"Interstellar exploration?"

Ding Cheng took over the script and finally saw a high-budget hard sci-fi film, and he was looking forward to it.

After watching it, I found that it was not so much a science fiction movie as an emotional film in a science fiction shell, which also seemed to hint at the soft science fiction trend in Hollywood.

In recent years, more and more directors have abandoned the traditional path of hard science fiction, and instead put more energy into exploring the spiritual world of the protagonist, and intertwined with the grand time and space of the universe to form a dual text that complements each other.

For example, Nolan's "Interstellar" uses the emotional bond between father and daughter as the main thrust of the whole film, while in "The First Man on the Moon", Armstrong's self-examination and family relationships form the emotional center of the whole film.

In "Blade Runner 2049", the director directly inserts himself into the thinking of ism, and the whole movie becomes a spiritual journey for replicant K to find himself......

Director James, seven of his films have even won the Venice Silver Lion and four Palme d'Or, but the mainstream commercial market is still unknown.

In Ding Cheng's view, he represents a type of director, and today when movies have fully moved closer to business, he is still willing to rely on his own obsession to bring it a little closer to art.

It takes enthusiasm and courage!

Many people like to describe Nolan as moving freely between business and art, as if talking about a tightrope walker?

But in fact, Nolan is very safe, but in a strong commercial film atmosphere, plus a little artistic thinking. What is provided to the audience is a kind of self-congratulatory satisfaction, as if it also understands profoundly, reaches the subtlety, but in fact it is just exquisite flattery.

Compared to him, James is bolder.

He doesn't carve out a safe zone for himself and step on that non-existent chain under the gaze of the public. On the contrary, if you really walk on the tightrope, as for whether there is anyone cheering, it depends on fate.

Specially looking for previous works to study, his pace is slow, but it is not pretending to be deep, nor is it slow, but to leave space for the audience......

Roaming space.

If you blindly seek speed, this space will disappear. The audience can only be carried away, blindly accepting everything in front of them.

But slow down, it's a completely different story. At this time, the audience can change from passive to active, and have more opportunities to examine the objective world on the screen and wander through it.

This is the effect that the director wants, and it is only in this slow pace that a lot of details can be seen.

On the surface, they are all so-called genre films, but in fact, they are always competing with the audience's expectations.

Take the debut film "Little Odessa" as an example, it was originally a killer movie, but you can't see the coolness of the killer and the coolness of killing people in the film. On the contrary, what is seen more is the powerlessness of the killer as a person, and behind it is the fate that violence cannot compete with.

"We Have the Night" is a gangster theme, the protagonist is a gangster, and his father and brother are both policemen. The film reverses the fatalistic routine established by "The Godfather", that is, a man joins a gang for a family feud, and becomes a gangster who becomes a policeman for revenge, and he gives up his original romantic life and turns to survive on the tip of a knife on the other side.

This reversal, with a great sense of absurdity, tells a story of fate.

"Two Lovers" is a love film, but the sweetness of love is not seen, it is about a scumbag wandering between two lovers, and in the end, he can't get the top, and he takes the bottom.

Retreating to the next best may be the normal state of love, and it is more likely that love will slide into marriage.

Even Ding Cheng has to say that James has always been against the public's interest!

The image is exquisite classicism, but in the bones he is actually a rebel.

Especially like the good students in the class, who look very honest, and their minds are full of ghost ideas.

When I come back and read the script again, the protagonist Roy receives the task of flying to the Mars base to contact a spaceship on Neptune and relieve an energy wave crisis. And what surprised him even more was that his father, who had been lost for 20 years, was probably on that spaceship.

Along the way, he experienced the attacks of space pirates, mysterious creatures, and successive distresses, and finally arrived at Neptune to reach the final truth.

The original enthusiastic commercial blockbuster was put in James's hands, and the first thing was to go to spectacle?

He has no intention of consuming the gifts and tensions of the universe, and wants to do something more important and difficult than exploring the stars......

Exploring the human psyche?

Ding Cheng laughed dumbly, in this sense, "Interstellar Exploration" is more like a road movie.

It tells the story of a journey in which the protagonist flies from Earth to the Moon, Mars, and Neptune with great confusion and anticipation, hoping to answer his ultimate questions in a reunion with his father.

There are two levels to this question: one is more personal and concrete, and the other is more universal and abstract.

33 years ago, when the protagonist was 16 years old, his father joined the Lima Project and traveled to the edge of the solar system in search of extraterrestrial life, and never returned.

This caused severe psychological trauma to young Roy, who grew up to be withdrawn, no longer expected of intimacy, and even closed off himself.

Through a large number of lenses, the mental world of this emotionally impaired person is presented, such as shallow focus photography. Accentuate the characters, blur the environment, and reinforce the sense of alienation......

In particular, the helmet is set up with a transparent layer and a metal reflective material on the other. The former is like Roy's disguise, seemingly communicating with the outside world without barriers, but in fact there is an invisible diaphragm in it.

The latter is even more resolute, completely reflecting back the external environment and completely isolating itself from its own world.

For astronauts, apathy is a rare talent, no matter what kind of danger they are in, they can be calm and unfazed.

It was precisely the lack of father's love that created his indifference, and in the end, this indifference followed in his father's footsteps and became a genius astronaut.

However, this fate is not what Roy wants. The wife left because of her indifference, which was extremely painful and irretrievable. I don't want to live like my father who is selfish, abandons his wife and children, and dies alone.

With this Oedipusian sense of fatalism, embark on a journey to find your father.

In other words, it's not so much about looking for it as it is about getting rid of!

The director did not go to great lengths to create a heroic character with the halo of the protagonist, nor did he give the protagonist a noble space mission. Instead, it adopts a small-scale perspective to show the insignificance and loneliness of human beings.

The famous photographer Iter, who used to work on "Interstellar", used a large number of long shots and close-ups to visually create a majestic cosmic scene. The vast stars and the aircraft shuttling in the darkness form a kind of hidden interaction between the ten thousand sounds, the sense of power brought by the long shot, gentle and tenacious.

The choice of color tones is also quite careful, such as Neptune's dark blue, which is as calm as the ocean. When the protagonist arrives on Mars, the camera is dominated by orange and yellow, and this wasteland aesthetic shrouded in fog is the essence of "Blade Runner", and the careful sketching of the sense of the end of the world conveys the fear and uneasiness of the protagonist in the face of the unknown.

And when the camera shifts to the capsule, the color tone changes to light blue, which seems to symbolize the hero's courage. The exchange of cold and warm colors not only presupposes the direction of the plot, but also assumes the function of explaining information, which plays a buffering effect for the transformation and conflict of the characters' emotions.

The original intention was to show the landforms of Mars and the Moon in a desert landscape, but in the end, in order to achieve a higher degree of realism, the film was shot directly with high-resolution images provided by JPL Labs.

really enters the plot, and the real highlight is the cognition, state and emotion of the characters.