First of all, I give it a ten because the score is way too low from what it really deserves.
This story looks like a cliche, childish legend that is simply moved into a modern framework. Well Hanson and the Beast contains many interesting, ignored, and even taboo subject matters in the modern Chinese society. One most obvious cynicism goes to the portray of the villain, Yun, who looks like a demon Hitler advocating pureblood against human intermarriage. However, if you look closely, his policy is more than for pureblood but for ideology control. That's it. The BOT is a metaphor of China's censorship bureau. They filter positive news outside the wall and spread negative rumors toward their imagined enemies. They prohibit interaction because it threatens their power legitimacy.
The human world is depicted as a place filling with "ignored those," of those who are often dismissed and not to mention in the official narratives. The protagonist is indebted; his father has been mentally mad and hospitalized, which is still a rarely-mentioned taboo in most Chinese families. He attends arranged-marriage meetings with new money, who got rich via the compensation payment for house demolition. He meets lesbians, who cannot come out of the closets, have to fake marriage, and must have to bred to fulfill their parents' wishes. Another gay hidden in the set is when Xiao Bai serves in a karaoke pub. The man does not act like a hacker at all. He is obviously a gay hesitating about his own orientation, and thus comes to find girls with his butterfly-demon sister. Both the indebted protagonist and his debater are ordinary extras holding dreams of becoming actors, the lowest layer in pyramid of film industry.
The film have two major fights, both of which adopt a satirical way to finish the conflicts between the week (protagonist's side) and the strong ones (BOT). The protagonist is an actor, and the film also highlights a reality-in-fake frame to conceal the conflicts. Actors and filmmakers apply their weapon-the ability to act and the knowledge of film- as the keys to escape, to sneak in, or to break out of the prison. The method is funny and kinda deconstructionism. Moreover, this is also a strategy that the film takes, that is, to use a satirical attitude against those tough social realities.
7 out of 7 found this helpful.
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