copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

“Wow, this is homemade!”
The cycle of main melody blockbusters and the modernizing passion

By Tingyu Chen

“The long take at the beginning is thrilling and fascinating. Combined with outstanding quick edits of real gun fights, it gets your adrenaline rushing. In particular, the scenes of using a box-spring to block the bullet, catching broken glass barehanded, cutting the enemy’s throat with a magazine, etc. are so cool! Even the sloppy storytelling in the first half of the movie and the plot armour do not overshadow them. The feeling of China’s inviolability permeates the two hours of film viewing and makes my heart racing with national pride nevertheless.”—Viewer Comment on Wolf Warrior 2 from Chinese Movie Website Douban

“…the local audience’s pride in seeing Chinese heroes in outer space for the first time could just as easily turn to embarrassment, should the film’s production quality fail to measure up.”—The Hollywood Reporter, “‘Wandering Earth’ Director Frank Gwo on Making China’s First Sci-Fi Blockbuster”

Chinese cinema after 2017 has had a series of financial achievements. Since Wolf Warrior 2 (Wu Jing, 2017) set a new record in the home market with a gross of $870 million and made its way as the first Chinese film to appear among the top-grossing international films of all time, a succession of blockbusters in various genres have striven to break or at least follow its performance. In 2018, Hong Kong director Dante Lam’s action-adventure production Operation Red Sea turned out to be another box-office hit. With a gross of $ 579 million, it became the second highest profitable movie in the Chinese film market by then, which was, however, bypassed quickly by a sci-fi release Wandering Earth (Guo Fan, 2019) a couple of months later. Since 2020, a series of revolutionary history epics boosted another round of onslaughts on both the domestic and the world market, with The Eight Hundred (Guan Hu, 2020) ranking as the top-grossing film worldwide that year and Battle at Lake Changjin (Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark and Dante Lam, 2021) surpassing Wolf Warrior 2 and becoming the record-holder of the home market. With the release of Battle at Lake Changjin 2 (Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark and Dante Lam, 2022) and Wandering Earth 2 (Guo Fan, 2023), the trend of Chinese blockbusters that are both economically and critically successful continues. While the extraordinary success of these films needs to be factored along with other issues—first and foremost, the global Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant sluggishness of Hollywood, the world’s (most) powerful film exporter—the snowballing effect of box office performances in this wave of production seems to verify Stephon Teo’s assertation when he wrote about the success of Wolf Warrior 2 in 2019: “the triumph of Wolf Warrior 2 […] signals, finally, that the rise of the domestic market is entirely self-sustaining for domestic blockbusters” (325).

What appears more intriguing, however, is the critical buzz generated around the box-office sensation. Noticing the presence of the so-called main melody in the wave of production (e.g., the depiction of revolutionary histories in The Eight Hundred, Battle at Lake Changjin, Battle at Lake Changjin 2 and the touch of nationalism in Wolf Warrior 2, Operation Red Sea and the Wandering Earth series), scholars and critics have argued that the success of these productions signals either the blockbusterization of main melody films or conversely, the main-melody-isation of blockbusters. First applied to the filmic context in 1987 by the then Head of the National Film Bureau, Teng Jinxian, the term “main melody” was originally used to orient “the Chinese film industry against the commercialization that had developed rapidly since the enactment of the ‘reform and opening up’ policy” (Yu 166). While as it developed the definition of main melody film became “inconsistent, subject to time and circumstance,” it usually refers to “films extolling the virtues of the state, the military and the Communist Party of China” and therefore often understood as state propaganda (Teo 323). What is revealed in the critical discourse around the main melody blockbusters, hence, is an ambivalent attitude towards the combination of the post-socialist state’s propagandistic project and a liberal capitalist blockbuster model. While some suggest “main melody blockbusters will be the main theme in Chinese cinema in the years to come,”(Chu 15) others have implied that the very category of main melody film has died since party-state ideology in these films has become “an aspect of the script that is replaced and ultimately drowned out by commercial elements and ideologies foreign to such ideology” (Yau, “China’s Main Melody Movie”). Each standpoint, nonetheless, sees an incompatibility or at least, contradiction between the two aspects—“main melody” and “blockbuster.”

The difficulty in making sense of such cross-cultural mixing, as I argue, finds its root in (post-) Cold War politics which foregrounds a narrative that emphasizes a dichotomy between (post-)socialism and global capitalism, which in this case is translated into a dichotomy between their representative cultural/ideological apparatuses. Such a dualistic critical narrative appears inadequate to account for the cultural politics in the “complex, overlapping, disjuncture order” of contemporary global cultural flows (Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference” 296). Indeed, as globalization scholars like Mike Featherstone, Marwan M. Kraidy and Néstor García Canclini have pointed out, the process of globalization has brought to attention the fact that cultures and identities have never been self-contained categories.[1] [open endnotes in new window] Arjun Appadurai further notices,

“[…] global cultural flows have lost the selective and cumbersome qualities that they had for much of human history, during which most societies found ways to accommodate external systems of meaning within their own cosmological frameworks, hence producing change by dialectical accident and structural combination” (Sahlins 1987). Today, global cultural flows, whether religious, political or market produced, have entered into the manufacture of local subjectivities, thus changing both the machineries for the manufacture of local meaning and the materials that are processed by these machineries (“How Histories Make Geographies” 6-7).”

Following Appadurai, I suggest main melody blockbusters should be understood as products of the fluctuating machineries and materials resulting from a constant global cultural flow other than the one-sided subordination of global capitalism to state authoritarianism or vice versa. As indicated in the film reviews at the beginning of this essay, the cycle mobilizes a sense of national pride not so much through a straightforward narrative or discourse against another ideology. Rather, it does so through its energizing a cinematic experience achieved through deploying, first and foremost, a cinematic machinery most often associated with global capitalism—special effects. And as I’ll argue, such a capability for the special effects to evoke a sense of national pride in the cycle derives from a complex of international historical processes.

To put it differently, unpacking the cultural politics of the main melody blockbusters requires the perspectival move from politics at the (Post-) Cold War nation-state level to politics generated within the connectivities of globalization. Such a perspectival move asks for a methodological equivalent, that is, a more pragmatic approach to the manufacture of cultures. Other than resorting to an a prior explanation that such cross-cultural exchange leads to the homogenization or conversely the hybridization of global cultures, we need to examine how the global circulation of machineries and materials enables the manufacture of local meanings at different historical junctures and upon that, to find out what specific power relations remain stable underneath. In that regard, I use the more localized approach of cycle study and categorize the recent wave of main melody blockbusters as an inter-generic cycle that includes action-adventure movies (e.g., Wolf Warrior 2, Operation Red Sea), war epics (e.g., The Eight Hundred, Sacrifice, Battle at Lake Changjin, Battle at Lake Changjin 2) and science fiction (e.g., Wandering Earth, Wandering Earth 2). Instead of assuming that the popularity of the cycle signals either a triumph of state propaganda or reversely, a triumph of a global capitalist ideology, I ask two questions: what exactly makes the cycle appeal to its audience? And upon that, what political issues reveal themselves within such cultural production? As the outcome of the analysis, I hope the case study will provide a more constructive perspective for investigating the complex, overlapping, and disjunctive cultural order and its politics in our globalized times.

In what follows, I’ll first address some prior explanations for the cycle’s phenomenal success that resort to pointing out certain prominent factors in the cycle’s historical moment and how these independent factors appear inadequate to account for the cycle’s phenomenon. The take-away is that the cycle could neither be explained as the causal result of any of these independent factors nor be seen as a coincidental consequence of these factors lumped together. Rather, it remains our task to look for the regularities under these isomorphic, disjunctive or even coincidental historical forces. In the next section, I then look closely at the cycle’s textual features and reception discourses to investigate what really constitutes the cycle’s appeal. As I argue, the cycle indeed capitalizes on both a cultural taste—the fascination with the cinematic novelties of a specific form of special effects imagery—and a social desire—the desire for a sense of national modernity at the current historical moment. In the final analysis, I further demonstrate how such a desire to exploit cinematic technologies for a modern, or rather, modernized experience—what I call the modernizing passion—(re)constructs a generic realm of association that reinforces the syntax of the woman/the primitive/the past vis-à-vis the man/the modern/the future.

Some prior explanations

In a Jump Cut article issued in 2019 “From March of the Volunteers to Amazing Grace: the death of China’s Main Melody movie in the 21st century,” Shuk-ting Kinnia Yau claims that the Main Melody genre in Chinese cinema has seen its death in the new millennium. The Main Melody movie understood by Yau as a genre refers to “an ideological category of film promoting a particular political perspective” (“China’s Main Melody Movie”). For Yau, the Main Melody genre as a category of political films is dead because of the increasing commercialization of movies in the new century. She specifically points to two facets of such a commercializing process that lead to the death of the genre. First, in order to impress the audience, the Main Melody movies have to increasingly downplay their Main Melody characteristics or face their failure in the market. Second and complementary to the aim of increasing the movies’ mass appeal, the mainland film industry has introduced a series of outside resources, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan talents, which bring contradictory ideological elements to the genre. As a result, Yau concludes that the marketized Main Melody movies alongside their commercialization have “lost their capacity to promote ‘party-state ideology’” (“China’s Main Melody Movie”).

Looking at it retrospectively, Yau’s argument for the Main Melody genre’s death may sound premature given that the main melody blockbusters since 2017 seem able to maintain their Main Melody characteristics while striking a chord with the audience. A counterargument may be made that the genre has been revived to execute its highest mission as the mouthpiece for the party-state. The production of the main melody blockbusters corresponds with the political regime of Xi Jinping, who is often deemed to be the most powerful leader of the PRC since its first president Mao Zedong. In addition to Xi’s overall cultural policies that constantly assert the media’s significance in his guiding ideal of “Chinese Dream ,” one measure closest to the cinema and seen to be an reinforcement of the film industry as a party organ is the transferal of China’s film division from its previous supervision under the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) to that of the Communist Party’s Ministry of Propaganda in 2018.[2] Alongside these high-level policies and structural adjustments, the government has been continually investing in the making of main melody movies. Most of the main melody blockbusters in the cycle, like their predecessors, have received filming assistance and financial support from the government. For instance, Operation Red Sea was made with the direct assistance of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and presented to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the PLA and the CCP’s 19th National Congress; Sacrifice is similarly a commissioned film produced to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Koran War (known as “War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea” in China). Other entries in the cycle are also often co-produced by state-backed production companies, such as the China Film Group behind Wolf Warrior 2 and the Wandering Earth series as well as the Shanghai Film Group behind Battle at Lake Changjin.

Yet certain objections to this preliminary conclusion could be formulated. First and foremost, the main melody blockbusters, while demonstrating a certain evolution pattern in correlation with governmental thought, do not always show a full correspondence to such political agendas. Yau rightly observes that some recent main melody films like Wolf Warrior 2 and Operation Red Sea have shifted their historical perspective to reflect China’s real-life ambitions in its military development and other economic projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) under Xi’s notion of “Rich Nation, Strong Army.” However, the “century of humiliation” narrative that Yau attributes to the former regime of Jiang Zemin does not fade away since The Eight Hundred, Sacrifice and the Battle at Lake Changjin series in the cycle continued to rewrite those colonial histories during the Sino-Japanese War and the Korean War. In other cases, governmental instructions came later than the creation. For instance, while Wandering Earth director Guo Fan admitted that China’s real-life space program helped his film, governmental ordinances on using sci-fi movies to promote the state’s ideological goals only came in the wave of the film’s success.[3] In terms of funding structure, most main melody blockbusters also received private capital that prioritized market profits. Even the state-backed entities have themselves gone through market-oriented reforms in years of China’s marketization.[4]

Moreover, the party-state’s efforts to utilize cinema for promoting its messages often encounter frictions, negotiations and unexpected outcomes. For instance, the release of Wolf Warrior 2 in the mainland market clashed with another big-budget propagandistic movie The Founding of an Army (Andrew Lau, 2017). With the full backing of the government, the latter was granted nearly twice as many screenings as Wolf Warrior 2 at the beginning, yet as Wolf Warrior 2 started to pull ahead in ticket sale, cinema managers were reported to disregard official instructions from Beijing’s media regulators and give the action picture more screenings instead.[5] Another entry in the cycle, The Eight Hundred, gives another example of the convolution in such state-sanctioned cultural production. The film was first pulled off its scheduled theatrical release in July 2019, possibly for its reverence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang rather than Mao’s Communist Party in its depiction of a defense battle during the Sino-Japanese War.[6] Yet after the nation, including its cinemas, had been locked down for nearly six months since the coronavirus outbreak and desperate for some help with the national economic devastation, it was re-released in August 2020 as a market tentpole (with the removal of certain content though). As it turned out, the audience responded to the film with strong patriotic nationalism, a result presumably welcomed by the party-state yet not fully expected when it cancelled its original release. Such instances show the inadequacy of the inverted picture painted by scholars on the other side of Yau, for whom the Chinese state has refurnished the cinema as a tool to strengthen its authoritative power through its marketization.[7] Both lines of arguments risk smoothing out the multiplicity of industrial users (political leaders, policy makers, industry managers, filmmakers, audience, etc.) as well as their competing interests and constant negotiations when critically categorizing all these forces into two monstrosities named the party-state ideology and commercialization.

A more nuanced explanation that sees into these frictions may suggest that the commercialization or politicization of the national cinema is never smooth sailing; rather, the different users have to constantly negotiate and find a middle ground to work together. During the ups and downs of these multilateral relationships though, the domestic film industry has undoubtedly benefited from one spillover effect—that is, the mastery of the know-hows of filmmaking through the exchange of expertise and technologies.[8] As a result, it strengthens itself as the nation’s soft power instrument, if not the mouthpiece of a hard political power, and suffices to impress the domestic audience, if not yet an international one. This view notes an important factor that has helped transform the main melody films into its recent more popular variations. Most prominently, the cycle of main melody blockbusters benefits from the import of Hong Kong and Hollywood talent. The cycle’s action-packed entries were able to polish their mass appeal through the expertise of well-known Hong Kong directors like Dante Lam and Tsui Hark as well as Hollywood talent like Joe and Anthony Russo who consulted on Wolf Warrior 2 and further introduced Sam Hargrave as the action coordinator for the film. These effects-heavy blockbusters, while relying on the growing domestic effects industry—who during the years of cross-industrial corporation have gained their increasingly amplified capabilities—also leveraged overseas technological resources to boost their production value. Visual effects experts Tim Crosbie from X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016) and Jason Troughton from A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015) were listed in The Eight Hundred’s crews, while prominent visual effects houses Weta Workshop and Digital Domain helped with the effects work in Wandering Earth. Although these factors do contribute to the cycle’s appeal, it is worth cautioning that such technological and knowledge exchanges are not without problems. As I argue later, the effects-heavy imagery in the cycle is not necessarily state-of-art. Rather, the home industry needs to pursue all its accessible resources to produce an imagery that is only almost Hollywood-like. In this vein, Wandering Earth director Guo states in an interview that the effects in Wandering Earth function only in between the second and third levels of Hollywood standards.[9] On another occasion, Guo further notes that Weta’s contribution to the film was restricted to mechanical effects while their technologies and expertise on the more advanced digital effects are not easily loaned to the domestic industry. In any case, it is ill-founded to solely conclude the cycle’s success from the development of cinematic crafts.

Finally, another explanation might resort to an accidental factor. The Covid-19 crisis, although bringing a bleak season to the global cinema, created an unexpected favorable window for domestic films. For one, the sluggishness of Hollywood and other global cinemas during the pandemic created a natural blackout period when the domestic films faced less fierce competition from imported foreign titles.[10] In 2020, the few Hollywood titles released in Chinese cinemas were mostly old hits re-released with a different format (such as a 4K rerelease of Warner Bros’ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) while in 2021, only 20 revenue-sharing U.S. titles were released in the mainland market compared with 31 tentpole releases in the pre-pandemic 2019.[11] In addition, the increasing tension between China and U.S during the pandemic further exacerbated the fraught diplomatic relation between the two countries since the first Donald Trump administration and the escalating China-US trade war. Such geopolitical afflictions contributed to a surge of nationalist sentiment which has been present in the past few decades as China gradually enters the center of global power, preparing a favorable social climate for the cycle. Similar to the factor of better cinematic craft, though, these conditions created by the virus crisis helped boost the cycle but could not function as the sole explanation. In particular, attributing this cycle’s success merely to an accidental event fails to recognize its socio-cultural significance.

The continuing commercialization of the national cinema, the Chinese state’s ideological control as well as its continuous investment in the main melody genre, the home industry’s mastery of cinematic technologies and other know-how, the Covid-19 crisis and the surging national sentiment resulted from geo-politics­—all of these constitute the historical moment wherein the cycle of main melody blockbusters sees its phenomenal success. None of these factors, however, suffices solely to explain the cycle as a phenomenon. It should also be made clear that neither should we see it as a coincidental result of these historical factors lumped together. Rather, it remains for us to investigate what regularities exist underneath these isomorphic, disjunctive and even coincidental historical forces.

“Wow, this is homemade!”

In this section, I use cycle study to investigate how the interaction and competition of these historical factors eventually gives rise to the cycle’s phenomenal success. Compared with genre study, cycle study provides a more localized approach to examine the films’ aesthetics and social uses.[12] Through close analysis of the cycle’s textual features and reception discourse, I argue, what marks the cycle of main melody blockbusters is indeed its use or exploitation of special effects (especially CGI and computer-generated camera movement) to create a Hollywoodesque effects-heavy imagery, two main attractions of which are summarized as particle perception and the impression of a technologized eye. The experience of such cinematic novelties in the home cinema provides a sensory experience of national modernity—a “wow, this is homemade” effect as opposed to the single “wow” effect that scholars have argued for the spectatorship of special effects imagery. This factor taps into the audience’s affective engagement with the current historical moment and essentially drives the appeal of the cycle.

Particle perception

What I call particle perception refers to an aesthetics that allows the perception of images beyond the solid object level, which is usually enabled by CGI. One common deployment of CGI in the cycle is to construct the “big mise-en-scène,” such as the panoramic landscapes of ruined cities in Wolf Warrior 2 and Operation Red Sea, the bombing battlegrounds in Sacrifice, The Eight Hundred and the Battle at Lake Changjin series, or the futuristic spaces in the Wandering Earth series. As much as these CGI intend to create an authentic setting for the films’ narratives, the similarity in their looks belies their artificiality. Either built with practical footages and CG-extensions or constructed totally from CGI, the panoramic scenes in the films are most often undifferentiated from each other: with bombers bombing and objects being destroyed as well as fire, ashes, and other floating molecules in the mid-air. In other words, the CG-extended settings often create a kind of indeterminate space or—to appropriate Gilles Deleuze’s term—a kind of any-space-whatever which “no longer has co-ordinates” and appear “independently of the states of things or milieux which actualise them” (120). Take for instance, how, in order to showcase the global endeavor to save the planet from the pull of the Jupiter, Wandering Earth shifts its location across a vast range of cities and countries around the globe. A transition between the different locations is frequently achieved through the insertion of the apocalyptic images of the frozen planet’s surface, which gives little indication of the locations’ exact spatial relation. Indeed, the film oftentimes overlays graphic demonstrations, such as text or time, of a spatial transition over its CGI so as to guarantee the story a base level of spatial continuity. This kind of CGI overlayed with texts as geographical and temporal markers is barely exceptional in the cycle whose storytelling frequently experiments with the disruption of spatial-temporal continuity.

While such a presentational mode of special effects could be easily condemned as shallow spectacle, Stephen Prince has argued against critical spectacle-indictment accounts; for him, these merely insist on a photographic model of the cinema with its basis on indexicality (2). Prince finds nothing inherently non-indexical in visual effects; indeed, as he cites Braxton Soderman and Mark Wolf, digital effects imagery makes indexical claims through both the persuasiveness of the created image and its reference to the technical foundation (i.e., data sets and algorithm) needed for creating such image (150). These two aspects of indexicality are equally important for generating the wonderment in the cycle of main melody blockbusters. That is, the spectacular CGI in the cycle appeals to the audience for both its persuasive visual appearances and the technical complexity those appearances allude to. In fact, it is the latter aspect that leads to the distinguished characteristic of the cycle’s CGI from its previous concretization in Chinese blockbusters, that is, its fascination with the atmospheric elements (e.g., the fire, ashes and snow) which possibly alludes to the complex data sets and algorithms to render such fuzzy objects in computer-generated images.[13]

The fascination with the atmospheric elements brings about one of the most prominent spectacles in the cycle—the bombing scenes, a kind of rarefied images of molecules or particles in the mid-air where the micro-movement of matter becomes the center focus. Deleuze once argues that the frame of the film is either towards saturation or towards rarefaction: while the big screen and depth of field often allow the multiplication of independent data, rarefied images are produced either “when the whole accent is placed on a single object” or “when the set is emptied of certain sub-sets” (12). In at least two varieties of the bombing scenes, we can see how the transformation of matter becomes the single accent of the image. In one, the entire frame is filled with the ashes and small molecules resulting from either a bombing (e.g., those from Wolf Warrior 2, Battle at Lake Changjin, Battle at Lake Changjin 2) or from the breakdown of a hill or a planet (e.g., those from Wandering Earth, Wandering Earth 2). In the other, the degree of rarefaction within the frame is lower yet still, the explosion of either bombers, earth and other solid objects or even human bodies constitutes the main set of the image which is usually represented as a mixture of grey, red or golden color. These two varieties of bombing are grandiosely exploited by Hong Kong helmers Dante Lam in Operation Red Sea in which a near ten-minutes battling sequence between the Chinese navy squad and the terrorists from Yewaire is presented as a relentless showcase of bombings. Just as a film review from Variety points out, “There’s a perverse wonder at the massive bomb clouds rising into mid-air before bursting, like fireworks, into a golden shimmer”.[14]

The wonder at the transformation of matter is further intensified by film speed. Often the explosion or breakdown of solid objects are caught in slow-motion cinematography to accentuate the micro-movements that we could not see in a real-life incident. For example, in Sacrifice and the Battle at Lake Changjin series, the images of soldiers being engulfed by fire—and to an extreme opposite, the tearing-apart of a human body in a flash when being hit by a machine gun—are constantly evoked to showcase the cinema’s ability to capture the transformation of matter that is not visually accessible for a natural human eye. If there is any criticism to be advanced against the violence in such a “body-machine-image complex,” it is in this sense that the cycle directs its attention to the spectacular images other than the violent damage of humanity by warfare.[15] Relatedly, the concept of bullet time is vastly applied and innovated in the cycle. This special effect trick invented by the Wachowskis in The Matrix (1999) is used in the openings of Wolf Warrior 2 and Operation Red Sea but is expanded to present the encounter of shells from tanks and the penetration of bullets into objects in Battle at Lake Changjin. Parallel to the wonder at the massive bomb clouds, there seems to be a wonder at the wrinkles around the bullet as it penetrates through the air. Through the manipulation of film speed, these slow-motion images create what Sean Cubitt calls the “sublime time of special effects,” an experience of temporality that is beyond historical time and narrative time (130). Like indeterminate space, sublime time here works as the void where the viewer’s attention is on the transforming matter and the cinema’s ability to capture that transformation in its imagery. If to deploy Deleuze’s words, despite their rarefied surface, it is the multiplication of data behind the creation of such images that they derive their fascination.

An outstanding case that combines the rarefied image and sublime time can be found in Battle at Lake Changjin 2. There is a flashback sequence of the Chinese soldiers’ initial failed attempt to dismantle the bridge that would allow the U.S air force to retreat in the Korean War. The sequence retells the story using a series of stopped images. Contrary to the renowned story of motion picture’s development out of still images in its earlier days, the case here sees an opposite movement to turn the motion picture into still images. Similar to slow-motion cinematography, the sequence flaunts its artificiality to the greatest extent so as to showcase its capacity to capture the micro-movements of matter. With that noted, it’s probably not unexpected that the still images prominently utilized in the sequence are those images of bombing clouds and of bullets penetrating human bodies. And it is this perception of images beyond the solid object level that I call particle perception. Writing about the attraction of swirling dust, flickering flames and other fuzzy objects in CGI, Jordan Schonig has argued that the cinematic reproduction of such “contingent motion forms” derives its appeal not from an indexical imbrication of the natural phenomenon but the cinema’s capacity to grasp such “unplannable” motion as an aesthetic object (42-9). Likewise, the attraction in the particle perception of CGI in the cycle comes, if not totally, at least equally from its technological modulation as from its visual appearance. Different from Schonig’s framing of such technology-perception attunement as an epistemic experience, I would argue that the attraction of such technologically framed, contingent motion in the cycle is a historical experience driven by a specific social desire—a desire for a sense of national modernity achieved through the sensations of a modern cinematic experience.

The technologized eye

Before turning to the social desire that drives the cycle’s effects-heavy imagery, I want to discuss another aspect of its perception and affect: its impression of a technologized eye. In different accounts of the movie camera, the metaphor of a human eye has been evoked to illustrate how it allows the viewer to perceive a fictional three-dimensional space (the general camera eye), share ideas and emotions with cinematic characters (the point of view), and generate bodily sensations of movement (the embodied eye). Such a metaphor is often bound to an anthropomorphic understanding of the camera, emphasizing either its mimesis of human vision or its phenomenological faculty of natural perception. I use the term “the technologized eye,” therefore, to accentuate the mechanical properties and thus the non-anthropomorphism of the camera in the cycle. As I posit, the technologized eye constitutes another aspect of the attraction of the Hollywoodesque effects-heavy imagery in the cycle.

In his account of visual effects in cinema, Prince notes that the shift to digital filmmaking brings about the aesthetic design of a “digitally realized long take” (91). This aesthetic design has engendered some of the most thrilling moments in the cycle of main melody blockbusters. In the opening sequence of Wolf Warrior 2, for instance, we are invited to follow the camera first flying leisurely over the idyllic landscape near the Indian Ocean, then speeding up and slowing down to catch the attack of a fishing ship by Somali pirates, and finally transcending the spaces above and under the water to follow the titular hero as he defeats the pirates. While most of the shots in the sequence are from live-action cinematography—including that of the hero’s underwater fight—the sequence that seems one single camera movement is no doubt a result of the digital amalgamation of a series of independent shots. In Battle at Lake Changjin, a similar design is utilized in the violent aircraft attack sequence when two U.S aircrafts fire upon a rocky plain without knowing the Chinese soldiers are lying below pretending to be dead. Like the opening sequence of Wolf Warrior 2, the flexible acceleration and deceleration of the camera as well as its elastic movement within a vast space elicit strong sensations in the viewer and make the sequence an awe-inspiring moment in the film.

Yet what is unsettling or delightful here is not simply the virtuosic camera movement. Equally, the illusionist experience of impossible movement brings “the sensations of self,” which as Scott Richmond elaborates, comes from the finiteness of the self’s body and the cinema’s capacity to extend its potential (8). Comparable to the particle perception, the digitally realized long take assumes its wonder simultaneously from its visual appearance and the modulating capacity of cinematic technologies. In all these cases, the difference between a technologized eye and natural human vision is often reinforced through the elimination of a stand-in character perspective for the motivation of its movement. In the opening sequence of Wolf Warrior 2, what we share is certainly neither the perspective of the hero nor the perspective of his antagonists. Similarly in the aircraft attack sequence of Battle at Lake Changjin, while obviously the camera does not provide the perspective of the soldiers, it flows so closely to them that it cannot be the perspective of the pilots on the U.S aircrafts either. In other words, the technologized eye belongs to no-body, or rather, it belongs to its own.

The no-body of the camera in the cycle can be further found in those computer-generated movements. In the sequence from Wandering Earth 2 when the characters first participate in a test launch of the space elevator, the camera first seems to follow their capsule in a conventional chasing manner though the movement here is obviously generated by computer other than being shot through camera. With the capsule sometimes getting closer and sometimes leaving us, the viewer experiences the “apprehension” that Jennifer Barker describes in the experience of a car chasing scene (106-19). However, at some point, the camera breaks itself from the chasing and turns to look at the architecture of the space elevator until it finally comes back to follow the capsule again. The turning-away of the camera again shows the film’s fascination with its CGI. But at the same time, the turning-away also indicates the camera’s own intentional movement which is beyond the narrative progress or character motivation. By deviating away from the characters’ movement, the camera turns the viewer’s attention to the movement of itself: a movement animated by computers across an indeterminate space that is equally constructed computationally.

In Battle at Lake Changjin 2, we similarly find the showcase of such a computer-generated movement across a computer-generated space. In the sequence when the then U.S president Harry Truman approved the request to use an A-bomb in the Korean War, the camera first follows his secretary from a bird’s eye angle, then penetrates the wall to enter Truman’s office and finally stops at the front of his desk. Truman’s decision is then revealed from the headline of a newspaper and interview played back in the soundtrack. After that, another smooth camera movement retreats itself from his office to the outside and then transits continually to the snowing frontline through a computer-generated aerial shot.

Equivalent to the digitally realized long takes in Wolf Warrior 2 and Battle at Lake Changjin, the seemly infinite faculty of the camera to move across a vast range of spaces in these latter cases reveals the impossibility of a character perspective behind them. Indeed, Truman speaks no word in the sequence even though he seems to be the essential actor in this subplot. Moving further than the previous long takes that integrate their seemingly one-shot takes from live-action shots and therefore give an unusual experience of movement in a still realistic space, the sequences here exaggerate the unnaturalness of the movement through an amalgamation of both digitally realized camera movements and CGI. To the degree that one might argue the overly dark and blank appearance of outer space in Wandering Earth 2 and the matte line during the computer-generated aerial shot in Battle at Lake Changjin 2 belie the plasticity of their special effects, such wobbly effects also accidently direct the viewer’s attention to the technological foundation of these not-yet-magnificent-but-still-spectacular visual appearances.

Such a non-anthropomorphism, I argue, constitutes the underlying motive for the camera use in the cycle including those less spectacular cases. Critics have noticed how the cycle favors the depiction of a character ensemble instead of a single point of view. In part, this is a long-standing convention in main melody filmmaking. What appears distinct in the cycle is that the preference for a character ensemble seems to possess an advantage of complying with a technologized eye. In arguably the most auteurist entry of the cycle The Eight Hundred, Cinematographer Cao Yu insists on shooting with a single camera throughout the film to “make the camera a sensitive actor other than an indifferent recorder” (Chen 145).  Yet instead of being attached to a specific character, this camera eye frequently moves around the ensemble cast without indicating whose perspective it represents. As a result, the camera appears to be the eye of no-body. Indeed, the idea of an anthropomorphic camera is ostensibly challenged in the film. Throughout the film, black-and-white documentary-like sequences are intermittently inserted to indicate the perspective of the journalist Fang, who has come to the forefront to record the historical event. At some points, the film tries hard to verify the historical presence of Fang’s camera by emphasizing its material functioning. For instance, when Duanwu, a young soldier, was dying after being shot by an enemy aircraft, Fang uses his camera to take a photo of him. The widescreen frame of the film is suddenly cut to a classic aspect ratio with black-and-white coloration. The shimmering of the image together with the hissing of film running in the soundtrack tries to bring us to the materiality of Fang’s camera and asserts that what we see is from the eye of a person who was present at the historical moment. Yet during the final retreat, Fang’s camera was shown as destroyed by a bullet and left on the bridge. But if Fang’s camera were destroyed, how should we perceive the previous footage that the film tries so hard to assert the existence of by invoking the aura of the “photographic image” (Bazin 4-9)? The paradox here paradoxically brings us to the core of the issue: it seems that the film asserts the existence of Fang’s camera so hard from the beginning only to destroy it at the end. Rather than accentuating the camera’s ability to record physical reality, the film invokes the aura of photography only to showcase how the technologized eye is capable of (re)creating to the extent that it can recreate the “language of photography.”

Indeed, the underlying logic of a non-anthropomorphic camera eye might better explain the failure of Sacrifice (Guan Hu, Guo Fan and Lu Yang, 2020) in the cycle. As an entry that attempted to exploit the success of The Eight Hundred, Sacrifice seems an unexpected flop. While the popular explanation for its failure suggests that limited production time—a total of 110 days from writing scripts to completing post-production[16]—led to its repetitive usage of those spectacular images which eventually compromised its economic and artistic values, I note that this failure was instead exaggerated by its attempt to attach the technologized eye to a human perspective. Telling the story of a group of Chinese soldiers who try to repair a bridge to the front amid brutal bombing from the U.S air force, the film is divided into four chapters, each aiming to tell the story from the perspective of the soldiers, the adversaries, the gunners and the bridge builders. The attempt to anchor the perspective of the film by attaching it to a human perspective, nevertheless, contradicts with the non-anthropomorphic camera eye that drives the appeal of the cycle. In other words, a human perspective requires a degree of difference in its imagery which the non-anthropomorphism of the technologized eye does not stipulate (as seen in the often undifferentiated effects-heavy imagery in the cycle). The title card appearing at the opening of each chapter, therefore, distracts the viewer’s attention and negates the possibility for them to lose themselves in the wonder that the technologized eye brings. It is this contradiction that essentially results in the film’s box-office flop yet, at the same time, asserts the attraction of the technologized eye for the cycle.

“Wow, this is homemade.”

My use of the terms “particle perception” and “technologized eye” is deliberate. On the surface, the terms allude to the technical principles behind the production of their special effects, such as the particle system used to create those fuzzy objects in CGI and digitally realized camera movements. But instead of deploying the technical terms, I use them to emphasize the perception and affect of the effects-heavy imagery upon its home audience rather than the terms’ technical procedures. Indeed. I’ve been using the terms “special effects” and “effects-heavy imagery” in a general sense. Prince once argues that the term “special effects” makes no more sense in digital filmmaking as the common practice of image manipulation has deprived of them their specialness. He prefers the term “visual effects” instead and delegates “special effects” to its industrial currency that refers to “mechanical and practical effects, such as explosions or stunts involving car wrecks” (Prince 3). In the cycle of main melody blockbusters—at least in its spectatorship—such a distinction, however, does not seem rewarding. In fact, some of the spectacles in the cycle are constructed from different effect methods. Take the bombing scene for instance. While the explosions near the end of Sacrifice are produced from practical effects, the explosions on the surface of the moon in Wandering Earth 2 are assumably constructed digitally. However, their similar appearance and deliberate design make it difficult for the audience to differentiate between them.[17] More importantly, as I suggest, there is no necessity for differentiation in the attraction of such effects-heavy imagery.

To put it more precisely, the spectatorship in the home audience’s consumption of the special effects in the cycle is not one of connoisseurship (as Michele Pierson once writes about the cultural reception of special effects in England and U.S).[18] Rather, it is a sensory experience of how it measures up to the state-of-art cinematic novelties. This sensory experience has its horizon in a globalized modern experience. As the audience’s reviews constantly compare the home products to their Hollywood counterparts—Wolf Warrior 2 to Die Hard and Fast & Furious, Operation Red Sea to Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan, The Eight Hundred and Sacrifice to Dunkirk and Hacksaw Ridge, Wandering Earth and Wandering Earth 2 to Interstellar, The Day after Tomorrow, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner —the criterion for the state-of-art status of the spectacles is how they measure up to a Hollywood look, or in other words, a sensorium globalized by Hollywood. As Miriam Hansen once writes about the global circulation of classical Hollywood cinema, “the worldwide hegemony of classical Hollywood cinema provides […] a sensory-reflexive horizon for the experience of modernization and modernity” (“Fallen Women, Rising Stars” 10). Such a sensory-reflexive dimension of Hollywood films “may take cognitive, discursive and narrativized forms, but it is crucially anchored in a sensory experience and sensational affect” (Hansen, “Mass Production of the Senses” 341).

The Hollywoodesque effects-heavy imagery in the cycle, therefore, functions in two ways. On the one hand, the home-made spectacles offer a comparable experience of cinematic sensations to those enabled by previous foreign imports or overseas pirates from Hollywood. On the other, the recognition of their home-made status gives this sensory experience a reflexive horizon, which anchors the shocking experience at the historical moment of national modernization. Indeed, the effects-heavy imagery in the cycle is perceived to be almost Hollywood-like other than competitively state-of-art. And for the home industry to produce such an almost Hollywood-like cinematic experience, it needs to mobilize all its accessible resources, from governmental fundings to private capital and from domestic technological affordances to external expertise. Yet it is this almost Hollywood-like imagery which is almost self-made by the home industry that taps into the audience’s affective engagement with the historical moment: a sense of national modernity through the sensory experience of a globalized modern experience at the home cinema.

In this light, the cultural references in the narratives of the films (the revolutionary history, the real-life events or the futuristic writings from a world-famous Chinese writer), the rah-ah jingoism or even the sometimes wobbly CGI all become the anchor that helps the viewer to rediscover their historical position in the spectacular wonder, to recognize that the spectacles are not imports from a more powerful center but products of the home cinema. It is through this process of losing oneself in the spectacular wonder and rediscovering one’s historical position that the cycle mobilizes the national sentiment at the moment. In other words, the “wow” effect in the cycle of main melody blockbusters should be articulated as a “wow, this is homemade” effect. The perception and affection of special effects in the cycle, therefore, should be understood as a historical experience that has its concrete appearances—the fascination with the cinematic novelties of particle perception and a technologized eye—and responds to a concrete historical situation—the home audience’s affective engagement with the current historical moment of national modernity. And it is the deployment of such cinematic novelties in response to a social desire of modernity that marks the cycle of main melody blockbusters and drives its essential appeal.

The modernizing passion

Through bracketing an a prior explanation of the cycle’s politics—that it signals either the success of state authoritarianism or the success of global capitalism—and taking a more pragmatic approach to the films, we see that the cycle of main melody blockbusters involves a more complicated historical experience. As we have seen, the cycle capitalizes on both a cultural taste—the fascination with the cinematic novelties of a specific form of special effects imagery—and a social desire—the desire for a sense of national modernity at the current historical moment. As a result, the sensory experience of the Hollywoodesque effects-heavy imagery in the cycle provides the audience a form of affective realism, a sense of national modernity that taps into the audience’s affective engagement with the historical moment they are in. Categorizing the sensory experience in the cycle as a form of affective realism, however, is by no mean to deny its political nature. Rather, it asks us to move away from those a prior explanations and to look for “relations of meaning that are re-constructed through such [cultural] mixing” (Canclini xxix).

As it is seen, the sensory experience of national modernity in the cycle is by and large enabled by the exploitation of a specific kind of film machinery—one that bears the ostensible impression of industrialization and its technological motors—that of the special effects. This textural and intertextual horizon for national modernity in the cycle well finds its extratextual equivalences at the industrial level and even the broader national imaginary. At the industrial aspect, the capacity to harness such advanced cinematic technologies and other industrial practices has been pursued as the criterion for its own modernization (as seen in the high currency of the expression “industrializing the cinema” in recent years). At the broader national imaginary, just like the cycle foregrounds the presentation of all sorts of machineries and next-generation technologies in its retelling and imagining of the national history (e.g., tanks, guns, aircrafts, drones, AI, automation computation, etc.), the popular image of a strong nationhood is usually imbricated with a technologically-determined historical view. As much as the cinematic experience of national modernity is sanctioned by the globalized sensorium through Hollywood, such an imagination of national modernization bears vestiges from the Western Enlightenment project and its colonial history. And it is such a desire to mobilize cinematic technologies for a modern—or rather modernized—experience and imagination that I would call the modernizing passion.

Here I appropriate Rey Chow’s term of “the primitive passions” when she writes about the cultural landscapes of post-colonial societies in the twentieth century. For Chow, such an interest in the primitive most prominently appears “at a moment of cultural crisis—at a time when…the predominant sign of traditional culture, such as the written word, is being dislocated amid vast changes in technologies of signification” (Primitive Passions 22). What Chow has unpacked is the relation between the demand for cultural identity expression and the machineries and materials that are available for its expression at a post-colonial time. Similarly, the modernizing passion stipulates a set of relation between cultural expression and their available machineries and materials. In the new century when the nation is in need of a new way to conceive of its present and future, the cinema again provides the primary expressive medium yet the materials and machineries it deploys are of a vastly different set. Corresponding to the deployment of special effects, the modernizing passion plays out its fantasies through “a generic realm of associations” that has less to do with the primitive (e.g., the animal, the savage, the countryside, the indigenous, the people) but with the modern (e.g. the cosmopolitan, the machine, the technology etc.)[20] While Chow argues that film—in its singular form—provides the most appropriate material expression for primitivism (Primitive Passions 22-3), we see that the relation between cinematic technologies—especially special effects—and their expressive faculty for an experience of national modernity in the cycle of main melody blockbusters is, indeed, the product of a complex of historical forces: the development of cinematic technologies, the affective engagement of the audience, the investment of the industry, geopolitics and its history, etc..

Juxtaposing the primitive passions and the modernizing passion also helps to surface the politics, or the (re)constructed relation of meaning in the cycle. Chow has noted how the socially oppressed classes—women, in particular—become the predominant component of the literatures in primitivism (Primitive Passions 21). Take the most prominent cinematic cases of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and The Story of Qiuju (1992), we see how the female figure is frequently called up as “a means of putting on display both the glorious and the barbarous aspects of Chinese culture” in response to “the libidinal tendencies of a postmodern, corporatist globalism” at the end of the twentieth century (Chow, “Fetish Power Unbound” 495). Chow has argued that such a centering of the subaltern, the underprivileged, or the woman particularly does not so much indicate that the intellectuals “become ‘enlightened’ and choose to revolutionize their writing by turning their attention to the oppressed classes,” but instead that “they find in the underprivileged a source of fascination that helps to renew, rejuvenate, and ‘modernize’ their own cultural production” (Primitive Passions 21). In the modernizing passion of the main melody blockbusters, however, we see the fascination with an entirely different social class. As critics have noticed the high masculinity in the cycle, the cycle’s entries favor greatly male characters in the center of their national and global actions, should it be the titular hero in Wolf Warrior 2, the military squads in Operation Red Sea, The Eight Hundred, Sacrifice and the Battle at Lake Changjin series or the rescue units in the Wandering Earth series. Similar to the woman figure in the primitive passions, the populated images of the man’s action in the cycle shows not so much an attention to the social class itself but a discovery in it of a source of fascination at the current historical moment of modernizing the cultural productions.

Yet it is in the evocation of the two gendered classes in response to the different demands of their disparate historical situations that we find an entrenched and unsettling power struggle. At these two disparate historical moments, the cinema is similarly evoked as a mechanism for affirming cultural identities with their different cinematic novelties and towards different audiences—in the primitive passions, the exhibitionist image of primitivism for international art cinema screens; in the modernizing passion, the exhibitionist special effects for the domestic viewers. Yet the generic realms of associations they form constitute very much the same world-making: the woman/the primitive/the past vis-à-vis the man/the modern/the future. It is the construction of such relations of meaning that I argue, constitutes the politics of the cycle. As suggested above, such relations of meaning are neither imposed by the single force of global capitalism nor by state authoritarianism; rather, they are the result of a series of coincident or even anachronistic factors including but not limited to the development of cinematic technologies, the investment of different industrial actors from the state to the market, as well as the heritage of the Western Enlightenment project and its colonial history. The coincident and anachronistic coexistence of these factors may bespeak the whimsical appeal of the cycle, but the power-meaning dynamics it reveals stipulates a history of entrenched unsettling cultural regularities.

Conclusion

With the rebound of cinematic entertainment in the post-pandemic era, Chinese cinema together with the global industry is on its way to explore the new normality. The domestic cinema in 2024 has seen the revival of one genre that is long considered as the staple of the home industry outputs: the more down-to-earth comedy.[21] Whether or for how long the cycle of main melody blockbusters and its modernizing passion will extend into the post-crisis Chinese cinema is still to see. So are the cycle’s impacts on the other production options in the broader media ecosystem. For instance, Aynne Kokas has argued that China’s ambition for global cultural influence and Hollywood’s simultaneous desire for the lucrative mainland market in the past two decades create a middle ground that makes possible Sino-US media collaborations including film coproduction.[22] How would the main melody blockbusters’ phenomenal success and the accompanying seemingly waning interest in Hollywood products in the home audience disrupt such an equilibrium and change the pattern of this “new global media order” (Kokas 13)?

At the same time, Chinese media brands have also been charting new paths in the global media landscape. Alongside the acquisition of the international releasing rights of the Wandering Earth movie by Netflix, the 2015 Hugo Award winner by the same novelist The Three-Body Problem had been serialized by both domestic streaming platform Tencent Video and Netflix, making itself another recognizable Chinese (or perhaps better to say, global) media brand. All these cases show the increasing complexities of global cultural economy. How to navigate these complexities remains an important question for all practitioners in the field and it remains the job of cultural scholars and critics to find the regularities underneath such constant fluctuations. In this article, I use the cycle of main melody blockbusters as a case for illustrating such an increasingly complex and disjunctive global cultural order. At the same time, I propose a more pragmatic approach to probe the stable and problematic relations of meaning that lies underneath. Neither a sheer celebration of the increasing volume of exchanges as hybridization nor a downright defeatism of its entrenched struggles, I see such a pragmatics as a form of optimistic pessimism that through its discovery of the unsettling relations of meaning, has the likelihood to bring more “subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rule of the game” (Haraway 27).

Notes

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