Original title: A large number of empty mirrors, dialogues and emotional blanks make the audience feel confused and uncomfortable (quote)
“Echo” does not sound, Feng Xiaogang suffers Waterloo again (theme)
Tonight News reporter Liu Guifang
From the anticipation before the broadcast to the mediocre response after the broadcast, the 13-episode web drama “Echo” directed by Feng Xiaogang is coming to an end. Since the show went live on March 16, its best score in the hot drama rankings is only fourth. From the word-of-mouth Waterloo of directing the first web drama “North Ruins to the South”, to the failure of “Echo” this time, is the golden sign “Feng Xiaogang” not working?
Under the banner of a suspense drama, “Echo” tells the story of a female detective who is deeply involved in a whirlpool of personal emotions while investigating a female corpse case. The play is adapted from the novel of the same name by writer Dong Dong. Feng Xiaogang specially invited the original author to write the script in order to make the script show the temperament of the original novel to the maximum extent. However, this approach, which was originally considered to be more helpful to the adaptation effect, brought the most fatal problem to the show because it retained the original structure of the novel.
The novel “Echo” is advanced according to the case line and emotional line. The odd-numbered chapters describe the reasoning and detection of the murder case by the heroine Ran Dongdong who is a policeman, and the even-numbered chapters describe the marital crisis between Ran Dongdong and her husband Mu Dafu. , until the last chapter the two lines merge. The author Dongxi said that the plot of one line is ups and downs, and the plot of the other line is almost static, but the characters on the two lines are turbulent in their hearts, and finally intertwined with each other in the reader’s reading, forming an “echo”.
Such a design is no problem for novels, because the imagination left by the text is unlimited, and the reading of the two lines will not interfere with each other. But for a small-scale suspense drama, the interference of the two lines in “Echo” has obviously become a big problem.
In the play, the emotional line is a standard family ethics drama, the lines are literary and humorous, and it is very Feng Xiaogang’s movie style. But when the audience is still experiencing “Feng’s humor” in the emotional line, they are forcibly drawn into the murder case and reasoning analysis. In addition, the case line full of suspenseful elements is not what Feng Xiaogang is good at. A lot of empty scenes, dialogues and emotional blanks are added, which makes the already procrastinating rhythm slow down again and again. In this way, the audience will go back and forth between two completely different rhythms, and instead of experiencing the tension and excitement that suspense dramas should have, they encounter confusion and discomfort in perception.
Having worked in the industry for more than 40 years, director Feng Xiaogang’s influence in the film and television industry is unquestionable, which also makes the cast and behind-the-scenes creative team of the two online dramas “North Ruins” and “Echo” gather industry elites. But no matter how strong the creative team is, if the story cannot be told well, the audience will still not buy it. As the old saying goes: gold cups and silver cups are not as good as the reputation of ordinary people. Artistic creation must take root in the people and life. Only by thinking more from the perspective of the audience can we win the audience’s approval.