Special feature of 1905 film network On the fourth day of the release of Tsui Hark’s new work "The Four Kings of Di Renjie", the box office broke 300 million, while the cumulative box office of the competing "The Richest Man in Xihong City" has exceeded 1.1 billion, leaving the "Four Kings" far behind.
The first two Di Renjie series have doubled the box office from 286 million to 600 million, but this time, it is difficult to double the box office to 1.2 billion.
Is the film bad? Or is "The Richest Man in Xihong City" too strong?
In the audience’s word of mouth, The Four Kings scored 6.7 points for Douban and 8.2 points for Cat’s Eye, which is really mediocre. Look at "The Richest Man in Xihong City" next door, and the cat’s eye score is as high as 9.3 points!
Although the box office and word-of-mouth are not ideal, in the eyes of most people, this new work is the best in the whole Di Renjie series at present.
However, Xiao Dianjun also noticed that many viewers had a question after watching the film.
"Di Renjie’s Heaven Empire" has a thrilling moment when the statue of the floating pagoda collapses, and "The Dragon King, the God of Di Renjie" has a giant "Aohuang" that suddenly flies over the warship.
But what are the "Four Heavenly Kings" in Di Renjie’s Four Heavenly Kings?
Are the four gods of heavenly kings that glared at Wei Chi Zhenjin and the Ghost Badger when they robbed Kang Long Mace in Tianwang Temple?
Is it the eye monster "Red-eyed King" who sealed the inferno in the battle of Dali Temple at the end and transformed it with the method of shifting souls?
Di Renjie, Sha Tuozhong, Wei Chi and Shui Yue, the four heroes who rode horses to the unknown front in the egg?
Or indirectly refer to and echo the core expression in the film with the four great kings of Buddhism — —"Hell is not empty, and I will never become a Buddha."?
Whether the "Four Heavenly Kings" are real or imaginary is actually traceable in movies, but what many people don’t notice is that,For director Tsui Hark, he also has his own "Four Kings" in this film, which are the four aesthetic signs of Tsui Hark’s film: strangeness, power, chaos and spirit!
Fortunately, "Di Renjie" series didn’t add the word "detective" in the title at the beginning. Although the first one was a suspense detective film with reasoning elements, it has completely turned into a martial arts supernatural film that "collectively fights monsters".
Most of the praise for this new film falls on the five visual wonders: the golden dragon, the strange fish, the white ape, the glaring king, and the tentacle monster like rambutan.The most powerful aesthetic label of Tsui Hark’s films is his "strangeness".
The first is his monster complex.Tsui Hark is known as "the hermaphrodite in the new wave movies", and the nickname "Xu Laoguai" has been used to this day. He is deeply influenced by Hollywood monster movies, Japanese special films and comics, and he also loves to find creative inspiration in China’s myths and legends.
Butterfly Change, the first film in 1979, is a martial arts experimental film with the concept of "mutating butterflies to kill people", which combines Gu Long’s novel Blood-sucking Moth, Japanese horror film Eight Graves Village and Hitchcock’s Birds.
He is also known as "Spielberg of Hong Kong", just as foreign scholars commented on Spielberg, "The skill to win the audience is to extract the essence from Hollywood’s’ groceries’ and absorb the strengths of each family".Tsui Hark is good at "stealing teachers". The elements of Hollywood monster films can be seen everywhere.
The opening of the Dragon King, the destruction of the warship by the Aohuang and the great white shark in Spielberg’s film all pave the way for narrative suspense with the way of "only hearing its voice but not its shape" and "still hiding half her face from us behind her guitar".
In "Four Kings", the white ape standing on the roof of Dali Temple tore the monster, which seems to have jumped into the set of "Furious Beast" at a closer point. From a farther point of view, isn’t it the "King Kong" who stood at the top of the Empire State Building and dueled with a helicopter?
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In the end, the "magic wheel" appeared when Master Yuan Xiu confronted the boss of the inferno. The package shape was very similar to the face-hugging bug in Alien and the eyeball of the glaring king. You can even think of the zerg big BOSS&hellip in starship troopers. …
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Counting the monsters in Tsui Hark’s movies in the 1990s, there are the tree demon grandma and the big BOSS Montenegro old demon who absorbed men’s blood in Ghost Story, the Millennium centipede essence in Ghost Story: Infernal Affairs, and the megalithic monster in Ghost Story: The Way to the Road.
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The white snake and the green snake in Green Snake, the white crane and the thousand-year-old fire turtle in New Crane Needle, and even the modern monster & HELIP in Monster City and Black Xia 2. …
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After the new century, Tsui Hark seems to prefer "intensive" and "tentacle" monsters.The glaring king with eyeballs all over his body in The Four Heavenly Kings of Di Renjie was reflected in The Biography of Shushan in 2001, in which the monster Youquan is a huge skull composed of dense stones.
There are also piles of red scarabs … It is a nightmare for people with "intensive phobia".
The tentacle monster like Rambutan in the film is shown in Journey to the West and daoist magic written by Tsui Hark: spider essence, demon "red eyes" and "big nose hair" are covered with red tentacles.
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Tsui Hark is becoming more and more fond of presenting some large animals on the screen:The devil fish in Di Renjie’s Dragon King, the big tiger in Taking Tiger Mountain Outward, and the Four Heavenly Kings of Di Renjie have gone from dealing with a single animal to gathering golden dragons, strange fish and white apes. ……
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There are 23 concept pictures at the end of The Dragon King, where there are nine-tailed foxes, bronze warriors, Jiuding Beads and Garuda … Garuda’s eagle image appears in The Four Kings. Therefore, as long as the Di Renjie series is filmed, Tsui Hark’s "Monster Universe" will continue to bombard the big screen.
The "weirdness" in Tsui Hark’s films is not only monsters, but also pays special attention to the "weirdness" in character modeling.He not only respects history, but also makes textual research on historical facts in serving Buddhism, but also exaggerates and grotesques the faces and forms of some characters without explanation.
Yang Zirong, the Monkey King and Granny Tree Demon all have thick black eye makeup:
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Pei Donglai, Pig Bajie, White-haired Witch, Yuhua Tian … They all have scary faces, and they can’t tell right from wrong.
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Although no one wears eye makeup or paints white in The Four Kings, Wei Chi, played by William Feng, has to keep his eyes wide open and his facial expression will collapse like a Peking Opera. And his role, that is, wavering between his own power and interests and Di Renjie’s brotherhood, is unpredictable.
Goblins like Green Snake, Xiaoqian and Spider Spirit always have long, thin eyebrows, and some of them even turn a corner. This time, Wu Zetian, who was controlled by alchemy, also has this kind of eyebrows, which is completely different from the short, round and thick eyebrows in Heaven Empire.
Another passive hand and foot on the eyebrows is Shuiyue, and two eyebrows are set with diamonds, which is very strange.
Buludu and Ma Jinliang in flying swords of dragon gate, the eccentric king in A Demon Journey to the West, and Eight donkey kong & HELIP in Taking the Tiger Mountain Outward; Some are foreign people, some are villains, and their faces are printed with grotesque marks.
This time, almost everyone’s face was tattooed with patterns and patterns.
Sometimes they can distinguish between good and evil, and sometimes they are difficult to distinguish.Tsui Hark just wants some specific characters to have their own unique visual labels.This kind of plastic art, whether it has a clear personality orientation or a vague faction implication, leaps to the screen, which makes his characters more energetic and memorable.
"Power" is the sense of power in Tsui Hark’s movies, and the most basic thing is his action play style.
Hong Kong’s martial arts films are always divided into North and South schools. Roughly speaking, the Southern School is a real Kung Fu school, with Liu Jialiang and Bruce Lee as its representatives.
The northern school pays more attention to the skill of action and has a sense of performance on stage. One kind is the acrobatic Kung Fu comedy of the Seven Little Fooks, and the other is the light, elegant, fierce and chic action drama in the films of directors Hu Jinquan and Chu Yuan.
By the time of Tsui Hark, most of his martial arts scenes were more focused on the northern style.Especially the Ghost Story series, the legendary swordsman series and Xinlongmen Inn with Cheng Xiaodong,It’s more a collision move, and there is no in-depth conversion between attack and defense. It’s more like the step-by-step cooperation of two people dancing, and it’s more inclined to show the artistic conception and atmosphere of the action scene.
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He also does the integration of the North and the South.Several Huang Feihong series directed by Yuan Bin are all realistic action styles, while Knife is both violent and powerful and has a formal freehand brushwork, not to mention Seven Swords, which has Liu Jialiang’s real skill and a free and easy sword gesture.
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Based on the tradition of the North-South School, Tsui Hark’s new martial arts films have more dynamic martial arts scenes, more skillful movements, and more gorgeous and beautiful impressions.
The series Ghost Story of Ghost Story always escapes from the sky, flying swords of dragon gate is full of flying eaves and climbing walls, and The Legend of Shushan is always flying fairy … The same is true of the Di Renjie series, which is where Tsui Hark transcends the tradition of the North-South School:Pay attention to the use of modern stunts.
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Tsui Hark is a "technical madman". As early as Butterfly Change, he replaced lightness skill, sword and magic with springs, hooks and gunpowder, and replaced kung fu with science and technology.
In "The New Swordsman of Shushan", he upgraded the technique of hanging Weiya in Hong Kong’s traditional stunts. In the past, the actor in Hong Kong films could only fly in a straight line, but after his transformation, the actor could fly in curves and turns.
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Tsui Hark is an overseas student who went to the United States to study, and has a special liking for Star Wars. When filming "The New Swordsman of Shushan", he invited the industrial light and magic special effects team of "Star Wars" to Hong Kong, and introduced Hollywood special effects technologies such as models and optics into Hong Kong films for the first time.
In 2001, in "Biography of Shushan", Tsui Hark used live-action +CG technology, and the whole film had more than 1,600 special effects shots. He wanted to make a martial arts film into a science fiction film, even though it seems to be "fifty-five-cent special effects" now, but CG technology just arrived in China, and the actors didn’t quite understand what green screen performance was.
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Although the 1986 Chivalrous Woman Thirteen Sisters was a three-dimensional martial arts film, Tsui Hark’s flying swords of dragon gate was the first all-3D martial arts film in Chinese history. "Di Renjie’s Dragon King" is a bold breakthrough, IMAX+3D+ underwater shooting; "Outwit Tiger Mountain" is the first 3D red revolutionary movie.
Tsui Hark’s step-by-step efforts in technology have made martial arts films move from the handicraft stage of physical fighting to the modernization of science and technology.Based on repeated experiments and upgrades, we can be so carried away by the false visual spectacle of The Four Kings of Di Renjie, which is close to reality.
After indulging in 3D technology, Tsui Hark always likes to "shoot" the audience’s eyes with various weapons on the screen.Not only that, but every weapon he designed in the film also made the action scenes have stronger screen impact. Just like this Tianwang Temple duel:
Wei Chi’s 360-degree rotating sword and darts, and the double knives like the "Golden Wheel of the Sun and Moon" in The Legend of Shushan, inspire more powerful action scenes in the offensive and defensive rounds.
Look at Dong Fangbubai’s embroidered needle, Yan Chixia’s talisman, Li Yingqi’s heavenly fencing, Lei Yanjian in the sky, Zhao Huaian’s long sword, and Buludu’s Gankun Circle & HELIP; …
These weapons designed by Tsui Hark not only serve the visual effects, but also are the spiritual weapons of the characters.The most obvious one is Seven Swords, in which seven swords represent the different personalities of seven swordsman.
Di Renjie’s Kang Long Mace is even more so.
Kang Long Mace is a majestic artifact presented to the king Ji, which naturally symbolizes Di Renjie’s dignity and rights. But this time, the film emphasizes that it is a defensive weapon with no sharp edge and its function of breaking all attack weapons.
This is in perfect harmony with Di Renjie’s passive and conservative personality and his ability to solve all strange cases and repel the villains.
"Four Heavenly Kings" is a bloody case caused by a "Kang Long Mace". This time, Tsui Hark’s weapon has leapt to become the narrative MacGuffin and the driving force of the story.
Single shot with an average of several seconds, stormy editing, multi-angle shooting position, push-pull, shake-follow movement mode,Tsui Hark’s previous works generally used such a messy image style to stimulate the audience’s adrenaline.
However, because of 3D, the fast-paced cutting and diverse composition movements are easy to make the audience dizzy and vomit. Therefore, watching "The Dragon King of the Gods" and "The Four Kings", the pace of lens editing is obviously slower than in the past, and the shooting angle and motion mode tend to be simple.
However, the visual chaos in Tsui Hark’s films is still changing.
One is that he will use the deformation on the lens instead.This is most reflected in The Dragon King of the Gods, such as the distorted picture when Di Renjie first came to Luoyang to read Wei Chi’s lip language;
The second is to fill the screen with colorful and grotesque weapons, costumes, art scenes and special effects monsters, which is complicated and creates instant attraction.
Chaos in audio-visual style and chaos in story text are two sides of Tsui Hark’s film.
Most of his film stories took place in the years of rebellion. Xinlongmen Inn was the Ming Dynasty when Dongchang was monopolized, Huang Feihong was the turbulent era in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty, peking opera blues was the period of the Republic of China when warlords were fighting, and Green Snake and Ghost Story were fictional shemale and shemale worlds …
It is precisely because of troubled times that justice and evil have the soil of binary confrontation, so that heroes and villains can struggle with each other, stimulate the most direct drama conflict, and finally release the chivalrous feelings of loyalty to the liver and righteousness.
Even though the Di Renjie series is a prosperous Tang Dynasty under the reign of Ersheng Lingchao and Wu Zetian, Tsui Hark has to create a troublesome context in troubled times.
Heaven Empire is Sha Tuo’s personal dissatisfaction with Wu Zetian, The Dragon King of the Gods contains threats from overseas forces in the eastern island countries, and The Four Heavenly Kings is evil influence who seals the inferno’s challenge to the established regime and Wu Zetian’s lust for power.
In the rebellious world, the story lines in Tsui Hark’s works are actually not complicated, but there are many narrative lines, rapid logical changes and fast transition rhythm.Just like "Four Kings", the four sides wrestle and intertwine with each other, and there is often a clue that has not been explained yet, and the next scene will start non-stop.
Not only that, the disorder of genre is also Tsui Hark’s aesthetic label, and it is also a kind of blameless "original sin" brought by Hong Kong film production environment and Hong Kong film style in the last century.In a movie, martial arts, science fiction, reasoning, monsters, politics, love, comedy … He seems to take care of everything, as in Di Renjie.
Compared with the first two films, The Four Heavenly Kings has the most comic elements, and Sha Tuozhong and Shui Yue are almost a pair of funny actors.
Peeping at the bath, beating up, accidentally hitting the wound and vomiting blood … These are all the nonsense tricks used by Tsui Hark in action comedies in 1980s and 1990s, such as Ghost Horse Wises Many Stars, Best Partner, The Secret Order of Queen 3, happy ever after, etc.
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Tsui Hark also has a special preference for "disorder" in character gender.For example, Dong Fangbubai, who is gorgeous and heroic, can’t tell the gender, the tree demon grandmother in Ghost Story, the father-in-law Yu Huatian who is sometimes feminine and domineering, and the real person of Jiugong in Journey to the West & HELIP; … This kind of role is also set in Four Kings — Flying smoke.
Shangguan Jinger in Di Renjie’s Heaven-reaching Empire has a strong personality before Wu Zetian and a tender side before Di Renjie. Behind her, there is a mask of masculinity.
He loves this kind of female royal sister, just like Shui Yue in this film. She is strong and independent, who dares to love and hate, and is the master of her own destiny.
"Without words, Machamp confuses God", and the "God" here refers to ghosts and gods.
It is not so much that Tsui Hark loves to show scary or ghostly demons in supernatural films as that Tsui Hark intends to talk about people. Ghost Story is saying: Ghosts also have people’s worldly desires, and ghosts also have the right to love a person;
In "Green Snake", the white snake let the green snake gradually know what human emotion is, and Xiaoqing let Fahai escape into what is the ultimate confusion of the Buddha.
"Four Heavenly Kings" integrates the religious and ethical issues of ghosts and gods and Buddhism, and becomes the most critical part of the film.There are not only one kind of ghosts in movies, but at least three kinds: the illusion of sealing demons, magic and shifting souls, and human demons.
The setting of alchemy makes Tsui Hark’s imaginative vision more logical and acceptable. This setting is undoubtedly a satire on the demons who avenge the inferno and Wu Zetian’s desire for power: the power struggle is an illusion and a bubble.
In the end, Tsui Hark conquered everything with the Buddhism of the master of circle measurement: "Hell is not empty, and I will never become a Buddha", there is an evil ghost in everyone’s heart, and "a hundred years of lust for power … A generation of hatred, why leave future generations. "
Therefore, it seems that Yuance and Di Renjie are maintaining the stability of the established regime. In fact, they are transcending politics, letting bygones be bygones, letting go of hatred and pursuing the present peace. This is also a projection discourse of Tsui Hark and the whole series of Di Renjie on the present reality.
Confucius didn’t talk about "Machamp’s disorderly gods" and wanted to govern the country with benevolence and courtesy, but Tsui Hark described the universal moral concept of peace and justice with the film aesthetic style of "Machamp’s disorderly gods".
When Tsui Hark and Shi Nansheng set up a film studio in the 1980s, they asked the directors: "First, they should have their own style; The second is to have something to say — Even if it is a kung fu film, there must be something to say; Third, we should "follow the mass line", and commercial films must entertain the audience, so that they can be vented and feel better.Movies are mass media. I hope we can breathe with the audience … … The masses watch movies with their feelings, not with their heads."
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Even though filming in the north, Tsui Hark has always insisted on making this kind of popular film, which requires direct and enjoyable sensory stimulation, instant sensationalism and pleasant pleasure.
If in "The Four Heavenly Kings of Di Renjie", you have to struggle with why the ghost night didn’t kill Er Sheng directly in the hall, why Wu Zetian, who was controlled by magic, wasn’t instructed to kill the emperor, or how Di Renjie learned magic … You will lose all the fun of audio-visual perception.
Although sometimes the plot is scattered, sometimes it becomes hilarious when it is serious, there is a bad taste of B-class movies in A-class productions …These are the labels of Tsui Hark’s existence as a film author, and they are also the game spirit of "going too far and being crazy" in the golden age of Hong Kong movies!
