, " eight hundred " finally meets the audience. After the first round of
screening in advance, the film has been scored on Douban. The current rating of 8.1 proves the film’s reputation.
Wu Jing said that this was the first time he went to a movie theater to watch a movie in eight months, and he cried several times after watching:
"Eight Hundred", which brought Chinese war movies to another level.
Huang Bo was full of emotion after watching it. He said:
China needs such a movie too much now.
What the hell is this film?
"Eight Hundred"
The Eight Hundred
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Before talking about "Eight Hundred", the complicated and bumpy road to filming and release of the film could not be avoided.
Time goes back to September 9, 2017, and "Yubai" officially launched in Suzhou. Prior to this, the crew had spent a lot of money. In the Suzhou Huayi Brothers Movie World, which had not yet opened at the time, they built the four-line warehouse and the banks of the Suzhou River, the main scene of the movie, on a 1:1 scale. The main location of the movie took place here. It covers an area of 200 acres. It took 18 months to complete the construction of 68 buildings on both sides of the Suzhou River. The construction of more than 300,000 square meters and the "Suzhou River" were finally completed. Of digging and construction.
The story of "Eight Hundred" is adapted from the historical event of the famous " eight hundred warriors defending the four-line warehouse " in the Battle of Songhu. Although the battle ended with the final "eight hundred warriors" retreating into the concession, it was greatly Inspired the Chinese people's anti-fighting aspirations and wrote a tribute to loyalty, which is widely known in history.
As early as ten years ago, Guanhu planned to put this story on the screen, but because of the high investment, the project has been shelved. Finally, I found the investment, but in the preparation process, the construction project was delayed, the original actors were evacuated, and other twists and turns, so that the film only took four years to prepare in the early stage. The original filming plan for the film was in " Before "Lao Paoer", but because of the drama, filming location, etc., we can only shoot "Lao Paoer" first.
On April 27, 2018, the film went through 230 days and seven months of shooting in Suzhou and finally finished, and then went through a year-long post-production. Because this film is Asia's first full digital IMAX film , both special effects and shooting are extremely demanding. In shooting, actors cannot stick fake beards because they are easy to wear under the IMAX lens, and because the IMAX lens has a strong sense of perspective, even when shooting a distant shot, actors far away from 100 meters have to perform. In order to ensure the standard of the war scenes, the crew also invited the stunt coordinator of the "The Hobbit" series Glenn Boswell to serve as the war scene guide, "Lord of the Rings 3" and "X-Men: Reverse the Future" The special effects instructor Tim Krauss than to check the special effects of the film. The cast of
film is quite strong, starring Zhang Yi, Wang Qianyuan, Jiang Wu, Ou Hao, Huang Zhizhong, Du Chun, Zhang Youhao, Wei Chen, Li Chen, Yu Ailei, Yu Haoming, Zheng Kai, Tang Yixin, Xin Baiqing , guest appearances Stars in Huang Xiaoming, Yao Chen, Hou Yong, Liang Jing, Liu Xiaoqing and other big names, can be said to be a crowd of stars.
. With such a big handwork, the production budget of the film is as high as nearly 700 million yuan. That is to say, the film’s box office can get at least 2 billion in order to recover the cost. The previous domestic war film with the theme of the War of Resistance "The Hairpin" has a box office of 600 million, so the production of "Eight Hundred" is a big gamble for domestic films.
However, what the director Guan Hu didn't expect was that the road to the film would be so difficult. The film was originally scheduled to be released in the summer of July 2019 and was selected as the opening film of the 22nd Shanghai Film Festival.The world premiere is confirmed on June 15th. But the day before the opening of the film festival, on the evening of June 14, the film was urgently stopped due to technical reasons. Ten days later, "Yu Hundred" was officially withdrawn. Since then, there have been news of the film being fixed for many times, but it has not been able to be released, and it eventually became another missing movie in the mainland theater in 2019.
until July of this year, after the mainland theaters resumed work, "Yaobai" was once again rumored to be scheduled to be released. Fortunately, after experiencing many false news that the wolf is coming, the film was finally officially announced on August 21 this year, which instantly detonated the audience's expectations.
withdrew and re-cut at the cusp of the storm, set files to save when it was a waste of time, the scenes and scenes of "Yai Hundred" were very tragic.
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Before I watched "Eight Hundred", I made up for the film "Eight Hundred Heroes" produced in Taiwan in 1975, and also specifically looked for an earlier silent film version of 1938.
It should be said that the Taiwanese film version of 1975 is basically a high-definition remake based on 1938. Although the stars are gathered and the scene is more grand, the storyline and creative techniques are basically the same, and they were born in a special period. The publicity task is greater than the main theme film of artistic creation. The former was filmed in the second year of the War of Defense of the Four Lines Warehouse, and the latter was filmed in the 1970s. It belongs to the popular military education film in Taiwan Province.
So before the release of "Yu Hundred", my biggest worry about this film is-will the
film be made into an upgraded version of the 1975 version?
However, after watching the movie, I found that I was completely wrong. Guanhu's "Yaobai" is completely different from the previous two versions of the film in terms of style and focus. In the 1975 version of the Taiwanese movie,
, although the tragic description of the war at the Sixing Warehouse, was filmed on most levels from the perspective of an old-fashioned war movie. How the generals command and lead the soldiers, how the soldiers sacrifice their lives and forget their lives. How the patriots risked their deaths to support the frontline, etc. These plots are indeed very dramatic and moving, but the description of the war is too simple and modular. All the plots and characters in the film are historical interpretations, which are left to the art of the film itself. The processing and creation space is very small, which makes the story very thin.
But "Yai Hundred" is completely different. The film is very simple. There is no big scene of the Battle of Songhu, no overall strategic design, no complex images of high-level figures, no insidious cunning of political games, and only one mission— -Guarding the Four Lines Warehouse, only one thing is revealed-how these four hundred people fought this battle. The protagonist of the movie
is no longer a Weiguangzheng general or a heroic protagonist of Gao Daquan, but a group of deserters who are not firm in their positions. They are eager to live and fear death, and when facing the burned and plundered Japanese army, they are desperate to run for their lives, so that these characters It's hard to make people associate them with keywords like national heroes.
But the dramatic conflict of the film is precisely here. The screenwriter examines the cruelty and pain of the war through the perspective of this group of small characters. At the same time, through the change of the position of this group of small characters in the war, it shows that the soldiers sacrificed their lives to protect themselves. The great spirit of home defense.
In history books, we usually only see the heroic deeds of the Yao warrior fighting the enemy and the Japanese army. But few people would have thought that these soldiers who defended their homes and the country were fighting desperately in the desperate situation of being abandoned. Are they really not afraid of death?
, of course, is not necessarily true. There is no one in this world who is born brave, just because someone chooses to be fearless for responsibility, to bear, and to protect more people. And this is the most moving part of "Yai Bai". In the film, Yao is no longer an abstract number, but through flesh and blood characters, it is concretized into individual people .
Therefore, in this war of disparity between the strong and the weak, each of their choices, every charge, and every struggleRegardless of one's own body, there is also a great power contained in it. The so-called heroes of
are just because ordinary people come forward, and the protagonist of "Yubai" is exactly that.
has as many as a dozen main characters in the whole film. They come from all over the world and speak a variety of dialects and slang. Some are military accountants who have never touched a gun, and some are halfway soldiers who are born as farmers and drag their families to escape. Some are veterans who are full of scornful bullying and fear of hardship, and some are simple teenagers who have been involved in the war before they reach adulthood.
But the cruelty of war is here, and every life is engulfed in it, from the hurried escape at the beginning, to the fear and despair when there is nowhere to escape, to the realization of the mission and responsibility as a soldier, to the final rush to the battlefield The bravery and fearlessness of giving up life and death.
is especially interspersed with those fierce battles. It is the characters' hope of life and fear of death, their enthusiasm for secular life, their grief against wars, their determination to defend the country and the tears of witnessing the sacrifice of their comrades. , These detailed descriptions ensure that the characters in the film are basically full and true to the image. Even if you don’t know the real four-line warehouse battle, you will still be brought into the story as the characters in the film. Moved by the feat.
"The Eight Hundred" is a movie that eulogizes heroes, and it is also a movie that shows a variety of humanity in the state of war.
is like the line spoken by He Xiangning, played by Yao Chen in the film:
is like this for all the people in the country, how dare the Japanese pirates?
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6zThe story structure of the movie is very simple. It revolves around the four days and nights of the 524th regiment of the Eighty-eight Division of the National Army, which was ordered to garrison the four-row warehouse. At the same time, the film is divided into two lines: the battle in the warehouse and warehouse Outside the group portrait . The war scenes of
are undoubtedly the highlight of the film. The battle of the Four Lines Warehouse in history has a very complicated political and social background.
On the one hand, the four-line warehouse is located on the north bank of the Suzhou River in Zhabei District, Shanghai, and the southern bank of the fifty-meter-wide river is the Shanghai public concession at that time, gathering citizens, refugees, students, media from various countries, and garrisons. This makes the Four Lines Warehouse Defense War the first "surrounded" war in the history of human warfare, .
At the time of the bloody battle on the North Bank, the South Bank was still singing and dancing, just like the stands of this war. As the lines in the film said: A Suzhou River, separated by two worlds, is heaven on one side and hell on the other. This strong sense of contrast has invisibly deepened the tragic sense of this battle.
Outside the warehouse, there was not only a fierce attack by the Japanese army, but also the eyes of countless Chinese and foreign people in the concession area. The heroes knew that this battle had already risen to the level of national dignity. Every second they persisted, they declared to the world that the Chinese would rather die than yield.
But on the other hand, the 524 regiment was ordered to stick to the Four Lines Warehouse to prove China's determination to resist Japan at that time and to obtain support from the international community. Therefore, this battle itself is a political performance, which is played for international friends. The 524 regiment that was ordered to guard the "Four Lines Warehouse" was abandoned.
What's more, this group of abandoned children is not only as many as the 800 people declared to the outside world, but also there are many soldiers who have never been on the battlefield and veterans who just want to escape. Let such a group of small people come into battle. Su's enemy forces are simply hitting rocks with pebbles.
Faced with this inevitable battle, "survival" is the biggest wish of many people at the beginning.
Ou Hao played the recruit at the Dragon Boat Festival wanted to take his younger brother Xiaohub together to escape, Zhang Yi played the civil accountant old abacus has never taken a gun. In his words, "Fighting, with so many people, you can't win with more people, and you may not lose without yourself." This battle will always be over, but if you die, you’re really dead.” Jiang Wu’s Northeast Soldier, the old iron , is greedy for life and fear of death, Wang QianYuan's veteran Yangguai has good marksmanship, but he has long lost the bloody nature of soldiers in the defeats, and only cares about how to save his life in battle.
But when I saw the blood splattered on the spot and sacrificed heroically, I saw civilian relatives and friends being brutally killed by the Japanese army. The blood of most of them was gradually ignited, and then these people continued to fight the enemy. The tragic and majestic sections of the heroic sacrifice have also become the famous scenes in the film.
and these little people who are greedy for life and fear of death are the veterans of the 524 regiment who have worked hard since the first day. Under the leadership of the regimental commander Xie Jinyuan (played by Du Chun), they repelled the Japanese raids. However, because of the disparity between the strength of the enemy and the enemy, every time the 524 regiment repels the enemy, it has to pay an extremely painful price.
The 21-year-old soldier Chen Shusheng (played by Zheng Kai) had a bomb tied to his body and died with the Japanese army, leaving only the words "giving up one's life for the sake of justice". In order to blow up the Japanese armored vehicles, the soldiers tied grenades one by one, reported their names and hometowns one by one, and did not hesitate to line up to die. The sound of human shells
also awakened the sleeping people on the other side:
It turned out that there was still a Chinese army fighting the Japanese, and even the last drop of blood would not let the country share.
At the beginning of the war, people living in the concession were indifferent and even a little gloating because they could not be hit by artillery fire. However, as the war raged, watching the soldiers and soldiers on the opposite side continued to make heroic sacrifices, they still defended this last one. On the line of defense, people began to grieve, anger, and cheer for the soldiers.
After that, the people of the country were also infected by the spirit of the national army soldiers, from celebrities and scholars to traffickers and pawns. They had money to pay, they worked hard, and they actively supported the front lines. There were even Girl Scouts, gangsters, enthusiastic students, etc. People braved the bullets and bullets to win each other's lives, and provided all kinds of support to the North Bank one after another.
However, even though the 524 regiment completed the task of garrisoning the Sixing warehouse for four days and four nights in desperation, in the end they only waited for an order to retreat. When Xie Jinyuan, who was dedicated to guarding the country, learned from officials sent from Nanjing that the bloody battle at the Four Lines Warehouse was actually a premeditated "political show," his anger and frustration could be imagined.
In the face of cold politics, the soldiers' hot blood donations have become worthless, which invisibly deepens the tragic background of the fate of the 800 heroes.
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Only in terms of the author's limited viewing experience, "Yubai" can be said to be-
is currently the highest industrial level of Chinese war films.
If purely from a technical level, "Yabai" has top production and audiovisual expressiveness. Its fierce and popular war scenes, realistic sense of battle scenes, and tragic expression of the cruelty of war have established a new level for domestic movies. An industry benchmark, such an evaluation is by no means exaggerated.
In the history of the four-row warehouse guard battle, the scale was relatively small, but the movie magnified the severity of the tragedy ten times. In the first half of the film, a number of fierce battle scenes were used to create a stern, violent and always tense war situation. Soldiers dared to fight back in the rain of bullets in the four-row warehouse, and some were panicked, which made people see It was dizzying, completely out of breath, and did not lose the action scenes of European and American war films.
However, although the film’s industrial technology is commendable, on the other hand, it must be admitted that the film’s weaknesses and deficiencies in literary play are also quite obvious. The creative ambition of the film is great, but limited by space, the description of life on the South Bank is not well balanced with the war scenes, which leads to serious weakeningAfter the emotional expression of the war scenes, the plot seems to be a bit carefree.
has repeatedly appeared in the image of a white horse, which uses Malay to symbolize the state of the soldiers in the Sixing Warehouse. At the beginning, the white horse was frightened and fled everywhere, just like the horrified guard soldiers who just entered the Sixing Warehouse, timid and fearful to fight; then the white horse reappears and comes to the Sixing Warehouse, it is like the national army soldier who strengthens his confidence and swears to guard; the white horse that appears finally is It may mean new national hopes and expectations for a better future, but this kind of design reappears, it will seem too much and deliberate.
and the existence of the film due to force majeure factors, the current version has a lot of traces of modification in the details of the story, which still caused a gap in the look and feel of the film to a certain extent, especially in the beginning of the film, where the plot is not coherent. There should indeed be some changes.
For example: How was the deserter of the Hubei security regiment played by Ou Hao brought back to the Sixing Warehouse? How did Huang Zhizhong's role later be hoisted by the Japanese army after being mixed with refugees?
In addition, it is worth mentioning that the release version will completely delete the character played by Ruan Jingtian of , a Japanese living in the concession, and his name is not even on the Douban entry. It is said that he was discovered by people while using Japanese to stop the atrocities of the Japanese army and was eventually hanged. Such a role makes the image of the sentient beings on the south bank of the Suzhou River more three-dimensional, and the changes before and after are more ironic, greatly increasing the depth of the film.
Of course, leaving these off-site factors aside, "Eight Hundred" can be regarded as an excellent war film. The movie
is fortunate to show human nature with the theme of war films- writes majestic with cowardice, courage with despair, tragic and strong with confusion, and righteousness with courage to write .
The best Chinese war epic of the year, deserves its name!
