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

by Tingyu Chen

In the opening sequence of Wolf Warrior 2, 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. The flexible acceleration and deceleration of the camera as well as its elastic movement within a vast space in this digitally realized long take flaunts the difference between a technologized eye and the human vision. The impression of such a technologized eye is one main attraction of the cycle’s effects-heavy imagery.

“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.