Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Real science fiction should be like a documentary, it presents the history of the future.

Four years ago, wandering Earth was a surprise; today, after watching wandering Earth 2, I felt shocked.

By the time I watched the first movie, the movie had been released for two weeks, and the moments were in a hurry to make up the tickets. This year, I booked the earliest show on the morning of the first day of the Lunar New year, but I hesitated when choosing the screening hall-the UME nearest home has a regular room and a 120-frame giant screen. The former costs 80 yuan and the latter costs 200 yuan. Finally, I gnash my teeth and still book a ticket for 80 yuan.

Space elevator, photo source: I regretted saving 120 yuan less than half an hour after the opening of the promotional film "wandering Earth 2", which deserves to see the best screen. The scene and technological sense of the film continued the high standard of the first film, and even visible improvements in details, such as the visually shocking space elevator; the plot, narrative rhythm and acting skills of the first film were also greatly improved. To borrow a comment from Douban netizens, "there was no piss in the whole three hours of the movie."

What is even more surprising is that under the appearance of science fiction, wandering Earth 2 also has a very delicate emotional expression. The love of the two protagonists for their families becomes the emotional thread that runs through the film, and makes the epic narrative of "pushing the Earth away from the Solar system" with more flesh and blood; in addition, the discussion of virtual and reality, freedom and responsibility, individual and collective heroism, and AI's ethics is of philosophical and sociological significance, which is also perfectly integrated with the film.

This reminds me of the shock of watching Interstellar for the first time. When the film was released in 2014, space immigrants, wormholes and hyperspace were all "old" sci-fi elements, but Nolan blended the ugliness and brilliance of human nature in the face of death, love and affection. Nolan created a human epic with sincere emotions in a grand narrative, which is what Nolan does best and why the sci-fi film is sealed.

Wandering Earth 2, which also does this, is already a great science fiction work in my heart, and it has undoubtedly surpassed the first one to become the best science fiction film in Chinese film history. The film presents the content, as director Guo Jing asked the original author Liu Cixin what is science fiction, Liu replied: "the real science fiction should be like a documentary, it presents the history of the future." "

01. Wandering Earth 2, the new peak of Chinese sci-fi movies, the wandering Earth series, adapted from Liu Cixin's novel of the same name, tells the story of future physicists predicting that the sun is about to be destroyed and facing the solar system that is no longer suitable for survival. Mankind launched the "wandering Earth Project" in an attempt to lead the earth to find a new home for mankind.

The wandering Earth Project has a total of five stages. the first film is mainly about the third stage when the earth escapes from the sun and Jupiter, corresponding to the second chapter of the original book, the Escape Age.

Wandering Earth 2, the first prequel, takes the era when it was planned to build 10,000 planetary engines as the background of the story, telling the story that the "solar crisis" is about to hit and the world is in a panic. Mankind will face the dual challenges of doomsday disaster and the survival of life.

The first stage: mankind spends all its efforts to build 10,000 planetary engines that drive the earth forward and 10,000 dungeons that shelter human life.

The second stage: the steering engines around the equator are turned on one after another, driving the earth to stop spinning. The earth stopped, causing a huge tsunami to sweep the world, and the global population plummeted by nearly half.

The third stage: the earth will use the sun and Jupiter to complete the final accelerated sprint and officially embark on a journey of wandering.

The fourth stage: after the earth leaves the solar system, the planetary engine is turned on at full power, accelerates to 5/1000 of the speed of light in 500 years, and glides for 1, 300 years, then turns the engine around and slows down in another 700 years.

Phase 5: the Earth arrives at its new home in the target galaxy and becomes a new planet in the target galaxy.

The reason why I didn't book a 200 yuan ticket for the movie is that my expectations for wandering Earth 2 are not too high. There are three main reasons:

The first is because the first part of wandering the Earth has many shortcomings. The first amazing place is the production level represented by Wanhuadao and special effects. Objectively speaking, the handling of the plot and details is not perfect. The former is the expression of the film while the latter is the soul of the film.

The second is to worry about the dog-tailed mink. This series is nominally adapted, but in fact, Liu Cixin's original work is very short (about 23000 words). From characters and plots to various details and world views, a lot of originality is needed, which undoubtedly increases the difficulty of creation.

The third is that the quality of recent science fiction is really not high. B station bet on the "three-body" animation basically hit the street, Tencent invested in the "three-body" TV series quality is slightly better, but only in order, even the film history legendary sequel "Avatar 2", also fell into the awkward situation of production without plot, and the final box office fell short of expectations.

But as mentioned at the beginning, the mass of wandering Earth 2 is much higher than originally expected. In the whole film market is still in the post-epidemic downturn, achieved a win-win situation at the box office and word of mouth.

According to the Lighthouse Professional Edition, the box office of "wandering Earth 2" reached 476 million yuan on its opening day, beating another blockbuster during the Spring Festival. "Manjianghong" starring Shen Teng and Yi Qianxi also surpassed the one-day box office record of Chinese film and television science fiction films set by "wandering Earth" (419 million yuan).

Of course, due to the influence of the epidemic, the shrinking film market itself and the competition from the hit films in the same period, it is not known whether the total box office of "wandering Earth 2" will eventually surpass that of the fifth previous film in film history (with a total box office of 4.688 billion yuan). In fact, if you look at the data on the premiere day alone, the proportion of "wandering Earth 2" is as high as 33.2%, more than 4% of "Man Jiang Hong", but the attendance rate is only 47.1%, which is lower than that of "Man Jiang Hong" and "Bear haunt" in the same period. the latter two are 54% and 61% respectively.

Booking and attendance will affect the rest of the film, further affecting the overall box office trend. On January 23 (the second day of the Lunar New year), "Man Jiang Hong" has overtaken "wandering Earth 2". As of 6 pm, "Man Jiang Hong" also surpassed "wandering Earth 2" at the real-time box office on the 23rd day. Of course, one day's box office doesn't mean anything, and then "wandering the Earth 2" has a chance to win by word of mouth.

As of 12:00 at noon on January 23, wandering Earth 2 had a Douban score of 8.3, surpassing the 7.9 of the first film, with more than 100000 ratings in just one day. Among them, 44.6% of the viewers gave a 5-star rating, another 34.1% gave a 4-star rating, while the proportion of the first five-star and four-star movies was 34% and 38%, respectively.

This is not common in Douban, where the ratings of sequels are mostly lower than those of their predecessors. it can be said that no matter from the ratings or the feedback from the audience, most of the viewers who watched it for the first time thought that wandering Earth 2 had surpassed the legendary predecessor and become the new best sci-fi film in China.

02. The epic of saving mankind and the story of saving loved ones. (note: the following contents include some spoilers. Students who do not want to be spoilers can collect them first and watch the following after watching the movie. )

As mentioned earlier, the strengthening of narrative and emotion in wandering Earth 2 is the biggest surprise of the film.

Director Guo Fan said in an interview that the first film of wandering the Earth is a standard genre, while the second film uses a more difficult chronicle narrative structure, hoping as a prequel to better show the course of this period of time. This was also inspired by Liu Cixin. Guo Fan said that after the end of the first film, he once asked Mr. Liu what his favorite science fiction film looked like. The latter replied, "it should be like a documentary, showing the history of the future."

The whole film has three narrative lines, centering on astronaut Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing), researcher Tu Hengyu (Liu Dehua) and Chinese representative to the coalition government Zhou Yizhi (Li Xuejian), centering on the two major events of "Space Elevator attack" and "Moon falling crisis". Show the history of human beings before they embark on the journey of wandering in space from different perspectives.

The choice of the three protagonists is interesting. The astronaut is the "hero" closest to the front line of space, and his perspective has the most sense of substitution in the crisis. The most wonderful air combat scene in the play takes place right in front of Liu Peiqiang. The engineer is the core of promoting the entire wandering earth project. His perspective is not at the center of the crisis, but it can help the audience to see the whole picture of the incident. Even the truth behind the whole incident is revealed through the perspective of Tu Hengyu. As the representative of the human group, the politician is the epitome of the game of human society, showing the whole picture of the event from another angle.

Source: the three story lines of the trailer "wandering Earth 2" advance under the same timeline and have little overlap with each other. And one of the best parts of the film is the only intersection between the protagonists. Liu Peiqiang signed up for the astronaut examination. the last interview was in a room surrounded by mirrors. The interviewer was a supercomputer 550W. Tu Hengyu and other engineers sat in the room behind the mirror, watching the interview.

In the stress test, the omnipotent computer saw through the weakness of Liu Peiqiang's character and asked him to cry out that he had won the qualification of a dungeon but still applied to be an astronaut, not for any noble reason at all. but to help the son and wife who did not win the lottery to be rescued. Liu Peiqiang's defensive roar made him fail in the interview, but moved Tu Hengyu behind the mirror, allowing the latter, who had been suppressed for many years, to make a choice between family and reason.

"the most important core of the film is emotion, and everything else can be put aside," Guo Fan said in an interview. And put the personal emotion and narrative into the background of grand narrative, which not only makes the whole film more flesh and blood, but also makes the theme of this film more profound.

A theme that impresses me very much is "Virtual and reality". At the beginning of the film, there is a confrontation between supporters and opponents of the wandering earth project. in the face of the crisis of destruction of the earth, opponents support the "digital life plan" of digitizing human information and living forever in the digital space. In order to get the coalition government to change its plans, supporters of the Digital Life Project have marched around the world in protest, even at the expense of launching terrorist attacks to sabotage the implementation of the wandering Earth program.

It seems that this is portraying the virtual group of supporters as stupid and selfish, but the film's discussion on the subject does not stop there, but launches a deeper discussion with the help of Tu Hengyu's perspective. Tu Hengyu, a digital man expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences before taking part in wandering geoengineering, digitized his daughter's personal information when she was dying in a car accident. and with the help of a supercomputer, he built the same artificial intelligence as his daughter.

Photo Source: the trailer for "wandering the Earth 2" Tu Hengyu has been trying to finish his work of saving mankind, but at the same time he also hopes to save his daughter and give real life to his digital daughter, who has only two minutes of life. Even his teacher Ma Zhao did not support him, constantly urging him to recognize the "reality" of his daughter's death in the hope that he could live in the present. In the end, Tu Hengyu gave up everything he had in order to give up his digital daughter's life, and even gave up his mission and responsibility to save mankind at one time. The daughter reborn in the supercomputer almost became the inducement to destroy human civilization, but eventually became the spark of human survival.

Until the end, the film did not give an answer-is the life of numbers meaningful? Is it yourself or a string of inanimate code that dies and is reborn in the digital world?

Similarly, there is no answer to the discussion of artificial intelligence. The film also has an important role without actors-the super artificial intelligence computer 550W, which is the first MOSS. In the first film, there is a clue to MOSS's "rebellion". When Jupiter's gravity surges, MOSS deliberately does not inform Earth, while when the crisis comes, MOSS uses the name of leaving fire for mankind to prevent astronauts from igniting Jupiter to save the earth by destroying the space station.

After the end of the first film, some viewers speculated that these plots may be intended to explore the risk that AI will do whatever it takes to protect itself, or when there is a conflict between human commands, AI has the risk of destroying mankind. But after watching the second film, I suddenly realized that these plots were all foreshadowing of MOSS's "rebellion." Super artificial intelligence, which completely surpassed the level of human wisdom in a few years after its birth, believed that the destruction of mankind was the right choice. Space orbit attacks, lunar falls, and the Jupiter crisis, which repeatedly threatened the survival of mankind, were all under the control of MOSS. But what is interesting is that while MOSS dominates the crisis, it also leaves a glimmer of life for mankind. MOSS is not so much plotting to destroy mankind as testing it.

The danger of AI has also been a hot topic in the scientific community in the last decade. Especially in the last two years, with the improvement of computing power and the emergence of new large models, AIGC, ChatGPT and other technologies, AI is developing at an unprecedented speed. AI, which can talk, program, draw and write, is becoming omnipotent and unprecedentedly dangerous. More and more scientists are worried that if AI in the real world really produces autonomous consciousness, it will also be possible to destroy human beings.

These philosophical questions may never be answered in a real sense, and the film only leaves some possibilities for discussion. However, many advances in science and scientific ethics are often driven by these discussions, and excellent science fiction works, especially science fiction films, are the most powerful tools to promote these discussions at the social level.

In the past, these works were often born in Europe and the United States, where scientific development is more developed, and we can only act as absorbers and learners. Therefore, the emergence of "wandering Earth 2" is undoubtedly a happy thing.

03. Chinese sci-fi movies finally want to talk about the Chinese elements of wandering the Earth 2.

This is a Chinese sci-fi film-certainly not because the creative team is from China, and there have been a lot of domestic sci-fi movies and TV dramas in the past few decades, but few of them have been sold. If you call those sci-fi movies of your own, there is no pride but shame.

Wandering the Earth 2 is a good science fiction work, which is the premise. In addition, after watching this film, I will have a strong sense of cultural identity, because from three levels, the creative team well integrates the story of the film with Chinese elements.

First and most basic, the protagonists of the film are all Chinese. This is not nonsense. In Hollywood sci-fi movies, Chinese people are often either supporting roles or villains. No matter how good the movies are, it is not a happy thing that their motherland and compatriots are either stupid supporting roles or evil villains.

The second point is at the cultural level. This is also reflected in the first film. The driving safety slogan that has become a hot Internet stalker is a typical Chinese culture, and the second film also has many impressive scenes, such as a picture in the second half of the film before Beijing was flooded. The latest house purchase leaflet brushed on the railing shows 200 yuan or 300 yuan per square meter, whether it is post-80s, post-90s or post-00s. As long as you live in China, you will smile when you see this.

Objectively speaking, this is actually not novel for domestic films, and even most of the domestic comedies with good reputation do better at this point. But wandering Earth 2 is especially a sci-fi blockbuster whose production is comparable to that of Hollywood. In recent years, Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters have also added some Chinese elements because of the Chinese market. But it is basically just one or two Chinese faces and old things such as gangs, kung fu, cheongsam and Chinatown, and it is a very rare experience to see contemporary Chinese elements in sci-fi blockbusters.

The third and most important point is the integration of values.

In the first film, Guo Fan was also asked in an interview about the embodiment of Chinese elements in wandering the Earth. He talked about the land plot in traditional Chinese culture, saying that there is a local plot of the Chinese people behind the idea of leaving the earth together. This is a kind of Chinese value, but it is not strong when I watch a movie, at least I understand it after watching the interview.

In the second part, Chinese values are better displayed. The most typical is collectivism. At the end of the film, "Hero" Liu Peiqiang is sent back to the space station by his predecessors. 300 astronauts from all over the world detonated a nuclear bomb on the moon with their own hands. A heroic collective saved the earth in distress, which is in sharp contrast to the first "individual heroism" in which Liu Peiqiang sacrificed himself to save the earth. If individual heroism is a typical American Hollywood value, collective heroism is a typical Chinese value.

In addition, Tu and Liu have paid and even sacrificed for their children, the mentor and apprentice of Liu Peiqiang and Zhang Peng, space elevators and planetary engines, which are unique to the engineering romance of Chinese infrastructure demons. The details of the film reflect the values that Chinese audiences are more familiar with, making them feel "very sci-fi" and "very Chinese" after watching the film.

Today, it is still very difficult for Chinese films to go abroad and export Chinese culture and values to overseas countries like Europe, America, Japan, South Korea and even India. However, in the field of science fiction, having such a work can be presented to the Chinese people is still of great significance for building scientific and technological self-confidence and attracting more talents to join China's scientific and technological development and construction.

Chinese films need more "wandering Earth", and China's cultural and scientific and technological development also needs more "wandering Earth". I hope that "wandering Earth 2" can achieve good results. "wandering Earth 3" is expected to bring more surprises and shocks.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: geek Park (ID:geekpark). By Zheng Xuan.

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