from the movies.
A large branch of war films is based on the films of World War I and World War II. Since the time is relatively long, and the two sides of justice and injustice in World War II are relatively clear, so I regard this type of film as a series. Different countries usually only have different subjects. , the difference in content is not particularly large.
Most of the other war films come from the local wars after World War II, most of which occurred in the Middle East and Africa, and most of them have the United States.
So we see that the American war films in recent years, whether it is "Black Hawk Down", "The Hurt Locker", "The King of War", or even "Fahrenheit 911", are all raw and dark, they torture the government and the military , questioning the rationality of the policy, questioning the national status of the United States, and reflecting on why the United States is going to fight a war that does not belong to itself.
On the other hand, in China, "Wolf Warriors 1 & 2", "Operation Mekong" and "Operation Red Sea" in the past two years have both elements of forced sexual immorality and the background of adaptation of real events, all of which show the mentality of a military power.
There is no meaning to criticize, just like people who lack love yearn for love all their lives, Chinese people who come out of the weak and poor hope to be strong, especially simple hope to be strong.
Although the gap in absolute strength between China and the United States is still very considerable, the gap in public opinion strength is already very small.
What does that mean?
GDELT has counted the reports of the global media in the past two years, and has marked the positive and negative indices of praise and depreciation for the reports (positive means praise, negative means depreciation). How a country's media evaluates its own country and others.
The media evaluation basically explains the public opinion evaluation, and put forward the view of China and the United States:
The U.S. media’s rating index for the United States was -0.88, and the rating for China was 0.31; the Chinese media’s rating for the United States was -2.09, and the rating for China was 1.222.
I'm not making this comparison to say who's making a better movie, or to judge the media's stance. There is no comparison.
Behind the film pattern of military/war/drama films between the two countries must be the change of national power. The international leadership of the United States has gradually been shrinking domestically, and it has fallen off a cliff after Trump took office; while China's growth in power has been accompanied by a more purely exaggerated public opinion environment, such a result is expected.
Well, it's interesting, isn't it.
4.
The increasingly frequent high-frequency words such as "powerful country" and "big country" show a problem that we cannot ignore at present:
The experience of being colonized is still in the national memory, but China has become stronger at an extremely fast speed. Facing the increasing and inevitable international exchanges, how can we position ourselves psychologically?
The sketch of the Spring Festival Gala shows the gratitude of Kenyan blacks for China's aid to Africa. I didn't actually watch it. It was uncomfortable to watch. I felt that the sketches showed primitive and backward, even with monkey This picture of Africa is very inappropriate.
Netizens' comments on this sketch are extremely divided. Some people think it's inappropriate, while others think it's completely okay: "Africa is like this, is there any problem with it?"
have.
On average, most African countries are indeed inferior to China, but they are also like China, where modernization and tradition coexist.
In the past, we were keen to criticize foreign media, believing that the picture they showed of China's poverty and backwardness was still at the stage of everyone farming, which was a deliberate smear. So why are we the ones who ignore the modernization achievements of African countries and just show their poverty and backwardness?
In the 1990s and even until the beginning of the 21st century when I was in junior high school, China has always emphasized that it is brothers with "third world" countries, equal and friendly, and talked about the Third World Alliance's support for China to become the five permanent members of the United Nations. At that time, China also had aided construction projects in Africa, but our caliber was "equality and mutual benefit".
What turned "equality" into "looking down", and when did we begin to feel that we have regained the confidence of a great power in the Celestial Empire? Because of the high-speed development train? So you have the power of a big country to despise others?
Then Liu Wen's Instagram was captured by a giant torture of "Are you Chinese?"
I don't understand this logic very well, so I read a lot of comments humbly. The reasons are different. Some people say that Lunar New Year is not a Chinese New Year. Their starting point is the same, Chinese people can't use "lunar new year", "Chinese new year" is just right.
One typical comment reads:
Wow, not to mention that Japan can't celebrate the Spring Festival, countries like South Korea and Vietnam that have been celebrating the Spring Festival due to ancient historical reasons are now a problem.
This kind of "celestial empire" argument is actually very familiar.
When the Opium War broke out, the British army tried to get in touch with the Qing court throughout the process, but since the emperor of the Qing Dynasty could only negotiate with the emperor of the United Kingdom, the courtiers could never reach the sky, so it was not until after the occupation of many coastal cities. See the emperor for negotiation.
In the end, I couldn't win. When the agreement was signed, what the Qing court cared about most was not the ceded land and the indemnity, but how the name of the emperor of the Qing Dynasty should be placed. Because we are the kingdom of heaven, and you are barbarians, the indemnity for ceding the land is not the indemnity for ceding the land, it is the reward of my Qing Dynasty.
In such a mentality, people are eager to prove that "this is mine", "this is my gift to you", "I am superior to you".
As mentioned above, the weak and impoverished nation aspires to be strong, which is right and especially gratifying.
But during the Spring Festival, I kept thinking about what the "big country mentality" is all about, and what kind of "big country mentality" is normal.
A person should have two situations in dealing with the outside world. One is to export to the outside world to consolidate a relatively high status, and the other is to devalue others and establish a chain of contempt to find self-positioning.
This should also hold true at the national level.
The mentality of a great power always contains two sides. One is because of its own strength, it constantly exports its core values to the outside world, and avoids controversy and does not mention the United States. I think China in the prosperous Tang Dynasty is a good example. However, modern China has a special practical problem in exporting values, that is, although modern China has "national conditions", it has not formed a value system that adapts to modern countries.
The problem is very similar to the Islamic world.
In the vast majority of Islamic countries, there will always be two main ideological conflicts in the country, namely Western values and traditional religious values. The former is generally referred to as secularization.
The early root of the rise of fundamentalism was the era of colonial expansion. For the first time, the Islamic world (mainly the Ottoman Empire), which had dominated the Islamic world for centuries, was completely shocked when it found itself completely unable to win against the Christian world. The heaven and the kingdoms come to Korea, how can they lose to England?” is the same.
When it was discovered that they could not win, the reactions of both sides were almost the same:
For the Islamic world, there have been holy wars with the Christian world for hundreds of years, and the symbolic meaning of not winning the West is that Islam lost to Christianity. This is intolerable. So people began to reflect: If we can't win, it means that either Islam is inferior to Christianity, or there is a problem with the way we practice Islam. But the former cannot be recognized, so Muslims reflect on the latter, and a series of theoretical ideas have emerged that advocate a return to the era of Muhammad in the 7th century.
For China, we have been a great country for thousands of years, accepting tribute from all countries, it is impossible to lose to the four barbarians. Our Confucianism and even the feudal system are the foundation of the country, and there can be no problems. The only problem is the equipment, so we must "learn the skills of the barbarians to control the barbarians."
But whether it is Islamic teachings or traditional Chinese thought, they all face the same problem - no modernization and innovation have been carried out.
Throughout the colonial era, a large number of "Westernization" flooded in. The traditional thinking was not modernized in the process, but was directly interrupted and stopped at the end of the feudal era. Therefore, when we look back today and hope to find the core traditional values rooted in the nation, what we see is always unacceptable and looks like the "guo xue" of the feudal legacy.
In contrast, Japan, where the combination of tradition and modernity has not been innovated for a long time, many things that seem "traditional" today were actually established at the end of the 19th century, but due to the success of innovation, today they are generally recognized as "traditional". ". And the fact is that tradition is not about the length of time, but about national identity.
China's own traditional values were interrupted by the colonial era and lost this process, and our generation in general grew up educated on Western values, so we criticize our parents, elders, the government, and the society we come into contact with, and also Always judge by this standard.
The conflict between the two values is so big that the values at the national level cannot be unified, and that the elders and the younger generation do not understand each other during the Spring Festival, but how to judge right and wrong? Almost impossible to judge. If we think that "traditional values" are not applicable to today's China, who can say that the values generated by Western modern state theory must be applicable?
No one knows what the real "China's national conditions" are, and no one knows what the real "Chinese values" are. It cannot be summarized and exported.
As a big country, we can export money and technology, but we can't export values, so we can't emphasize the establishment of democracy and liberal order in the film like the clichés of American blockbusters. If we do, it looks like exporting Western values.
So in the end we always make a fuss about the common values of mankind, either fighting drugs in the Mekong or saving people in Africa.
And because there is no basis for exporting values at the level of value, the "big country mentality" at the public level will always appear narrow, and we need to pull up the derogatory reference - countries and regions that are more backward than us - in order to build the self-confidence of a big country, Until we gradually develop and explore our own spiritual values.
Before that, even if we haven't found it yet, I hope we can try our best not to do such things that belittle others and build the confidence of a great power. Going back 100 years, we are victims of the "great power mentality" of other countries, and we should not be the perpetrators today.
"The boy killed the dragon, and he became the dragon", but there are always new boys, so don't be a malicious part.
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