Spielberg is undoubtedly a long-sleeved businessman, but that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have the heart of a movie fanatic
"Ready Player One" is not a movie about games. The director just borrowed the elements of "games" and "VR technology" to remake and package an adventure action sci-fi movie in the style of the 1980s.
Anyone can enjoy it without getting bored, and it has an overly simple but very coherent storyline, which mythologist Campbell calls "the hero's journey" - the cliché of a teenage hero saving the world, and it is precisely because Therefore, we don't need too much psychological burden in the dark theater. You can enjoy the audio-visual and the story the first time you watch it, and if you have the second time, you can enjoy the details. Many discussions and even quarrels about the film are more like a marketing tool for the distribution company to see success, rather than the most important part of the director. Spielberg's work has always been to tell the story and bring the audience to the audience. His attention was held fast until the last minute of the subtitles rising.
01.
In 2006, Steven Spielberg was planning to direct a new sci-fi movie. Industry sources pointed out that the movie "will rely more on existing, solid scientific theories", and it will be down-to-earth rather than imaginative. The main tone of the movie. To this end, Spielberg not only approached Hawking's close friend, Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, but also tried to recruit Jonathan Nolan as a screenwriter, but in the end he still had a different idea and turned to filming at the box office. The fourth "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which is almost guaranteed on the list.
The Indiana Jones of "Happy Daddy" was chased by the "Su Xiong villain" who showed his teeth and claws. Connecting. Adventure, action, family affection and a glimpse of aliens, this is a movie he is more familiar with and more handy, as for the sci-fi movie project he always abandoned after seven years. Now known as "Interstellar" - "Interstellar", and a full decade after "Indiana Jones 4", he never set foot on pure entertainment until "Ready Player One".
In the past ten years, as if hoping to relive the brilliance of "Schindler's List" or "Saving Private Ryan", Spielberg has been diligently shooting a mixture of "serious, grand, profound" and so on. Elemental works, and the results of deliberate work are often mixed, with audiences and critics neither particularly disgusted nor genuinely fond of these works ("Dream Giant" is also not as popular as "ET Alien" ), but comments like “Lian Po is old, inspiration is regressing” are always heard, but in an age where information is attenuated in hours and minutes, even such comments can’t wait to die, so that you can consume updates as quickly and economically as possible. larger object of public opinion.
02.
Even if the general public spurns "this increasingly fraught society" on their smart devices from morning to night, everyone is eager for heroes to come from the sky , and almost all the best-grossing films in the past few years have been wearing tight-fitting clothes. Clothes, wisecracking superheroes are entangled, and the stores surrounding these movies are always full of people and customers.
Spielberg seems to have read the pulse of the times and reacted accordingly. His next work is "Ready Player One" - a film that Christopher Nolan politely declined, and Spielberg Grid's dynamism and genius in commercial films is also on display in his own "superhero" film, knowing that he and George Lucas created the most basic narrative rhythm of today's commercial films.
This easy-to-understand imagery, which tries to grab everyone's attention, often troubles Spielberg when he's making "artistic" films—and many critics find the serious subject matter of the Holocaust unacceptable Too frivolous, like Schindler's List, choreographed into one bedtime story after another, because "the brutality of the concentration camps cannot be reproduced in any form" lacks reverence for the indiscriminate approach of Jean Luis C. Godard even called Spielberg "hypocritical, blasphemous, and a liar" in his straight-forward manner.
Fortunately, "Ready Player One" does not need to carry too much burden in terms of text and morals, so all the 72-year-old director has to do is to make the film as pleasing as possible to everyone.
Adapted from the 2011 best-selling novel, every paragraph of the story is filled with a splendid tribute to popular culture such as 80s movies, TV, cartoons, video games and songs. It was a disaster - even if all the fans of the original book had money and leisure, and took the trouble to go to the cinema to watch each of them a dozen times, the box office contribution would still be a drop in the bucket, and the movie would still be worth nothing. So Spielberg corrected it precisely.
Like the weird doctor Black Jack with black and white skin stitched on his face in Osamu Tezuka's work, he cut away the "tissue" that was too hard and rough, leaving only the most recognizable and easily visually conveyed parts. The practice of cutting tofu with a knife on both sides is extremely funny - fashionable high-tech scenes and teenage hero settings are used to attract teenagers; nostalgic pop culture is to bring tears to the eyes of people who have entered "middle age" as promised.
At the same time, he racked his brains to make a simple story that was smashed to the bone and fleshed out in the most colorful way - the visual effects were so complicated that the director still had time to make another "Washington Post" while waiting for the rendering output. The newspaper carried out a symbolic "Chong Ao", and the arrangement of the music and sound effects was also painstaking. The auditory "Easter Eggs" in the film are higher than the visual ones, and are closer to the original meaning of the "Easter Eggs"; The sadness and laughter of the film have a living sense of substitution, rather than the living dead who symbolize some unattainable meaning of life. All the hardships and hardships are also imagined within the length of the film. Spielberg's goal and The purpose of the entire film industry system is exactly the same - profit.
As Adorno, the master of the Frankfurt School, said, "The whole way of the cultural industry transforms profit motives into cultural forms." The basic purpose is to fill the empty seats between the screen and the projector, "art, self-expression" and everything else is just added value. Even so, the difficulties and dangers to be faced to achieve this goal are no less than the terrifyingly difficult BOSS decisive battle in the "Dark Soul" series. The poor viewing experience will make the audience feel regretful, because the movie-watching experience Not only the financial cost, but also the high cost of time - I could have cleared a game segment in two hours, or did something else, but I went to watch a "bad movie" and got a ticket.
The material and spiritual stings and chain blows will make the audience feel regretful about the behavior of watching movies. The formula of just listing the selling points and simply adding them up to make some quick money is actually being used by audiences and even profit-seeking film production companies. planned elimination. Only a few people feel guilty after spending more than two hours in "Ready Player One". This is the greatness of Spielberg. His intimate knowledge of the commercial nature of the film medium makes him more focused on the motives of filming. To enable this industry to continue to develop and keep pace with the times.
03.
Spielberg is undoubtedly a long-sleeved businessman, but that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have the heart of a movie fanatic
On June 10, 1982, Spielberg, who was determined to win, obtained a movie prop, a sleigh, at an auction at Sotheby's by proxy. Including commissions, this seemingly ordinary thing cost him $60,500, which is a sleigh that appeared in the epoch-making movie "Citizen Kane." After the death of Charles Foster Kane, a group of people found a sleigh emblazoned with "Rosebud" in his treasure-piled warehouse, and it was thrown into a campfire and burned. Kane was very fond of this sleigh when he was young, but after leaving for some reason, he never saw it again. This is a famous scene in Orson Welles' film "Citizen Kane", and "Rosebud" also appears in the lines of "Ready Player One" character Wade Watts, becoming a subtle footnote to the film - Spielberg, who has far surpassed Orson Welles, a former ghost in terms of wealth, prestige, and status, may be expressing his achievements to those achievements that he himself looks up to but cannot reach. Sincere respect.
"Rosebud" is defined in Ready Player One as a lost and recognized friendship. But Orson Welles died alone, with a typewriter on his lap, writing a script that no one would read. His last job, according to his own words, was "dubbing a toy". This character is the Emperor of the Universe in the Transformers movie.
What exactly is a "rosebud", there are still different opinions to this day. It is the answer to the line in the movie "In the Mood for Love", "If you have one more ticket, will you go with me?" In Suskind's novel "Perfume", Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was trying to find his own body odor; it was the last generation of the Eastern Roman Empire who disappeared in the bloody street battles in Constantinople wearing a purple royal robe Emperor Constantine XI; it is synonymous with the stone that Sisyphus can never push to the top and all the right and wrong that he so desperately seeks and never finds.
But in Ready Player One, there is no such dazzling melancholy. Everyone, including the villain, is more or less successful. Spielberg categorizes the mountain of material, rearranges the structure, and then becomes a new story. . Some are meant to be remembered, others are meant to be forgotten forever.
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