Zhu Yilong falls down a mountain
Finally someone ripped Zhu Yilong's new movie, and since it hasn't been released in my country, this was my only chance to watch it. Here's what I think:
First off, the title is a litte weird again. We just dubbed it "z1l falls down a mountain" because that's the most accurate. ;) The official title is Cloudy Mountain, the Chinese title most closely translates to Exploding Summit, but we also had fun coming up with other translations:
Lu Xiaojin (Jiao Junyan) and Hong Yizhou (Zhu Yilong) inspecting the tunnel construction site
* I can't even formulate a coherent overall impression except "Boom!" That movie was so overly loud and hectic and explosive, that's really the only thing that stuck with me. So should I review it on the basis of how good an action movie it was? Hm.
- The action was way too high-frequency for me to work. What already struck me in the beginning was that everything was turned up to 11 with no breathing space in between. That got a little better later, but not much. That movie really *wanted* to be all action all the time. This of course didn't work, because it sacrificed the build-up for peak levels of action every single time.
+ What it did reasonably well was make me care about the characters. There was some exposition about all the main characters and it did make me care about them.
- Although I can't say I liked the Hongs? They were both stubborn, arrogant, and brash idiots who didn't listen to the people around them. Not that Western heroes are any different - but still annoying. It made sense that they'd be similar in character, though, so I don't blame Hong Yizhou that much for being an idiot. At least he was nice to his girlfriend.
* I'd have to watch the beginning again to figure out what exactly their jobs were. At first, it looked like they were both geologists, but then they were suddenly explosives experts? And they seemed like an excellent team, but they weren't supposed to be? Eh?
- Of course, there were lots of instances where physics did not apply. There were things like a car jump across breaks in the road, gravity-defying rock climbing stunts, and a jump onto a flying helicopter. I would file those under "the usual", although they all made me groan.
- Action movies are always illogical, but that whole idiocy of climbing into the hole in the rock, then being shot at with a harpoon, catching the harpoon, and then jumping back over to the flying helicopter without getting shredded or blown down was just a little too much nonsense in one place.
Wet, cold mountain climbing
* The special effects were mostly acceptable. I think I just got used to them by the end. There were a lot of computer simulations of exploding mountains, and then actual exploding mountains. Whatever. :) The other special effects, like the helicopter scenes and the diving, were all okay and didn't ping me as unrealistic.
+ I very much liked Xiaojin, Hong Yizhou's girlfriend. She was smart and practical and all around great. So much love for her! \o/
- I thought it great that Xiaojin was allowed to go back out to rescue him - it felt like a very "hero" thing to do. Unfortunately, it didn't lead anywhere. It was explained, but still disappointing. In the end she went to rescue some kids. Singing kids, even. :(
* I liked how the boss was a woman and was allowed to a) have all the authority and b) make stupid heroic decisions and save Hong Yizhou's life.
* I liked everything about Zhu Yilong's performance. Including the rock climbing, which was a little obviously fake at times, but he did pretty well. The car stunt driving scene was really good.
* So. Much. Rain. (More of a meta comment. It must have been a pain to film on so many levels. The cave parts were restricted to a handful of crew and they had to hike up there every day and then couldn't eat, drink, or even take a piss inside the cave all day long. The rock climbing scene was much longer than I expected and it was cold and wet and they were freezing the whole time. The river-running scene was not worth hurting his knee over. The scene where he tumbled down the slope was used to good effect though (although still too risky to film, imho).)
* I did appreciate Zhu Yilong's grungy look, he was slightly scratched up and bloody throughout. It would have been better if the source material had been crisper. As it is, I had a blurry and highly compressed copy and couldn't fully enjoy that. I guess I'll wait for a better one. I'd buy it, too.
cave exploring
+ The best part of the movie, hands-down, was him confessing his childhood trauma/fear to his father and starting to cry. It was more wailing than crying, and I loved every second of it. Zhu Yilong, still the best.
+ And he got to be the hero. Which he deserves. <3
- Even though of course none of it made sense. First, his father wanted to do everything himself, and then he suddenly supported his son sacrificing himself? Nope? Then the son went to climb a mountain and the father magically appeared behind him and saved his life? Huh? If at least the emotional arcs had made sense, but those were sacrificed to the action as well, it seems.
+ A scene I genuinely loved was early on in the movie, when Xiaojin returned from the market and unconcernedly walked along the train tracks directly in front of an oncoming train. The market vendors who had their produce stacked right on the dam next to the tracks were similarly unconcerned. Very beautiful understated slice-of-life moment there. A++.
* The credits had some more train-related historic footage, which ranged from interesting (the very old ones) through hilarious (the part where the film crew obviously thought they'd have to put the two women front and center) to nausea-inducingly propagandistic (the modern ones).
- And while we're on the topic of propaganda: this movie really pulled all the stops. Bosses caring for their populace, workers caring for their tunnel, rail workers constantly being called soldiers, and just ubiquitous praise of the military. Most worthy of a special mention were:
- 1) when the boss explicitly compared their actions to how "Western Cultures" would solve this problem (by relying on religion, apparently), while Chinese people are able to level mountains. Yup.
- 2) the falling salute
- 3) the fact that the civil leader (not sure, was he the mayor? some higher-up?) was constantly being updated on the situation by a military leader, and the military was obviously in charge of the whole thing and then decided to evacuate the town. The army saves the day, yup.
In general, I never like when military terms are conflated with civilian terms, and this movie did it a lot. Apparently, railroad workers are called "railroad soldiers" in Chinese. Pffft. (And it was not a translation issue, I heard the word 'bing' clearly.)
Spoiler: I was actually surprised that Hong Yizhou (and, I assume, Xiaojin) survived. This doesn't usually happen in Zhu Yilong's dramas/movies, and I am tempted to be a little more lenient with the movie because of that.
Overall, the movie was too fast-paced for me and didn't make much sense. The propaganda was even more blatant than I expected. I really wanted to like this movie, and I did like all the personal moments, but overall, it just isn't my kind of movie. Luckily, I really don't mind what Zhu Yilong does, I'll watch him in anything, and this is still better than a lot of his other works. At least it's just two hours long, and there are many many close-up shots of Zhu Yilong's face, his screentime adds up to at least half of the movie, I'd guess. So I would still rec it for him.
5 of 10 stars.
Last but not least: here are the 300+ caps I made: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ojh7fegpcl8gheg/cloudymountain.zip
p.s.: I know some of you have posted reviews, but I skipped those because I hadn't seen it yet. Please link me again! <3
x-posted from dw (comments:
)
First off, the title is a litte weird again. We just dubbed it "z1l falls down a mountain" because that's the most accurate. ;) The official title is Cloudy Mountain, the Chinese title most closely translates to Exploding Summit, but we also had fun coming up with other translations:
Lu Xiaojin (Jiao Junyan) and Hong Yizhou (Zhu Yilong) inspecting the tunnel construction site
* I can't even formulate a coherent overall impression except "Boom!" That movie was so overly loud and hectic and explosive, that's really the only thing that stuck with me. So should I review it on the basis of how good an action movie it was? Hm.
- The action was way too high-frequency for me to work. What already struck me in the beginning was that everything was turned up to 11 with no breathing space in between. That got a little better later, but not much. That movie really *wanted* to be all action all the time. This of course didn't work, because it sacrificed the build-up for peak levels of action every single time.
+ What it did reasonably well was make me care about the characters. There was some exposition about all the main characters and it did make me care about them.
- Although I can't say I liked the Hongs? They were both stubborn, arrogant, and brash idiots who didn't listen to the people around them. Not that Western heroes are any different - but still annoying. It made sense that they'd be similar in character, though, so I don't blame Hong Yizhou that much for being an idiot. At least he was nice to his girlfriend.
* I'd have to watch the beginning again to figure out what exactly their jobs were. At first, it looked like they were both geologists, but then they were suddenly explosives experts? And they seemed like an excellent team, but they weren't supposed to be? Eh?
- Of course, there were lots of instances where physics did not apply. There were things like a car jump across breaks in the road, gravity-defying rock climbing stunts, and a jump onto a flying helicopter. I would file those under "the usual", although they all made me groan.
- Action movies are always illogical, but that whole idiocy of climbing into the hole in the rock, then being shot at with a harpoon, catching the harpoon, and then jumping back over to the flying helicopter without getting shredded or blown down was just a little too much nonsense in one place.
Wet, cold mountain climbing
* The special effects were mostly acceptable. I think I just got used to them by the end. There were a lot of computer simulations of exploding mountains, and then actual exploding mountains. Whatever. :) The other special effects, like the helicopter scenes and the diving, were all okay and didn't ping me as unrealistic.
+ I very much liked Xiaojin, Hong Yizhou's girlfriend. She was smart and practical and all around great. So much love for her! \o/
- I thought it great that Xiaojin was allowed to go back out to rescue him - it felt like a very "hero" thing to do. Unfortunately, it didn't lead anywhere. It was explained, but still disappointing. In the end she went to rescue some kids. Singing kids, even. :(
* I liked how the boss was a woman and was allowed to a) have all the authority and b) make stupid heroic decisions and save Hong Yizhou's life.
* I liked everything about Zhu Yilong's performance. Including the rock climbing, which was a little obviously fake at times, but he did pretty well. The car stunt driving scene was really good.
* So. Much. Rain. (More of a meta comment. It must have been a pain to film on so many levels. The cave parts were restricted to a handful of crew and they had to hike up there every day and then couldn't eat, drink, or even take a piss inside the cave all day long. The rock climbing scene was much longer than I expected and it was cold and wet and they were freezing the whole time. The river-running scene was not worth hurting his knee over. The scene where he tumbled down the slope was used to good effect though (although still too risky to film, imho).)
* I did appreciate Zhu Yilong's grungy look, he was slightly scratched up and bloody throughout. It would have been better if the source material had been crisper. As it is, I had a blurry and highly compressed copy and couldn't fully enjoy that. I guess I'll wait for a better one. I'd buy it, too.
cave exploring
+ The best part of the movie, hands-down, was him confessing his childhood trauma/fear to his father and starting to cry. It was more wailing than crying, and I loved every second of it. Zhu Yilong, still the best.
+ And he got to be the hero. Which he deserves. <3
- Even though of course none of it made sense. First, his father wanted to do everything himself, and then he suddenly supported his son sacrificing himself? Nope? Then the son went to climb a mountain and the father magically appeared behind him and saved his life? Huh? If at least the emotional arcs had made sense, but those were sacrificed to the action as well, it seems.
+ A scene I genuinely loved was early on in the movie, when Xiaojin returned from the market and unconcernedly walked along the train tracks directly in front of an oncoming train. The market vendors who had their produce stacked right on the dam next to the tracks were similarly unconcerned. Very beautiful understated slice-of-life moment there. A++.
* The credits had some more train-related historic footage, which ranged from interesting (the very old ones) through hilarious (the part where the film crew obviously thought they'd have to put the two women front and center) to nausea-inducingly propagandistic (the modern ones).
- And while we're on the topic of propaganda: this movie really pulled all the stops. Bosses caring for their populace, workers caring for their tunnel, rail workers constantly being called soldiers, and just ubiquitous praise of the military. Most worthy of a special mention were:
- 1) when the boss explicitly compared their actions to how "Western Cultures" would solve this problem (by relying on religion, apparently), while Chinese people are able to level mountains. Yup.
- 2) the falling salute
- 3) the fact that the civil leader (not sure, was he the mayor? some higher-up?) was constantly being updated on the situation by a military leader, and the military was obviously in charge of the whole thing and then decided to evacuate the town. The army saves the day, yup.
In general, I never like when military terms are conflated with civilian terms, and this movie did it a lot. Apparently, railroad workers are called "railroad soldiers" in Chinese. Pffft. (And it was not a translation issue, I heard the word 'bing' clearly.)
Spoiler: I was actually surprised that Hong Yizhou (and, I assume, Xiaojin) survived. This doesn't usually happen in Zhu Yilong's dramas/movies, and I am tempted to be a little more lenient with the movie because of that.
Overall, the movie was too fast-paced for me and didn't make much sense. The propaganda was even more blatant than I expected. I really wanted to like this movie, and I did like all the personal moments, but overall, it just isn't my kind of movie. Luckily, I really don't mind what Zhu Yilong does, I'll watch him in anything, and this is still better than a lot of his other works. At least it's just two hours long, and there are many many close-up shots of Zhu Yilong's face, his screentime adds up to at least half of the movie, I'd guess. So I would still rec it for him.
5 of 10 stars.
Last but not least: here are the 300+ caps I made: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ojh7fegpcl8gheg/cloudymountain.zip
p.s.: I know some of you have posted reviews, but I skipped those because I hadn't seen it yet. Please link me again! <3
x-posted from dw (comments:
)