The "minimalist" "Fall" that broke through the barriers of adventure films and thrillers is really high
The young girls Hunter and Becky met to climb a 610-meter-high abandoned TV tower, but they couldn't come down after going up.
Last Friday, a "minimalist" thriller "The Fall" was released in mainland theaters in terms of characters, scenes and plots. It got a high score of 7.2 on Douban, higher than 87% of thrillers and 81% of adventures. piece.
During 106 minutes, the theater audience and the girl in the film were "trapped" in a small space in the sky, experiencing the ultimate psychological process of self-help in despair.
The warning "Watch with caution for people with fear of heights" is printed directly on the main poster of the film, but this undoubtedly gives more audiences a reason to enter the theater.
For a long time, thrillers have been the rigid needs of theater audiences, and they are also a "cost-effective choice" for small-budget movies to fight big.
And the advent of the high-altitude movie "Falling" with adventure elements has broadened the connotation of thrillers, a genre that is widely loved by audiences.
horror film?
Adventure movie?
The main characters in The Fall are Becky and Hunter.
During a mountaineering exercise, Becky lost her lover and never recovered.
In order to regain her courage, her friend Hunter invited her to climb the TV tower together.
The TV tower in the film has been in disrepair for a long time and is crumbling. This caused the only escape ladder to fall shortly after the two climbed up.
But because of the setting of "extreme sports enthusiasts surpass themselves", the starting point of the story is fundamentally different from the routine of "you will not die if you don't do it" in previous thrillers.
This is what makes "The Fall" different from most thrillers: it is actually a thriller based on an adventure film, and the degree of horror is directly proportional to the degree of adventure.
In the film, the parts of the tower that are constantly falling off, the surrounding environment is desolate, the mobile phone with no signal and the vultures circling above the head are all pushing the adventure level of the characters to the peak step by step.
There is no need to deliberately create horror plots like previous horror movies. The two girls in "Falling" only need to move slightly occasionally, which is enough to scare all the audience in the theater into a cold sweat.
Stephen King expressed his love for "The Fall": "I wish I wrote this movie." The American "King of Horror Fiction" has often depicted human psychology in extreme situations in his past works. But he still thinks The Fall is "very scary".
Small cost, how to shoot?
The production of "Falling" cost $3 million, which is considered a low-cost production among commercial films.
After the film was released in North America in August, it earned a box office of 7.2 million US dollars. Later, its cumulative box office worldwide exceeded 16 million US dollars, becoming a model of fighting big with small things.
For the shocking audience in the theater, their biggest confusion is: How did such a frightening high-altitude scene be filmed?
The answer is: special effects plus real shots.
The abandoned TV tower B67 in the film refers to the fourth tallest building in the United States - the 625-meter-high KXTV/KOVR TV tower in California.
In actual shooting, although the actors do not really have to climb the 610-meter-high TV tower, they also have to shoot on the top of the 30-meter-high TV tower built by the crew - the latter is built on a 600-meter-high cliff , so that both the actors and the audience can really feel the towering vertigo.
The actor Grace Caroline, who played Becky, said that she often felt a "dropping feeling" in her stomach because of excessive fear during filming.
Film director Scott Mann believes that thrillers must stick to real shooting, because "audiences want to see us play for real."
Because the two actors were far away from the ground during the real shooting, the director could not guide from the side, so Scott Mann chose to build a device with the same size as the top platform of the tower in his backyard in advance, and explored with the actors, in such a small place , how they sit and sleep.
There are surprises, there are loopholes
On Douban, 56% of the audience gave "The Fall" a favorable rating, more than half of the people who rated it.
People praised the immersive feeling brought by its audio-visual effects: "I would like to call it a weight-loss film. After watching it, I consumed 800 calories." Tons of adrenaline." "At first I watched it from a chair, then after I started climbing the tower I watched it sitting on the floor."
Some viewers also pointed out various unreasonable details in the film.
For example, at an altitude of up to 610 meters, there are no shelters around, and the two heroines should encounter strong winds, instead of sitting firmly as in the film.
For another example, the girls' mobile phones have been turned on for three days - many viewers pointed out that this is unreasonable. Based on their experience with this brand of mobile phones, such battery life seems a bit exaggerated.
The reverse ending of the film is undoubtedly the guarantee for this low-cost thriller to completely get rid of the risk of bad movies.
In the past, thrillers have usually had a twist at the end, but it's basically a "you think it's over, but it's not" routine.
The reversal of "The Fall" is not like this. The reversal is not only in the plot, but also in emotion, which allows people to finally walk out of the high sense of reality of the plot and bathe in the sunshine of humanity.
At the same time, this reversal also makes people truly realize what the truth is about what they saw before—it is this frightening ending that makes "The Fall" truly an undeniable novel. Doubtful thriller.
From adventure to thriller
For a long time, the thriller routines were the same and the quality was not high.
Although theater-level audio-visual equipment can amplify sensory stimulation, there are still few thrillers that make people feel "worth the ticket price" after watching them.
"Falling" allows people to see the possibility of thrillers getting rid of the suspended plot, that is, to fully mobilize the audience's senses with a sense of reality.
Before it, a group of adventure genre films of the same theme had been explored for more than 20 years.
It can be said that "The Fall" successfully broke through the genre barriers of adventure films and thrillers and became popular in 2022, standing on the shoulders of its predecessors.
The plot of "Vertical Limit" in 2000 is quite similar to "Falling". It also takes mountaineering enthusiasts as the protagonists, and the emotional entry point is also the protagonist's psychological barrier caused by the loss of a loved one.
In the story, Peter's father resolutely chooses to cut the rope in order to save his son during a mountaineering, and falls to his death from a cliff.
Since then, Peter has given up his mountaineering career and broke up with his sister, who is also a mountaineer.
Later, my sister was in danger when challenging the K2 peak at the western foot of the Himalayas. The whole team was trapped in the cave on the peak. Due to the shortage of food and medicine, their lives were in danger.
In order to rescue his sister, Peter had to climb the Himalayas again to face the challenges of natural limits and his own demons.
"127 Hours" in 2010 is closer to the minimalism of "The Fall" in terms of character and plot design.
This movie is completely based on real events: In May 2003, American mountaineering enthusiast Alan Ruston was trapped for 5 days and 5 nights because his right arm was crushed by a stone while climbing in a canyon in Utah.
In order to escape, he endured severe pain and spent more than an hour breaking the radius and ulna successively, using his sports shorts as a temporary tourniquet, and then cutting off his right forearm abruptly from the elbow with a knife.
After escaping from the rock, in order to save time with blood loss, he climbed through the narrow and windy canyon with superhuman perseverance, descended to the bottom of the 60-foot-deep canyon by rope, and met the rescuers after walking 5 miles, and finally survived.
"Walking in the Clouds" in 2015, like "Falling", achieved the ultimate in dizzying heights.
The film is adapted from the personal autobiography of French acrobatic artist Philippe Pater, telling the story of him overcoming various doubts and walking the tightrope between the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York.
Although many viewers commented that only the last 20 minutes of the film's 123 minutes are the most worthwhile, seeing the spectacle of "walking in the clouds" at an altitude of 412 meters still makes most viewers satisfied.
The 2018 "Freehand Rock Climbing" showed the whole process of climber Alex Honnold's freehand climbing of El Capitan without ropes.
Although this is a documentary, it also caused many viewers to "complain": "fear of heights" after watching it.
(Yangcheng Evening News reporter Li Li)
(Source: Yangcheng Evening News November 23, 2022 Edition: A10)