Zheng Kaisi, who has achieved nothing, has a clown in his heart. At every moment of his depression, he jumped out and tried his best to resist the bulls, ghosts, snakes and gods from all directions. At the beginning of "Animal World", Zheng Kaisi's psychological space is depicted as a strange and cruel world, and a cartoon-style action camp is used to build a scene that is in sharp contrast with the characters in reality. This new film will simply use action and death as the lead for genre film construction.
But this is just a pretense. As a representative and phenomenal among China's new film directors, Han Yan does not want to tell the traditional story in "Animal World", but leads Zheng Zheng with a relatively absurd scene. Kaisi (Li Yifeng) is faced with all kinds of helpless difficulties in reality: his mother becomes a vegetative person, his love affair with nurse Liu Qing (Zhou Dongyu) cannot be fully realized, and he is deceived by a trusted friend, which leads to a huge debt. The clown in his heart started killing, and Zheng Kaisi, who was physically at a loss, was between wildness and depression, which was the most fundamental fuse that triggered all subsequent actions. True, being kidnapped by Anderson (Michael Douglas), the ultimate villain who controls the player's destiny (in fact, the disappearance of Zheng Kaisi's father during his childhood has been linked to Anderson) eventually triggered Zheng Kaisi to embark on the Destiny cruise ship and enter the most brutal. A card survival game, but the core driving force behind this adventure is still Zheng Kaisi's unwillingness to accept his fate. The meaning of "Animal World" is the protagonist's resistance to external pressure at the spiritual level, and it is also very specific and subtle in the various complicated game rules on the ship displayed in the film and the ingenuity of various people who are born in response to these rules.
Most of the entire movie takes place on the cruise ship Destiny, and as Zheng Kaisi enters the game, he finds friends who cheated him and some other allies with unknown intentions. It needs to be pointed out that the ups and downs of the film depend to a large extent on the rather complicated rules of the game that Anderson read out before the start. When facing players from all over the world, this kind of game is based on a fixed number of box-guessing drawing cards and the players themselves. The number of stars to decide whether to issue or not has a kind of generality across language (already solved in the way of interpreting headphones), ethnicity and regional culture. It is a pity that the rules of the game were explained by Anderson within two minutes. As an audience, the effective information that I can accept is always limited, which leads to difficulties in understanding any subsequent narrative points that touch the red line of the game rules. And this difficulty also caused the loss of the ability to grasp the rhythm of the overall plot development to a certain extent.
Although the film is adapted from the work "Gambling Apocalypse" by Japanese cartoonist Nobuyuki Fukumoto, and there is already a complete film and television adaptation in Japan, I am still working as Han Yan, who was also adapted from the "Animal World" play, when weaving this story All possibilities are very carefully considered. Even though the presentation of the rules of the game seems a bit hasty in a movie that focuses on mature commercial genre films, it is obviously impossible for the creators to set the clues clearly if the creators themselves can't make it clear. In the film, Zheng Kaisi, together with his fellow inmates Li Jun and Meng Xiaopang, go all the way between the step-by-step and the organization's calculation, and taste the subtlety of human nature in extreme situations. The bleakest ending in the game is the inability to go ashore and become a biological experiment, which is a natural echo of the "natural selection" test of the opponents involved in the game itself. In fact, winning the game in the end, or getting off the boat alive, depends not only on luck, but also on the total number of cards of a certain type, the percentage of cards in the hands of players who have not been eliminated, and the calculations in the opponent's mind. Just as Agatha Christie's mystery novels do not focus solely on the physical process of solving a case but on uncovering the suspect's inner world, the game process in "Animal World" is driven by established rules, but these specific Rules (for viewers like me who don't understand it), looking at Zheng Kaisi's gradually calm analytical posture behind his anger and rushing to the crown, we can see the character's own response and evolution to the current contradiction.
There are some familiar scenes in "Animal World". For example, Zheng Kaisi took a risk and entered the imprisoned area. He was betrayed while waiting for his comrades to redeem him. It seems that we have watched thousands of times. A hundred times the same kind of film is no different. However, these pretences became "anti-conventional" in the final comeback. The most direct waiting and hope, together with the overall consideration based on the overall concept, created Zheng Kaisi's ending in "Animal World". At the end of the film, it is obvious that there will be a sequel. If "Animal World" is positioned as the first song, some parts of the plot that are not particularly clearly explained can also be readily delivered to the next episode, such as Liu Qing's role as the protagonist's girlfriend in this film. Existence, there is not much room for development, the audience cannot intuitively understand why she has been with Zheng Kaisi as a childhood sweetheart for so many years, and the experience of Zheng Kaisi's father is obviously worth writing in depth.
Many people look at this film from the performance level, and they will come to the conclusion that "Li Yifeng's acting has improved" or "Zhou Dongyu's performance is not too amazing". In my opinion, instead of paying attention to the performance of this film, it is better to re-understand it in the present The meaning in the creation of Chinese films, a localized transformation is carried out by adapting foreign works. In "Animal World", it is obviously very clever to avoid the problem. For example, the fate of the cruise ship is essentially "gambling" behavior. What happens when the ship goes to the high seas, the gambling itself is about money, and more about life, including the player's own life and the fate of others who are trapped by money. The 3D effect in the film is mainly shown in Zheng Kaisi's imagined scenes of subway killing, character movement and card face switching in the gambling game. There are not too many action scenes in "Animal World". To present 3D effects without treating 3D as a mere gimmick seems to be another reflection of the calm mentality of "Animal World". Just as the characters in the film intrigue and take risks for their own destiny, the emergence of "Animal World" itself is yet another testament to the efforts of Chinese filmmakers to break through genre stereotypes and environmental constraints. This movie, whose image quality is similar to the usual Hollywood type films, is obviously still incapable of some aspects of the play, but the theme chosen and the concept proposed, even the organic grafting of the game and the fate of the characters, are all showing the killing. Try hard. After the release of "Animal World", the biggest rival will be the new director Wen Muye's "I'm Not the God of Medicine". This summer file seems to be a new director who can't be summed up by generation alone. An epitome of power. "Animal World" itself is not a perfect benchmark, but it is of considerable and valuable significance in the exploration of the Chinese entertainment and commercial film model with the summer vacation as the representative target.
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