On the map of the world film industry, Thailand has long been on the fringes of not being concerned about. The vast majority of viewers have never even seen any Thai films. Therefore, it is not easy for "Genius Gunner" to land in domestic theaters. Previously, the film has been introduced by many countries and regions in East Asia. The similar cultural context and collective memory suffered by the exam have made this little-known film from director to actor unexpectedly enthusiastic. The excellent quality and reputation of "Genius Gunner" not only comes from the whimsical and exciting cheating, but also because it uses examination room transactions to achieve a powerful perspective and analysis of social integrity issues, the gap between the rich and the poor, and unspoken rules.
As a movie with "three wrong views", the primary problem in front of "Genius Gunner" is how to make the audience quickly replace themselves with Xiaolin, a habitual cheating criminal with super IQ. We can see that the screenwriter started from the friendship of classmates that ordinary people can't resist at ordinary times: Grace, the best friend of the heroine Xiaolin, is extremely bad at learning, so she was restricted from participating in stage performances by the school. As a friend of Xueba, Xiaolin naturally couldn't bear it. What's more, she discovered that the whole class was more or less secretly cheating. So, she felt righteous and passed the exam answer to Grace.
However, the second-generation rich in her class and Grace's boyfriend knew that she helped Grace cheat, and the latter coerced her into cheating for more people who were willing to pay, including herself. Xiaolin hesitated for a moment: she knew that cheating was wrong, but the high income made her very tempted from a poor family. When she realized that her father had paid the school a huge sponsorship fee of 200,000 yuan without telling her, she felt both distressed and aggrieved. For a young girl who is inexperienced but sensitive and precocious, she can't refuse the money that is at her fingertips. What's more, the ignorant she also regards it as a kind of help at this time.
This massive cheating, which started as a friendship and spread to the whole school, quickly turned sour. It can be said that after Xiao Lin, a high school student with a still unclear concept of right and wrong, witnessed how the unspoken rules of the adult world are popular, she effortlessly found a reason to legitimize her behavior.
Xiaolin was first shocked that the school forced her father to pay a large sum of money under the banner of "voluntary payment by parents", and then she was saddened to see the teacher blatantly leaking questions in advance in the name of the so-called after-school tutoring or you would never have thought about it. What's even more speechless is that these hypocritical adults still plausibly explain why all these black-box operations are reasonable in the face of her debunking and questioning. So, what quickly came to Xiao Lin's mind was: Adults are only allowed to cheat by themselves, but they pretend to be strictly forbidden to cheat. Thinking of this, she couldn't help showing a bitter and contemptuous smile in front of the principal.
Xiaolin is well aware of her dual disadvantages as a student and an ordinary child, but she is unwilling to show weakness to all these injustices when she is young and vigorous. She has a strong desire to be the strong and the winner of this adult game. Therefore, she chose the dangerous path of cheating almost unscrupulously.
In this society, many things operate under two sets of rules, light and dark. As long as Xiao Lin can successfully keep her behavior from crossing the dark boundary, then the clear rules will let her go. Xiaolin believes that she has seen through the essence of the light and dark rules: those who make the clear rules do not necessarily follow them, but prefer to follow the dark rules. Therefore, the Ming rules have become a tool to punish the fools, the weak and those who naively think that everyone is abiding by it - obviously, Xiao Lin doesn't want to be such a person.
It's a pity that Banker in the film is such a person. If Xiaolin's single-parent family is considered to be well-off, Bank's family is struggling with food and clothing. He had to help his overworked mother run the old laundromat, doing laundry and deliveries. A stubborn boy from a poor family, apart from studying hard, it is difficult to have a way to change his destiny.
At the same time, the sense of justice in Bank's heart led him to report Xiaolin for helping his classmates cheat - although the school's strict punishment was not what he wanted. However, such a diligent boy eventually fell completely under the multiple blows of poverty and bad luck. The depth and complexity of the film is reflected in Banker's transformation.
The impoverished families represented by Bank and Xiao Lin are in stark contrast to their wealthy classmates who often buy luxury cars and have parties. The gap between people can be so sharply differentiated on campus. At this point, "Genius Gunner" has thrown a thorny question: Can money buy everything?
In the film, money can make the rich get a qualified transcript, an admission letter from a famous foreign school, or the privilege of knowing the law and breaking the law and getting away with it. What Xiao Lin didn't realize was that, being a poor person and not fighting against the poor, she was actually helping the rich to be more reckless and domineering. She is well aware of the helplessness of poverty, and hates hateful money grabbers (such as school sponsorship fees). She got deeper and deeper into cheating, but she betrayed her original intention, hurt the fairness of talent selection, and invisibly contributed to the success of the rich.
With the planning and advancement of cheating, the crisis began to emerge one by one. Xiao Lin was horrified to find that the progress of the situation was bit by bit, and finally completely deviated from her expectations. Before, she just wanted to use her ingenuity to make money smartly, but now she has lost herself in an out-of-control situation.
One severe moral torture after another began to appear in front of her. For example, she discovered that her best friend Grace had developed a bad habit of being infinitely dependent on her, and even offered her to go to the United States with her to help her pass the exam. The scary thing is that in the future, Grace will have to think about things big and small. After she got a lot of things that shouldn't belong to her without any effort, not only did she not blame herself, but it even worsened; another example, the rich second generation hired someone to injure Bank in order to let Bank join his cheating team. Lost the scholarship and was forced to rely on cheating to earn tuition. Bank's retaliation for this was to extort an additional 1 million yuan in compensation before sending out the answer.
Every time, Xiao Lin felt that the bottom line in her heart was violently attacked. But what can she do? to correct them? How does one cheater qualify to accuse another cheater? There is no fundamental difference in what they do.
The opportunity that made Xiaolin decide to turn herself in was when she witnessed the changes that happened to Bank with grief: Banker was exposed for cheating, and after being expelled from school, he threatened Xiaolin to join his new cheating gang, otherwise she would report him. Xiaolin looked at Bank hard, and the current Bank was a world away from the kind, hard-working, and strong genius boy she had made friends with back then.
Xiaolin finally realized that the seriousness of cheating was never fully manifested in a single exam; any small evil, if not stopped in time, would inevitably develop into a big evil, which would destroy an upright person. Xiaolin never wanted to be a moral defender, but she wanted to be a person with a worthy heart. She couldn't watch more and more good kids like Banker get distorted beyond recognition by money; she couldn't let those who thought they were helping their friends, but ended up hurting them or even ruining them, continued to be obsessed, and they were wrong. The film hints that Xiaolin wants to punish herself who directly caused all these tragic consequences.
As mentioned at the beginning, "Genius Gunner" is a movie with three wrong views. At the end, with Xiao Lin taking the initiative to tell the truth, the theme of the film finally "gets on the right track". However, unlike many movies that deliberately create bright endings in order to please the audience to cater to mainstream values, the screenwriter of "Genius Gunslinger" has fully and delicately paved the way for the transformation of the heroine Xiaolin.
First of all, the difficulty of avoiding invigilation in the exam room was a huge physical and mental burden for even the genius Xiao Lin, and no one would enjoy suffering in fear. This bad feeling overwhelmed Xiao Lin after she went to Sydney to cheat, and became her psychological motivation to give up.
Then, the continuous extension of the gray interest chain of cheating has affected innocent people, causing them to lose their senses in the face of huge profits and degenerate themselves. Banker, who used to be so resolute against cheating, turned into a fanatical initiator of paid cheating, and used the means of coercion and inducement in a sophisticated and vicious manner. Xiaolin wants to completely cut off the claws that are holding her, and she can only expose all this bravely as a party.
The audio-visual effects of "Genius Gunslinger" are excellent. The close-up of the sweat on the forehead, the slow-motion presentation when the time is pressing, and the fast and intense background music all make the tense atmosphere of the examination room feel like being there. More importantly, its success can give film practitioners in developing countries an important inspiration: how to make new ideas and surprises in the subject of daily life, and at the same time reflect and criticize the reality. Of course, if the cheating is only made refreshing, then the film will lose many memorable details. What is valuable is that "Genius Gunner" also brings a wealth of subtext for interpretation.
For example, when Xiaolin was tutoring Grace in math and wanted to help her pass the exam, Grace called her "Mr. Xiaolin" for the first time; and when she came back from the Sydney exam room cheating, Grace held up a "Welcome Teacher Xiaolin" ” of the pick-up card. When Xiao Lin was asked why she wanted to be a teacher during the interview, she found that she absurdly understood "teacher" as a synonym for sanctimoniousness. She undoubtedly hates teachers like the principal, but she actively moves towards her (cheating) in action (lie about charging sponsorship fees). She allows herself to be infiltrated by the ugliness of the adult world, but she sees depravity as growing up. It's ironic that someone can turn into someone she hates in a blink of an eye.
The name of the factory set up by the protagonists to manufacture cheating pencils is called "honesty", which is another irony - the more illegal activities you do, the more you have to shout a high-sounding slogan to cover it up. The unhealthy ethos of society, one set out in the open and another in the dark, has been imitated by a group of children in such a way that it is both clumsy and in place.
The most thought-provoking thing about "The Genius Gunner" is the terrifying slide in humanity it presents. Those who have told a lie often have to tell countless lies to make up for it; those who have done one wrong thing often have to do more wrong things to cover it up. The cheating at first was probably just a fluke. After that, cheating gradually evolved into a conspiracy of laziness and greed. People fantasize about getting something for nothing, wanting to break the rules and avoid punishment, and once their little ingenuity succeeds, they don't just quit, but become more ambitious. The children in the film are not in control, and who can guarantee that adults will stick to their principles in the same situation? Therefore, "Genius Gunner" has used the campus and examination room to reflect and reflect the entire society, and imagined for the audience a kind of deviant behavior that is very likely to be staged and will continue to be staged around us.
It is hard to imagine that a story that takes place on campus can be so thrilling. It calmly shows us the issues of social integrity, the gap between the rich and the poor, and the unspoken rules of cheating through exams. It will become a frame of reference every time people try to achieve their goals by improper means, warning us that temporary flukes can mutate into endless greed and eat us back. Cheating is wrong, it cannot be forgiven and it cannot be tolerated. Perhaps what "Genius Gunner" really wants to reveal to the audience is that in a society where deception and self-deception are prevalent, the adherence to the bottom line has changed from the original minimum requirement to the highest pursuit.
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