Compared with "Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons", which also sold in the Spring Festival stalls a year ago and set the highest box office record in 2013, "Havoc in Heaven" can be said to be quite conservative and restrained in terms of adaptation and subversion. Although some superficial plots are quite different from the original, the core is still the individual's resistance and reconciliation to authority.
For the shaping of Sun Wukong, it is also inclined to the return of the 86 TV version. Wukong's monkey nature is more than a demon, which can be regarded as the original and clear source of various adaptations and interpretations in recent years. To a certain extent, it can be seen as a conservative choice under the investment pressure of the producer. The loss of enterprising spirit makes the film more inclined to a stable popular narrative, but it can't help but sell the so-called "new ideas" in the details.
So Sun Wukong talked about love, the Bull Demon King and Princess Tie Fan stole the bridge, Dong Yong and the seven fairies, the Jade Emperor wore armor and took the lead, the fairies and monsters played kung fu in front of the green screen, and when Sun Wukong was playing with his senior brother, Donnie Yen was even unbearable. Here comes a few WWA lock techniques.
Abandoning the cloak of "Journey to the West", this is still a story of a lost hero's self-recognition. It is still the solid routine of being born ignorant, rising to fame, going astray, and returning to the right path. There are no accidental plots, no reversal climax, no Fancy narrative, no directorial style, naturally, no surprises.
With the consistent taste of producer Liu Xiaoguang (Forrest Gump) and director Zheng Baorui's experience of never doing a major production, the mediocrity of "Havoc in Heaven" is almost predictable in terms of story and narrative. After all, the adaptation of a famous novel is a piece of It’s a thankless thing—it can’t be copied, subverted, and gentle. Since it’s hard to escape infamy no matter what, it’s not as good as the rules. So the movie wisely shifted its focus to selling the VFX, the spectacle, the star cast, and anyway, in terms of marketing alone, the movie was a great success. But this is not so much a victory for the film as it is a victory for the Chinese film market.
What hides behind the gratifying box office is the film's extremely perfunctory production, top-level production, 3-year cycle, 400 million investment, overseas team, these fancy marketing vocabulary, can not save the quality of the bone marrow. Perhaps the adjective "worthless" is too extreme, but for 2 hours, I was bored in the dark Wanda IMAX theater, watching those shoddy monsters and monsters, wearing inferior hoods and colorful clothes. The paper-paste silver robe and gold armor bombarded my vision and mind in turn in a way that was three times larger than the usual movie screen, and the inner fire was indescribable.
In the production team of "Havoc in Heaven", some have well-known names. Among the art directors alone, there are Zhang Shuping and Xi Zhongwen who have won the Golden Horse Award and the Golden Statue Award, and the photographers Lin Guohua and Huang Yuetai, who have won numerous awards, are in charge , how can you believe that those heavenly soldiers and generals in paper armor, monsters and ghosts wrapped in blue-gray tight underwear, and even the perfunctory attitude of giving medium shots and close-ups with a handful of soot, can come from these experts.
Well-known professionals do not cherish their wings, and the attitude of nearly 20 local or Korean special effects companies that are not well-known is even less bottom-line. Kneading all kinds of golden and colorful fuzzy color blocks together, even the most basic modeling is too lazy to do a few more, a lot of materials are glued with 3D textures, the devastated Tiangong is on the giant screen, like It is a pile of crumpled rags, neither epic thick nor delicate. And standing behind the Jade Emperor, those thousands of expressionless CG soldiers are like a bunch of dummy models moved out of the waste market. The image matching is not even as innovative as the promotion aunt in the supermarket. casual.
Many people complained that the whole movie was an extended online game promotional video, which is very true, but there is a prefix limit, that is the online game 10 years ago. Looking at the moment, no matter whether it is Chinese or foreign, with a little care, scene creation, visual effect rendering, motion capture and even the level of smoothness must be thrown out of the film more than one street. Without it, Internet companies are profit-seeking, and the requirements for getting what you pay for are harsh. It's not like this movie, it's like a large infrastructure project with abundant fertilizer and water, subcontracting and subcontracting, subcontracting and subcontracting, just to get the money in and out quickly, not the effort but the price. If you want to be good enough, you will feel that it is worth the money on the outside, regardless of whether it is wrapped in brass or clay.
At the end of the film, when the staff subtitles were staged, the light and special effects took 10 minutes to complete. There were no less than 20 so-called "VFX visual effects supervisors" signed by all kinds of novel and cool but unknown visual effects companies. Such advanced technology, such a large support team, and the so-called description of how to cultivate meticulously, but even the delimiter in the names of the names on the final credits cannot be displayed, leaving only a bunch of "question marks" inserted in those English names that are neither foreign nor foreign. No one paid attention to it, so it was released in such a big way at the public screening. Most of the audience who knew that they could watch the film in the theater didn't care much about it.
As for the 3D effect, it's basically a trap that puts the viewer in a state of self-doubt. From the beginning to the end, the scenes that are supposed to be created in 3D maintain a thin layer of two-dimensional state, and then all kinds of characters are basically squeezed into another layer of depth of field, and an additional layer of subtitles is added to let the audience. As if seeing three-dimensional and not so sure, took off the glasses, saw the double image on the screen, and began to suspect that there was something wrong with his perception. The only thing that is impressive and has a slight out-of-screen effect is the butterfly that came back from the dead, which is considered a bit of effort. Not to mention fighting for "Avatar" and "Youth Pie", and even giving Xu Hark shoes, is also a poor qualification.
Having said that, the commercial success of "Havoc in Heaven" is nothing more than relying on a deception, giving up the story, and the strategy of selling visual effects is more like a huge conspiracy. In this case, the role of marketing has been magnified infinitely, focusing on the overall packaging, theatrical arrangement, and celebrity topics. The status of movie quality has been ceded to marketing, and the price of selling “oyster mushrooms” to “matsutake mushrooms” is also worthwhile. It's just another case of "money and many people come foolishly". It's just that the market has reached such a size that the audience even goes to the point of starvation when watching movies. To give some administrative care, the big Hollywood productions have been detoured and cannot be approached, and there are also theater giants participating in the distribution, and the volume of films has risen to more than 60%. A 3D movie or a giant IMAX screen, "Havoc in Heaven" is almost the only choice. If it hadn't run out of the dark horse of "Dad Going There", such an insincere film might have set a new box-office record for Chinese-language films despite the infamy all over the world. Such a story, I really don't know whether it should be considered dark humor or sadness.
If there's anything good about this movie, it's probably the main actors. Donnie Yen really let go of himself in this film, completely restrained the spirit and aura of an action star, and played the Monkey King vividly, but since Donnie Yen is most successful in that people can't tell from the movie that he is the former Donnie Yen , so why did the producer pay a sky-high price to invite him to take the lead? Behind this seemingly paradoxical logic, there is nothing more than the current thinking of marketing. The producer believes that if the name alone is thrown out on the trailer or poster, the audience will willingly pay for it. And, as it turns out, their judgment was completely accurate, and that's what everyone did.
On this side, the movie broke through the 1 billion box office smoothly despite the scolding, and on the other side, the producer couldn't wait to put the sequel on the agenda. It doesn't matter, it will be a special schedule to escort it, the theater alliance will give full support, and the film critics will scold the movie's name to the streets. Plunging, arguing, box office highs, new records, supreme glory. There are always people who can succeed casually. Such stories are constantly being staged in the current Chinese film market, and perhaps this is the most real reality of this "dream like a dream".
Ps: There are grooves all over the place, and there is no way to spit it out.
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