First of all, the core problem of "Eight Hundred" is not the so-called incitement to patriotism. We must understand this patriotism in a specific historical context. At the same time, this patriotism also needs to be distinguished from the extreme nationalism of "Wolf Warriors". . "Eight Hundred" is self-contradictory in terms of text, structure and theme, and finally leads to its ambiguous expression.
At the beginning of the film, the front and rear battlefields are established with the Suzhou River as the boundary. When the soldiers heard the singing of the businesswoman for the first time, they turned to the opposite bank and saw a half-naked foreigner man walking towards the singer. Chinese people have become objects of oppression and exploitation. From the very beginning of the film, it breaks the class attributes of both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and the inherent thinking of business girls who do not know the hatred of subjugation of the country. And Wang Qianyuan and Jiang Wu's obscene words to female students and their repeated mention of touching breasts and other words seem to be the objectification of women on the other side. Through the war, the expression of the establishment of a united front after the awakening of the consciousness of the family and the country was pulled back to the situation of singing the flowers of the backyard across the river.
Guan Hu showed a very tolerant patriotism most of the time. Whether it was deserters or even so-called traitors, they adopted a different approach from traditional anti-Japanese films. Plant the flag on Mount Fuji" monologue was broken. The film wants to show the weakness of human nature in a cruel environment through the establishment of deserter characters, but the director sets the deserter as a stereotyped person who is greedy for life and fear of death and timid as a mouse.
The paragraph of protecting the flag is a symbol of the establishment of the national consciousness in the film. In the early stage, there was a lack of a sense of ceremony. Why did you send the flag? Why did you choose a female student to send the flag? The lack of a sense of ceremony caused the audience to not cultivate the same sense of patriotism with the protagonist. , which subsequently led to the subsequent collapse across the board. Before the flag-sending paragraph, the film has always emphasized its apolitical nature, placing its perspective on the group portraits of the soldiers at the bottom, and even narrating it in a heroic style. Later, a higher-level perspective and a top-down perspective of the US were added, and the political nature of the war was emphasized. The last paragraph of crossing the bridge was even more ambiguous. In the case of emphasizing that the war was just a political show, emotions and perspectives The fatal problem, under the auspiciousness of the music, continues to be a heroic narrative from an external perspective, and finally loses its criticality and the creation of the tragic sense of the soldiers at the bottom.
Such a landscape battle is ambiguous, neither caring for the group-like figures, under the chaotic perspective, under the viewing and being viewed, nor a higher criticism and expression of condensing the two sides into a social picture, and finally In the wavering, it becomes a sensational narrative of the opposition between good and evil.
View more about The Eight Hundred reviews
