8/28/2023 0 Comments Wu jing wu you![]() While past patriotic films often focused on war strategies and the collective wisdom of the party leadership, Wu, counting Die Hard, Top Gun, and True Lies as inspirations, told similar stories with extravagant action scenes and Hollywood-style individual heroism. ![]() But it was not until the massive success of Wolf Warrior II that Wu established himself as a Chinese superhero. Wu, a Beijing native, started his entertainment career as a martial arts actor in the late ‘90s, taking on TV roles similar to those played by kung fu star Jet Li. “It’s a sweet spot in the Chinese market that the films can be approved by regulators to a degree, but they also are appealing to audiences.” “Wu Jing represents a particular muscular, nationalist vision of the party state that is acceptable to the party,” said Aynne Kokas, an expert on Chinese cinema with the University of Virginia. Wu has carved out a path in the tightly controlled film industry, not by pushing political boundaries but by creating excitement out of the party’s ideology. Nomadland director Chloe Zhao’s Oscar win was censored on the Chinese internet following controversy over Zhao’s political stance, even though Nomadland was once approved for release. Not a single South Korean movie was shown in China between 20, as Beijing and Seoul were having a fallout over the installation of a U.S. Every work needs to pass stringent censorship, while the number of foreign films is capped at 34 every year. The Chinese government has tight control over what gets shown on the country’s 80,000 movie screens. As the party imposes increasingly conservative ideology to stamp out subversive voices, Wu, with his old-school masculinity and patriotism, gets to dominate a cultural space that is becoming more detached from the rest of the world. We should not always wait for the white heroes to save us.”īut the colossal success of the 47-year-old and the military-action genre he spearheaded comes at the cost of what could be a more diverse Chinese cinema. ![]() “We have seen so many American superheroes, and we need a Chinese hero on the screen. “He really captures this new nationalist sentiment,” said Xiaoning Lu, a Chinese film expert with the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. While much of China’s entertainment industry is struggling to meet the young generation’s craving for excitement while toeing the Communist Party line, Wu has found a way to do both by positioning himself as an embodiment of a China that is increasingly assertive, confident, and influential-just like how white male heroes have been portrayed in Hollywood blockbusters. At a recent event, Jackie Chan joked that Wu’s four recent films had raked in as much revenue as the kung fu legend himself made over the past decades. Out of the five top-grossing films in the history of Chinese cinema, three starred Wu. ![]() #WuJingdefeatsWuJing trended on social media. At home, the three-hour long war epic in November surpassed Wu’s own Wolf Warrior II to become China’s highest-grossing film ever. Globally, its nearly $900 million box office revenues dwarfed those of Dune, No Time to Die, and Shang-Chi. Fed on frozen potatoes but possessing extraordinary determination, strategy, and a will to sacrifice for their country, the Chinese soldiers were able to defeat the American troops, who were equipped with advanced jets, tanks, coffee, and Thanksgiving turkey. In the latest blockbuster The Battle at Lake Changjin, so far the world’s top grossing film of 2021, Wu’s character fought brutal battles with the U.S.-led United Nations troops in the 1950-53 Korean War. His characters had fearlessly protected the Chinese borderland from a foreign drug lord, embarked on a one-man mission to rescue Chinese nationals from unrest in Africa, and, in China’s first sci-fi epic Wandering Earth, helped save humankind from annihilation. Disappointed by a shortage of macho figures in Chinese cinema, Wu decided to be that man himself.
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