Chapter 227: Chapter 227 - Justice is Worse than Evil
Just when "Sky Dragon Troopers" was rushing to shoot the last harbor container battle scene, something big happened in Hollywood. Australian actor Heath Ledger, who starred in Brokeback Mountain, died suddenly in his apartment in Manhattan, New York, and police say the cause of his death may have been an overdose.
The cast and crew had been working overtime for the last week to catch up on filming in order to finish the movie on schedule. Although Heath Ledger's death has been widely rumored in Hollywood, Lin Mingyang was not informed of it at the first time.
By the time he read the news on the Internet, there were already many versions of Heath Ledger's death: some people said that Heath Ledger committed suicide, because before he died, he had said that "his life continues in his daughter, so he can die without fear"; because Heath Ledger's death was due to an overdose of medication, and some people suspected that his death was related to drugs; some people even suggested that he had killed himself. Some people even put forward the hypothesis of homicide, but Heath Ledger died naked, the police to initially rule out the possibility of homicide.
Lin Mingyang and Heath Ledger could not even talk about acquaintance, Heath Ledger's death did not have much impact on him. In addition to expressing regret regret, Lin Ming Yang did not pay too much attention to this matter, until Ecks personally ran a crew for this matter, Lin Ming Yang then realized that things are a little different from what he thought.
"Heath Ledger is dead, you should already know about this, right?"
Lin Ming Yang did have "thoughts" about this matter, but not about Heath Ledger, "As an actor, I don't think the number of times Heath Ledger hit the headlines of the newspapers during his lifetime combined was as concentrated as the last few days after his death...I'm not saying this because I'm trying to satirize a soul who has also passed away, it's just that the Hollywood media seems to be far more interested in the dead than the living, and the media has fallen so far these days that they've lost even their basic sense of humanity!"
Ecks sighed softly, "The ethics of the media is not the topic I want to discuss with you today..."
Lin Ming Yang asked in disbelief, "Then do you think I should send a wreath to Heath Ledger like other Hollywood company bosses do, and then hypocritically state in front of the media that it's a great loss for Hollywood that a great actor has left us like this...I would never do that because that would be both an insult to the deceased, and also to an insult to myself, and God knows I didn't even know Heath Ledger, so what does his death have to do with me?"
"Maybe not before, but things have changed a bit..." said Ecks with a preoccupied look.
Lin Ming Yang was confused by this odd expression of his, "What's going on?"
"Heath Ledger was preparing to star in a movie before he died, and now the cast had to be temporarily replaced, and it just so happens that the director of that movie is a good friend of mine, and he asked me for help, so..." said Ecks with some hesitation.
Lin Ming Yang's eyes widened, "So you're going to let me take over a dead man's job?"
Ecks stood up and waved his hand at him, "Don't get excited yet, I know that with your current status, you can be completely dismissive of a role like that, this is just a personal request from me... and there's one thing I have to tell you, that role is just a supporting role!"
Lin Ming Yang's face didn't show a disdainful expression like Ecks had imagined, but instead became grave: "Well, even though you're no longer the agent, I'm sure you wouldn't find a supporting role for me to play for no reason. Tell me, what kind of role is that?"
Ecks looked at Lin Ming Yang with joy, his eyes unable to hide his excitement and thrill, "You're really willing to consider a role?"
Lin Ming Yang shrugged, "Provided that role is attractive enough."
Ecks was overjoyed as he introduced himself, "This role will definitely be an unprecedented experience for you, I'm certain you've never tried this type of role before!"
"Is that so?" Ecks' statement made Lin Mingyang wonder a bit.
"Of course!" Ecks looked at Lin Ming Yang with conviction, "I know you've acted in quite a few roles, but you've never starred as a villain in a movie... Although it's the 'bad guy' in the movie, I guarantee that this role is no worse than the protagonist in the movie, and in a movie with a strong dark style, such a character will often have a more colorful performance!"
Lin Ming Yang wasn't fooled by Ecks, and seeing that Ecks still had the intention to continue, he hastily made a gesture of stopping: "Alright, just tell me straight out what you want me to act in...as for how this role is, I'll make my own judgment!"
Ecks looked at Lin Ming Yang with a "grimace" on his face and deliberately left a suspenseful note when he finally announced the result, "Ever since you appeared in Spider-Man and Iron Man, you've practically become Marvel Comics' film and television agent, and this time, your opponent is from DC Comics, and it's not a small one! ...He's the patriarch of comic book movie adaptations, and by far the one whose comic book characters have been adapted into movies the most times."
Lin Mingyang took a single guess: "You're talking about Batman?"
Ecks didn't continue to sell the story, "To be precise, it's the Batman prequel."
Lin Ming Yang gave Ecks an unsuspecting look, "You actually know Christopher Nolan?"
"You know him too?" Ecks was a bit puzzled, because it wasn't hard to hear from Lin Ming Yang's tone that he appreciated Christopher Nolan, but the fact that Christopher Nolan wasn't considered a superb Hollywood director right now, and that Lin Ming Yang's status was different now, and that he was evaluating a director with such a tone of voice and attitude, Ecks was instantly puzzled.
Can't blame Eckles for being suspicious, compared to those famous directors, Christopher Nolan's first real movie - the ultra-low-budget The Following - was only released in London in 1999. Like many directors with humble beginnings, this rough-hewn debut film brought Nolan great success and prestige at that year's festivals, and its charismatic filmmaking and unparalleled inspiration and talent catapulted Nolan's career into a fast and furious growth spurt.
In this black-and-white film of less than 70 minutes, Nolan uses flashbacks as the basic narrative language of the movie, and then builds on the flashbacks by completely knocking time out of shape and then pasting these pieces of time together, giving the movie, which is less than 70 minutes, an incredible length. Because the participants were all full-time workers, they could only get together every Saturday to shoot a 15-minute film, and it took a whole year to complete the movie. For all of these reasons, The Following has been described as a "cool black-and-white movie with young dreams and ambitions".
The Following was undoubtedly a very low budget movie, costing only about $6,000. If it were in the United States, this sort of thing simply wouldn't have been possible for anyone - as the movie is shot in a very Hollywood style. Nolan established his style of filmmaking with this sensibility, which was later reinforced by the success of "Fragments of Memory".
You could say that The Following paved the way for Pieces of Memory. After The Following was filmed and submitted to film festivals, Nolan began work on Fragments of Memory. The film, which is structured as one of those non-chronological flashbacks, grossed $26 million at the U.S. box office. In fact, Nolan and his friends had received advance projections from sales agents that a film of this type would be considered a high grosser if it could sell $4 to $5 million.
Compared to the so-called big-name directors who spend money lavishly or even profligately, Hollywood film distributors are now more and more inclined to those directors who can "save money" and still make good movies, and new directors like Christopher Nolan, who can "make a big movie out of a small one," have become more and more popular in Hollywood. The new director like Christopher Nolan, who "makes a big difference with a small amount of money", soon entered the sights of the major Hollywood movie studios.
Although with "Fragments of Memory", "White Night Chase" and other such psychological thrillers established Christopher Nolan's status as an up-and-coming director and a very keen sense of character and super-confident directing style, Nolan, who is full of originality, has vowed to give the image of the past director a turnaround. His over-the-top imagination makes his inclusion in the movie "Batman: Riddle of the Shadow" the most surprising part of the movie. With an 86% approval rating from 35 critics, the movie scored even higher than the Star Wars prequel III, which swept the box office worldwide.
From this point of view, Christopher Nolan is undoubtedly a very promising director. His 2006 directorial work "Deadly Magic" once again won the hearts of critics and moviegoers with its eerie atmosphere and delicate structure, but despite the excellent acclaim he received from Hollywood critics, he is still not considered a "heavyweight" director in Hollywood. He is still not considered one of Hollywood's "heavyweight" directors, although he has received excellent acclaim from Hollywood critics.
It is not that Christopher Nolan's personal ability is insufficient, but under the evaluation system of Hollywood commercial movies, box office is the key to measure the success of a director. Christopher Nolan did make a lot of crowd-pleasing works, but all of these movies performed mediocrely at the box office. In contrast, although James Cameron has not seen a new film in 10 years, but people still remember him, the reason is still because he has created a lot of box office giant film, and "Titanic" created the box office myth, perhaps only he can break.
At least so far, Christopher Nolan couldn't afford to be held in such high regard by Lin Ming Yang, so Ecks was curious, but unfortunately Lin Ming Yang didn't tell him the answer.
It wasn't that Lin Ming Yang didn't want to say, but he couldn't. Lin Ming Yang wasn't going to go so far as to tell Eckles that Christopher Nolan would soon be able to make a blockbuster movie that would gross more than a billion dollars at the box office, and this movie was none other than Batman Prequel 2: The Dark Knight, which they were talking about right now.
Echolls met Christopher Nolan when Fragments of Memory was released in the U.S. At first he wanted to make Nolan his investment, but Christopher Nolan had his own ideas. Eckles helped Christopher Nolan a lot during that time, and then Eckles met Lin Mingyang, who had more "investment value", and although there was no possibility of financial cooperation, he and Christopher Nolan still kept in close contact. This time, Christopher Nolan opened his mouth to plead for help, and Eckles naturally hoped to help him convince Lin Mingyang.
"In this movie, Batman's opponent is the Joker, a highly intelligent criminal... Nolan promised me that if you're willing to star in this movie, the pay will be twice that of Batman's star Christian Bale, and as long as you're willing to do so, the Joker in Batman becomes the highest paid villain character in Hollywood. "
"I'm going to read the script first, and I'll make my decision after I've talked to Christopher Nolan himself!"
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Lin Ming Yang was still interested in the offer to play the role of the Joker, in his memory, Batman Prequel 2: The Dark Knight was the first comic book adaptation in Hollywood that grossed more than a billion dollars, but the movie was filmed almost half a year later than Lin Ming Yang's memory, and a lot of things changed because of it, and even though the director was still Christopher Nolan, Lin Ming Yang wasn't sure whether or not the plot was the what he remembered.
After getting the script, although he had been psychologically prepared beforehand, Lin Mingyang was still shocked by the seriousness of the plot of The Dark Knight.
Back in 2005, when he first saw Batman prequel: Time for War, Lin Mingyang was already very surprised by Nolan's realistic transformation of Batman. Now compared to the script of The Dark Knight in hand, The Hour of Reckoning would still be classified as a comic book movie. At least that film's Batman could still do some ninjutsu and destroy his enemies like a comic book hero; at least the villain, the League of Shadows, was an evil organization with a comic book feel; at least Gotham City at that time still had a little bit of a combination of reality and fiction.
And this time, the only remaining comic book colors in "The Hour of War" were completely abandoned by director Nolan. Judging from the script, The Dark Knight is a completely realistic crime movie, incredibly serious, incredibly dark, and even incredibly sad. In it Lin Mingyang can hardly see a bit of comic book: Batman has degenerated from a ninja with great martial arts skills to an ordinary man who just wears a bulletproof vest and has slightly better athletic ability, is no longer godlike, and gets injured more frequently; the villains are no longer a bunch of demons and monsters parachuted into the city; and Gotham City in the virtual world has completely metamorphosed into the real-life Chicago.
What takes Lin Mingyang's breath away is that, while abandoning almost all comic book elements, the Dark Knight plot's display of extreme evil and its exploration of the relationship between good and evil reaches heights never before seen in this kind of subject matter.
From the plot of The Dark Knight, Lin Mingyang sensed a déjà vu of the creative concept of putting superheroes back into reality and then giving people the opportunity to reflect on what the essence of a superhero is. In The New Spider-Man II, Lin Mingyang had borrowed the plot of the movie to discuss this issue with all the viewers. The proposition seems absurd at first glance, but the superhero here is no longer one of those idiosyncratic people who wear their underpants outside the body, underwear over their heads, or just underpants, but is abstracted into a symbol.
Lin had already hinted at this in the plot of The New Spider-Man II, and The Dark Knight builds on it again to further reinforce the idea of this proposition. On this proposition Lin Ming Yang and Christopher Nolan's ideas are basically the same, the essence of those superheroes is actually the ultimate justice beyond the constraints of the law.
Such a conclusion directly leads to the question: when comparing the ultimate evil and the unrestrained justice together, which one actually causes more damage to the society.
In "The New Spider-Man II" Lin Ming Yang only initially revealed his concern about this issue, but in "The Dark Knight", director Christopher Nolan directly puts this issue on the table for discussion.
Although Christopher Nolan didn't give a clear answer in this script, Lin Ming Yang felt that he had the same idea as himself, in most cases, justice that has lost its constraints is more terrifying than evil that has reached its peak.
The basic framework of a law-based society was to restrain evil with the law, and under this basic social system, the law was inherently designed to combat evil, so the law and the people under its protection had a natural ability to recognize and resist evil. Even when evil reaches its peak, there is still a legal system and the moral force of the people that naturally restrain and counteract it.
But justice is different. Because of its consistency with the law and the people's morality, justice has a more bewildering veneer than evil. Law and morality are far less wary of it than they are of evil. So when the man who holds the ultimate justice loses his self-restraint, the destructive power it produces can be even more terrible than the ultimate evil.
In a well-established society governed by the rule of law, almost all potentially destructive forces are restrained, balanced, and counteracted by the law, so that superheroes, who are supposed to be created to uphold social justice, instead become the weakest link in social justice. Superheroes have the ultimate power in their hands to mete out the ultimate justice. However, whether this power is abused or not is only bound by the moral power of the superheroes themselves.
In The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan devised a plot in which Batman's butler invents a device for Batman through which he can see holograms of the entire city of Gotham and listen in on cell phone conversations. Under Batman's strict moral self-discipline, the use of this device causes little evil. But even so, the butler who eventually invents the device worries about it, because the very use of the device is a red flag that extreme justice unencumbered by other constraints is slipping to the brink of spinning out of control. This episode carries a strong political metaphor.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government has expanded so rapidly that it has become more and more like a superhero with extreme justice in its hands, and its powers seem to be increasingly unfettered and uncontrolled. The U.S. government's control over security is reaching unprecedented levels, and security and freedom are always a contradiction. The American people have always had a freedom that is the envy of the world, and what is easily overlooked is that much of this freedom has come at the expense of their security. The American people are still paying that price, and most of them do so willingly.
But in the aftermath of 9/11, people's freedoms have been increasingly threatened by a variety of government measures aimed at security. There is a direct blueprint for reality in the script's detail of listening in on cell phone conversations. In the movie, Batman relies on his own moral self-discipline not to abuse this power, while in reality it is still doubtful that the increasingly superhero-like U.S. government can have such moral self-discipline.
In Lin Mingyang's opinion, extreme justice in the hands of the U.S. government has begun to spiral out of control and become a magnificent excuse for violating people's freedom and personal power. Even if it is not out of control, extreme justice cannot be used as a reason to violate people's freedom and personal power. If extreme justice must be carried out at the expense of violating individual freedoms and rights, then the raison d'être of such justice is very questionable.
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