Why Nezha 2 Does NOT Deserve its 15 billion RMB Box Office
The most popular topic in China during Chinese New Year must be the new movie “Nezha 2”, I also went to watch it, I have to say it isn’t a bad movie, but it definitely isn’t that good. 15 billion RMB box office is totally insane, Shen Teng spent years in acting to become an act in a number of movies with a total 10 billion RMB. This phenomenon doesn’t let me feel that Chinese animation is thriving, but only shows that Chinese people are easily manipulated, have too much money to spend, which kinda means inflation of the economy.
What really is annoying is not the movie itself, although the movie has a lot of flaws, including laugh on poop and pee, and some very awkward lines, I wouldn’t regard it as total trash. The thing that really pisses most people off is the swarming of people praising Nezha 2 and forcing everyone to watch it. People are taking it on national level, saying that “we are not rising the rank of Nezha 2 on the box office ranking, we are rising our country’s flag”, which is very dumb and funny. Stats have shown that 99% of the box office of Nezha 2 comes from China, however, for another great movie “Avatar”, only 22% of the box office came from America itself, which shows that the box office of Nezha 2 is a total self-revelry of Chinese people. It’s just a bunch of people who don’t have any money themselves giving money to another company. Therefore, the high box office of Nezha 2 represents nothing but how Chinese people habitually like to compete with useless things and their super self-centered nature.
Comparing the central theme of Nezha2, I don’t think it is really innovative, it’s just really similar to Nezha1. Other high office box movies are very innovative in their fields, such as Avatar, Inside-out and Frozen. Some characters such as common villagers and Madam Yin just seem to be a tool for Nezha to wake up and fight the villains. I couldn’t see any sense of education or maturity of Nezha in this movie, he’s just like a naughty boy and suddenly stimulated to kill the dragons because he thought his family died. But his family did not die and he did not have any apologies or compensation to others, which makes this character very selfish and immature. I didn’t see any difference of Nezha from the first movie, therefore I think Nezha 2 is a meaningless movie to watch.
A lot of people are being sarcastic that the trend now is telling them that you are not Chinese if you do not watch Nezha2, it is true that when a movie becomes too popular people start to put nationalism onto it, which is truly annoying to all of us. I watched “Farewell my concubine” the night after I watched Nezha 2, and I finally realized why people call it the best movie in China. The movie really reflects the suffering of people during that period by depicting a story of 2 actors, how they thrived as stars and fell to prisoners. It was 3 hours long but I never found it boring, there were so many details to discuss about, that is why for more than 30 years, people still like analyzing it again and again. That is when I knew Nezha is not the top of the Chinese film industry, and will never become the top of the movie industry.