Wen Sichuan good people
Wen no first, the selection of the greatest film will always have a lot of controversy, but to say that the Chinese hero film, standing at the tip of the pyramid of the first, no one will disagree that should be "Heroic".
First near a piece of music to help everyone brewing emotions ......
"Heroic" classic, not only in that it opens the golden age of Chinese heroes and police films, but also in that it is irresistible heroes, in the film's bloodshed in the career of the ceremony for us to complete the creation of God: Zhou Yunfa The various characters played by Chow Yun-Fat, Leslie Cheung, Dillon and Lee Tze-Hung in it have long since transcended their personal images and become unsurpassed godlike characters in Chinese-language police films.
Rarely has a movie been able to portray so many unsurpassed characters at the same time, and it's precisely because of the godlike significance of Heroes' Colors that adapting it has become an extremely difficult and unappealing task.
Destined to be cursed, that's one thing there's no doubt about. Ding Sheng, the director of Heroes of Might and Magic 2018, said as much in an interview.
What we're talking about today is Ding Sheng's remake of "Hero's Colors 2018," which will be released on Jan. 18, 32 years after John Woo's version of "Hero's Colors" was released in 1986. It just so happens that a 4k restoration of Heroic Colors was also re-released last November, kind of like a warm-up for Ding Sheng's adaptation.
A remake of "In the Color of Heroes" is bound to get a lot of criticism, something Ding Sheng is obviously well aware of. At the time when the project came to him, both remake and adaptation rights were available. In other words, he could either reproduce the John Woo version of "Hero's Colors" once, or completely change it into an unfamiliar story.
Neither is clearly the ideal style.
Ding Sheng, chose to adapt this road, in his words, is still using the original character relationships, I pay tribute to director John Woo in my heart, but since it is called a reboot, I would like to show some new style, after all, this movie over the past three decades, the audience is not the audience of the year, I from the values and aesthetics have to do some very new attempts, of course, the pursuit of the aesthetics of violence is a must!
The movie is a very good one.
The film follows the previous relationship between the three heroes
It is apt to use modernization and transformation to describe Hero's Duty 2018, because it is a completely different, Ding Sheng's own Hero's Duty, which is shown, is a kind.
You can see this new attempt at modernization in every nuance of the film. The setting of the story, which becomes Ding Sheng's hometown of Qingdao; the counterfeit money syndicate of the original film, which becomes maritime smuggling in a more contemporary context; and the setting of the big brother, who drives a taxi after his release from prison, which also conforms to the new era and geographic context, which turns into a seafood peddler who goes to the docks to get his goods.
The cast level is where this modernization is most directly demonstrated. Wang Kai plays Zhou Kai, Dillon's older brother character. His portrayal, then, takes two completely different paths from Dillon's down-and-out, disillusioned big brother setting.
Zhou Kai appears in the film as more of a contemporary tough-guy type of character, who is introspective, stoic and charming. He is clearly more of a hero to modern audiences, especially the younger ones, than the disillusioned big brother image of more than three decades ago, which drew on Dillon's own circumstances as well as the context of the time.
Wang Kai as Zhou Kai
Wang plays Ma Ke, Chow Yun-fat's Little Brother Ma, and a completely different image from the Little Brother Ma who would light his cigarettes with banknotes. You could even comment that the character is wild, with the line he hangs on to in the movie being fuck, and his protectiveness of Zhou Kai's master is shown in an extremely outward way - he keeps chasing after him to say he wants to worship him as a brother.
Wang's own gangliness and crossness give the character of Ma Ke a sudden explosiveness and rawness. This is a transgressive quality that the original Xiao Ma, and people of that era, would not have. The film also specifically mentions Ma Ke's Taiwanese background many times, a character that epitomizes the kind of contemporary youth gangster film that "Monga" is.
And Ma's Chow Chiu, Zhang's Sung Tzu-chieh, does have that kind of unworldly innocence and the growth that comes with metamorphosis in the midst of trauma.
It's important to note that these three actors do pose a marvelous tension between them, choreographed by Ding Sheng. You can feel the same kind of character relationship between them as in John Woo's version; yet it's clear that they're not heroes out of the '80s, but rather a story of brotherhood that you'll believe in, that takes place in the present day, and that has a kernel of something that will actually move you.
Ma Tianyu as Zhou Chao
What's key to that impressing is that Ding Sheng has keenly displaced the anxiety of changing times in John Woo's version of "Heroes of Might and Magic" into the present. In Heroes of Color 2018, there is not only action and violence, but also more of a sentiment, a kind of brotherhood in the new era, after being abandoned by the city and the mainstream.
The way these men express their emotions and show their violence is more direct and outward; they also have an unshakeable attitude towards what they hold fast to, and this insistence is the kernel of their ****communication; at the same time, they are all men who are wandering on the edge of the modern city, and between them and the city, there exists a disconnection and a distance that cannot be erased.
Lin Xue is the villainous bigot in the movie
This liminality you can see in some of the movie's underlying settings. As mentioned earlier, this is a seaside city story, and its subtlety is that the older brother, Zhou Kai, doesn't live in the city, but has a boat, which is associated with the sea, whether he was running a shipping camp before or selling seafood afterward. Zhou Kai, who has no residence in the city, is forever floating on the sea at the edge of the city.
He is the edge of the city.
To match this, the movie also sets up a female character for Zhou Kai who is also a marginalized person, Mei Lin, played by Li Meng.
Li Meng plays Mei Lin, Zhou Kai's girlfriend
Mei Lin is so in love with Zhou Kai that she waits for him on his boat after he is sent to prison, even when he is being trashed by the bad guys. This character can actually be seen as a sort of heterosexualization of brotherhood. Mei Lin, a character who mirrors Zhou Kai's character in terms of both personality and fate, completes the emotional integrity of Zhou Kai's character.
More than just a few of the main characters, Wu Yue, Yu Ai Lei and Lin Xue, who have worked with Ding Sheng before, play characters in the film that similarly display this liminality.
Wu Ut and Yu Ailei both play impressive bad guys
Only, Mei Lin, as a woman, is clearly more sober about the rules of the game in the world, especially in a scene in which Zhou Kai is released from prison, she sees him again, and things are different, leading to an emotional breakdown, and Li Meng's performance very accurately interprets this sense of sobriety, and at the same time, serves as a hint to the fate of Zhou Kai and others afterward
In a way, Mei Lin was ruined by Zhou Kai. And Zhou Kai, in fact, ruined most of the people around him: indirectly causing the death of his father, worsening the relationship with Zhou Chao, and making Ma Ke crippled in revenge for him. The key word in his characterization is guilt. Wang Kai's desire to speak and silence is a reflection of his inner guilt.
Besides Zhou Kai and Mei Lin, Zhou Chao and Ma Ke are also surrounded by the presence of women who fit their character traits respectively. Zhou Chao is a family man, so following the previous version of the setting, his girlfriend is a small, gentle nurse. Ma Ke is loose and spontaneous, so his relationship with his girlfriend borders on a dewy-eyed affair.
Zhou Chao and his nurse girlfriend
This is where "Hero's Duty 2018" differs from the classic "Hero's Duty," which didn't have many female characters except Zhu Bao-yi, who played Sung Tzu-chieh's girlfriend, and that's a state of characterization that we can identify with in '80s cop movies.
But put into perspective, the contemporary love story of "Heroes 2018", which is all about brotherhood, is clearly not enough. The addition of female characters, while strengthening the character and destiny of the protagonist, also enriches the movie in terms of emotional layers. In addition to brotherly love and affection, there is also love.
The film's modernized makeover is also reflected in the upgraded aesthetics of action scenes and violence. Ding Sheng, who once made "Tough Guy" and "Saving Mr. Wu," is quite stylized in his creation of action scenes, starting the film with a hearty action scene and ending it with a big battle, which also features a lot of high-speed photography, reinforcing the aesthetics of the violence between the guns and the fire.
Everyone's favorite double shot, however, isn't copied, there's just a little homage in the film.
And the most classic scene of Xiao Ma's dance to hide the gun for revenge was also combined with Japanese elements by Ding Sheng, the fire is not as good as the original version, but shot with a completely different flavor from the previous one.
Maybe some people do not know, John Woo's version of the "Heroes", in fact, is derived from the Hong Kong director Lung Kong shot in 1967 movie of the same name, the former was also remade by the South Korean remake of the "stateless", and in the subsequent story of many, many stories, similar to the "Heroes" in the brotherhood of the relationship in the movie, but also over and over again to tell the story of the two males, three males.
Movies are made for reasons that are not necessarily transcendent. Those that have become classics, let them stand there as classics. The story told by those who came after is really just another story.
This is the charm of a legend, and only a legend can earn the right to be endlessly retold and transformed, in order to pass on its charm to new generations.
It's actually too easy to watch "Heroes of Might and Magic 2018" and pick apart its weaknesses based on the classic version, but what's the need to do so? Might as well just see it through the eyes of a modern audience; this is a heroic story that belongs to a younger generation. Times are changing, and newcomers are entering the saga.