From 731 to the Chinese Film Industry

I have not actually seen the film, but from the fragments floating around online I think I can roughly reconstruct what the original version must have looked like. If my guess is right, the female officer in the original cut was probably written as a Chinese character who gets softened, then washed clean, and finally turned into a heroic savior. It feels like the movie wanted to cash in on every kind of traffic all at once: patriotism, female empowerment, emotional identification, all of it. But when you piece those ingredients together, what you get is a film with its political weight badly tilted. Maybe that is why it was cut so heavily before release, to the point that the story barely seems coherent anymore. Even then it only just scraped past the line.

Commercially, though, it worked. Grab the opening-week attention first, then grab the backlash traffic, then let mindless support and overexcited “righteous” interpretations fuel another round of argument, and suddenly the film has eaten several waves of attention in a row. That is not a good sign. I do not personally care much about every little political tendency inside a film, but the aggressive sale of sentiment and constant over-marketing are exhausting enough on their own, especially when the actual quality is ugly.

To me that feels like a bad signal. Film is not supposed to be reduced to preaching or propaganda. Of course empathy and identification are indispensable parts of art, but when those emotions are pushed too deliberately, the whole thing starts to feel manipulative. Maybe I am oversensitive. Maybe other people really do cry at scenes that strike me as overly manufactured. I had the same feeling recently with a scene involving Yue Yunpeng in Detective Chinatown. That was the only movie I had watched in quite a while, and even then it had already been more than half a year since my previous theater visit. Plenty of viewers probably cried over his sacrifice. I just felt the scene was forcing the emotion too hard.

Honestly, I have not gone to the cinema much in recent years because it feels like there are fewer and fewer genuinely good films. Carefully polishing a script does not seem to be the main way movies make money anymore. The only recent film that left a strong impression on me was Deep Sea. It is one of the few movies I would actually want to revisit several times. I even told my parents to go watch it after I finished it myself, but reality rarely fits expectations: they did not even manage to sit through the whole thing.

What I keep wondering is this: why does every movie seem to need some grand Meaning now? Over the last few years it always feels like the same checklist. Patriotism. Anti-fraud messaging. Some kind of social lecture. But in the end a movie is still entertainment. It is still a work of art. A wuxia story can simply be exhilarating. Watching people fight can be enjoyable on its own. If you happen to learn something from it, that is a bonus. A family movie should feel like a family movie. A crowd-pleaser should simply be thrilling. What is wrong with that? People go to the cinema to feel something, to have fun, to be moved, to enjoy themselves. Who goes there to receive a moral lecture? Who buys a ticket hoping to be assigned homework, write eight hundred words of reflection, and then read it aloud afterward?

The more I think about it, the more it seems that film today keeps using these themes mainly as traffic bait, shaped to fit social media. Go back to that patriotic moment in Detective Chinatown. If you are like me, you might feel while watching the movie that the segment arrives too abruptly. But when that same slice is cut into a short video and pushed through social platforms, suddenly its length is perfect. That is the point. It was never really designed to feel smooth inside the film. The movie itself is just a one-shot transaction. Unless you are lucky enough to become a phenomenon like Ne Zha, most viewers only need to buy one ticket. So all the movie has to do is persuade them to show up once. In that logic, a scene can feel awkward in the theater yet still be excellent marketing material online. The moment it gets people through the door, the mission is complete.

That makes me think of the low-quality knockoff films that used misleading posters to trick audiences. It is the same mindset. Do not polish the script. Keep costs low. Come up with one effective promotional angle and squeeze it for cash. Some films are probably just money-laundering vehicles anyway. Under those conditions, who is going to obsess over screenwriting? Who is going to insist on acting quality? In the end the industry just keeps draining the remaining passion of people who still care about going to the cinema.

So does the film industry still have real value? Could it eventually become a niche hobby the way traditional theater has become for many people? I do not know. Maybe younger audiences will drift entirely toward short video. Maybe people like me will one day cling to a small handful of films the way older generations cling to a few beloved operas, replaying them over and over. Just as I do not fully understand the value older people find in certain kinds of theater, a future generation might not understand the slow, blurry emotional texture that long-form cinema can express.

PS: This is only a personal opinion, and probably a somewhat messy one. Some things are hard to explain clearly in fragments. Maybe I have already fallen behind the trend without fully noticing.