China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Critical triumph
Ash Is Purest White, Jia Zhangke’s latest film, to open in September
Sci-fi writer Liu Cixin has said on many occasions that he wanted to see his best-selling novel to date, The Three-Body Problem, portrayed on the big screen, or, preferably, as a TV drama adaptation.
Work on the movie version of the book — which is in fact the first volume of Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, but better known to Chinese readers as the title of the trilogy — began in March 2015, and the film was initially scheduled to be screened in 2016. But despite the high expectations of the Chinese moviegoing public, the release of the movie has been postponed several times since then, and is now not expected until 2019.
Many people, however, remain pessimistic about the quality of the movie, largely because China has so far never produced a successful scifi movie to match the quality of Hollywood offerings such as 2014’s Interstellar, 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even this year’s Annihilation, which was adapted from the 2015 Nebula Award winner that beat Liu’s Three-Body Problem.
For film director Li Xiaofeng, Chinese sci-fi movies will only be able to improve if the genre is more widely accepted by Chinese audiences and enters the mainstream, rather than attracting a relatively small number of followers as it does today.
Li, the director of Ne Zha and Ash, is now producing a movie adapted from Han Song’s short story, Cold War and Messenger. It is a sci-fi story about love and time shot against the backdrop of an interstellar Cold War set in the near future.
“Sci-fi films are to cinema as heavy industries are to industry in general,” he says. “Because for me, half of it is about manufacturing, such as the making of the miniatures in Blade Runner (1982) or the outfits that the 1.9-meter-tall Bolaji Badejo wears to play the alien in Alien (1979). It takes time and energy to achieve such craftsmanship.”
“According to my experience of filming in recent years, the different sections of China’s film industry are so loosely organized that it is very difficult to achieve the texture of ‘heavy industry’ in a movie,” he says.
“We still lag far behind the Hollywood in terms of conceptual design and adopting an efficient, well-organized approach to production in our movie industry.”
But Chinese high people levels aspire of to make great sci-fi films, Han Song says. One of the most popular sci-fi writers in the country today, Han’s works have won several major Chinese sci-fi awards including the Galaxy Award and the Xingyun Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction.
Mary Shelly completed the world’s first sci-fi novel, Frankenstein, in 1818. And for China, the three waves of sci-fi fever which began at the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and ran until 2006, when Liu Cixin started serializing his The Three-Body Problem trilogy in the periodical Science Fiction World and culminated in 2010 when the trilogy was published in book form, was not only a key turning point. It also appeared to predict the coming of the fourth wave of Chinese sci-fi, which Han describes as “unprecedented”.
He connects this fever, Liu’s success as the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award with the economic, social and scientific advancements in China.
“Why did the books appear in 2010? It was a special turning point in China’s history. It was the year when the first people born in the 1980s turned 30 years old. This generation is very different to all the previous ones. It was the year when Shanghai hosted the World Expo and China was open to the world, which I think matters more than the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games,” Han says.
Economically, China overtook Japan to become the world’s secondlargest economy in 2010. And, in the same year, China surpassed the United States for the first time to have the biggest output value of any manufacturing country in the world.
And a year later, and for the first time in China’s long history as an agricultural country, the urban population exceeded that of rural areas.
“All these mark the huge progress that China has made on its road to modernization,” Han says.
Since 2010, a huge amount of money has been invested in the science-fiction industry, which has now become prosperous. And Chinese people are more determined than ever to make a really great sci-fi film like Interstellar, Han says.
“Why? Because China is the country that has the most complete manufacturing chain in the world.” And sci-fi, the heavy industry of the film genre, can be seen as a symbol of the development of science and technology, especially in the cutting-edge fields such as developing space stations, car engines or microchips.
“You can see why we want to make a good sci-fi movie so much,” Han says.
“Like all literary reflects reality.”