◎Han Siqi
The "Basic Law of Genius", adapted from Chang'er's novel of the same name, ended in the "spreading shouts" between fans of the original book, star fans and drama fans. Is it a "magic change"?
The one-star party of the original novel made a heartfelt complaint: "IP adaptation also needs to talk about the Basic Law!" Their request is not to copy and restore: "Fiction and film and television works are expressed in very different forms and ways, and appropriate adjustments and adaptations are necessary." "But the most basic thing is that a story must be logical, the relationship between characters must be logical, the behavior of the characters must be logical, and the emotions of the characters must be logical!" - I think the adaptation logic after adaptation is not smooth.
"Is the original idea bad? Is the logic not smooth? Are the characters not full? Do you really understand the screenwriter?" - Or think that the adaptation has reduced the thickness, three-dimensionality and complexity of the original story .
The five-star supporters on the other side resolutely defended the "independence" of film and television adaptations: "Indeed, compared with the original, it has changed a lot, and even some basic settings such as the way of crossing, the purpose, the number of people, etc. have also been changed, but its The changes are logical. It is entirely possible to separate the original work from the play, or view the play as a fan work that borrows some settings.”
The controversial "table" seems to be a question of reduction degree-whether it is faithful to the original work, and further, whether it accurately grasps the "core" of Chang'er's original novel.
So what is this "nucleus"?
The story of the Basic Law of Genius is actually not complicated.
The young girl Lin Zhaoxi lived under the shadow of her father Lin Zhaosheng and her first love, Pei Zhi, two math geniuses. She buried her love for mathematics for a while, until she experienced a dual time and space journey. With the guidance of her father Lao Lin and the help of Pei Zhi, she recovered Faith, fight side by side with your partners, and do your best to pursue truth and love.
Although it involves the setting of parallel time and space and time-travel, the setting of time-travel is far less brain-burning than the mathematical problem solving in the novel. The traversal medium of the Basic Law of Genius is to paint the mathematical formula E=mc2 on the wall.
The comparison of the two parallel time and space is also cutely referred to as the strawberry world and the cheese world. Among them, the strawberry world is the real world, and the cheese world is the parallel world that the heroine Lin Chaoxi has traveled to three times.
As the first protagonist of the "Basic Law of Genius", Lin Chaoxi is not a "genius" in the sense of innate talent - the benefits of hard work are much higher than those of ordinary people.
But in her life, her father, Lao Lin, and her crush, Pei Zhi, were out-and-out math geniuses. After years of close dimensionality reduction, her "general excellence" was set off like a "earth talent". Lin Chaoxi has lost the ruler for correct measurement and objective evaluation of self-achievement and value.
So at the beginning of the story, she swayed in the choice between lying flat and being mediocre, or insisting but painful.
If you are not gifted, do you still have to persevere?
If you are a gifted person, will you be able to avoid all the troubles and misfortunes in your life?
Three times of travel, two time and space, through the key of the mass-energy equation, Lin Chaoxi's entanglement and contradiction were intuitively translated into three questions by the author:
"Should I hold on to something that I thought about giving up but didn't really want to give up?"
"How does an ordinary person with an average IQ achieve genius?"
"How do we answer our own life?"
From knowing the self to dealing with the relationship between the self and the world.
In the framework of the "Basic Law of Genius", genius requires "consistent efforts and a life without slack."
Ordinary people, if they want to achieve genius, probably have to face their uneasiness, confront them again and again, lose less and win, and rely on the accumulation of winning percentages to bring about changes in the end.
Even geniuses like Lao Lin and Pei Zhi, their life experiences show that there are still propositions that genius cannot handle.
The ability of IQ may be transformed into a "knowledgeable home", and then have some capital to resist the risks of life uncertainty. However, in the face of the random number of fate, they will not necessarily experience less sparring than ordinary people, not necessarily You can avoid bad luck, but you may not be able to avoid lifelong regrets.
What can hedge against bad luck is not IQ, but happiness and pure ideals found in research.
This kind of "belief" is the most solid "core" of the "Basic Law of Genius": one can devote 100% to one's faith, be impassioned, and run through one's life from beginning to end. Life seems to have a main line and a central axis.
Therefore, rather than discussing the feasibility of "traveling" in a hard-core way, the novel "Basic Law of Genius" is more about if people can exchange the parameters of the external world like a save file in a game, in the choice of strawberry flavor and In the comparison of cheese flavors, "Every choice a person thinks will create a different world. Just like buying a cake, strawberry flavor and cheese flavor, each choice will have a different development." The novel allows Lin Chaoxi to complete the "growth" ", is not a "male frequency cool article"-style upgrade script, nor is it just to make up for regrets and realize a dream, but a reconciliation with oneself - even if "early talent" does not matter?
You can also find "self" in love and complete growth.
This involves the "li" of the huge difference between book fans and drama fans-the different understandings of the temperament of the novel "Basic Law of Genius", which in turn affects how the director cuts out characters and collages stories.
Director Shen Yan once explained his reason for changing the plot: "The time-travel life is a cheating life. The best part of all time-travel novels and time-travel dramas is that you use the cheating thing to change the world. People, Always face the real world." Indeed, this statement is certainly true.
But it can also be seen that the director understands time-travel in this way, and still looks at time-travel under a typical "male frequency cool text" thinking - time-travel is an illusory victory achieved by impossible tools, and furthermore Conscious judgment is an escape from reality.
But the problem is precisely here, the director failed to really understand the meaning of setting up parallel time and space in "Basic Law of Genius".
If the meaning of cheese-flavored choice is only understood as a "cheating device" in life, then the self-talk that Lin Chaoxi completed between the two worlds and her active choice are naturally covered with a hint of "escape". color.
The legitimacy of the role built on this underlying logic, Lin Chaoxi's motive for transmigration is not to fulfill herself, but to care about the people she cares about. Her personal efforts are more like a series of coincidences.
Therefore, the subject of the story of the "Basic Law of Genius" is subtly changed from Lin Chaoxi to Lin Chaoxi under the guidance of Lao Lin and Pei Zhi.
From her stubbornness and persistence in novels to her swaying image of compromising with reality, she has been adapted into a rebellious and decadent tool person in film and television dramas who needs to be guided.
And Zhang Zifeng's performance, together with her image of "national daughter" in the media, makes the drama version of Lin Chaoxi appear as a girl in the rebellious period before the college entrance examination, which is not much different from the temperament of the family ethics drama next door.
In particular, in line with this kind of change in character settings, the following plots have added a line of family and love that is not light, so that the high concept and fantasy settings of the original work are finally grafted on the family ethics type.
In other words, the plots of these life streams eventually dilute those profound discussions about personal paths and life choices.
Such a mixed operation may be out of the consideration of winning over a wider audience and grabbing audiences from romance dramas, and it also has the ambition to hedge risks.
Netflix allows genres to find its audience, uses algorithmic recommendations to do a good job in user subscription and retention, and balances the risks of blockbusters and ordinary dramas by diversifying investment.
If only fans of the show pay for the adaptation of the "Basic Law of Genius", it does not mean that the audience's acceptance has improved, but it can only prove that the absolute number of people watching the show is decreasing.
Expanding the audience plate is never a mechanical addition problem: one more element means more audiences. On the contrary, the strategy of "want to take all" is likely to flatten a high-quality IP into a mediocre and homogeneous one. "Followable Drama".