Customer Reviews

The World

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm shocked by some of the reviews here, but not necessarily surprised - The average filmgoer/dvdwatcher has the attention span of a small child on crack & the intellectual curiosity of those small dustbunnies that collect under old furniture. Still, I expect more from you people.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film - & yes, I wasn't actually expecting to. In fact I bought it more than a month ago & kept making up excuses not to watch it. Imagine my surprise when I found myself intrigued by some of the relationships in the film. Tao's boyfriend who mysteriously returns at the beginning of the film then disappears for the duration. Or her strange relationship with the Russian woman Anna. Even more interesting was the relationship between Niu & Xiaowei - why did they end up getting married considering Niu's jealous behavior (he set himself on fire for godssake)? Who knows, but these details make for a supremely fascinating character study IMHO. Like real life, this film demonstrates that our relationships can be extremely complex & often unpredictable. We make friends with the most unlikely people in the bizarrest of situations - maybe we're lonely or just sense something of ourselves in them. We get involved with people we know will hurt us (over & over again). We often feel like we can't fully understand the person we're with & their motives...

Of course, The World's relationship angle is also used in a much broader sense: the employees of Beijing's amusement park & their relationship with China & in turn, China's relationship to the rest of the world. It seems to me that as China becomes more capitalistic this movie will gain in popularity with people who wish to understand these people better. Like most of us, they don't quite know where they fit in the world & although they work in a park that offers a scaled-down glimpse of the world outside Beijing, most of them will never get to see that world first hand.

giving this 2 STARS on AVERAGE????? Perhaps you should spend more time at 25 theater GOO-GOO PLEX watchin a Michael Bay Marathon or something. GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER!!! GO SEE SOME REAL CINEMA!!!! THINK FOR A CHANGE!!!

For those who felt this deserved 2 stars or less I recommend the following: Cache, Raise The Red Lantern, Yi yi, anything by Kurosawa. oh sorry.. these aren't playing along with all the Adam Sandler films you wanted to see next to the Cold Stone Creamery and the ruby Tuesday you wanted to visit afterward???

WELL TOUGH!!!! you need a friggin education..

review below.. read it ... you might learn something.

How can you truly show disconnection. I think I have truly seen a master in action with Shijie, a film that takes place in a world theme park (this place does really exist) in China.

Zhang Ke Jia is a masterful director. His use of colour and character direction is unreal. One of the things he uses to great effect are arches and hallways. Characters appear in them, or look out of them in what is some of the most visual photography I have ever witnessed. There is also a great conversation scene between two characters who don't share the same language, and the use of reflected light that is truly remarkable, make sure to watch for this scene. But it doesn't end there.

Zhang also does something so miraculous that I thought would be impossible. He borrows heavily from Ozu, particularly a scene that is reminiscent of Tokyo Story and makes something that is uniquely his own.

The basic synopsis of "The World", is of the lives of the workers in the theme park. Some romances develop, a foreign Russian worker Anna is introduced to the group even though she and another Chinese girl Tao don't share the same language. Everyday trials and tribulations happen for these young adults who are trying to work in the 'New China'.

Somehow though with all the issues involved, rural people coming into the cities, technological communication, the erosion of China's agrarian past, the fakeness of place, the exploitation of workers and lead up to prostitution, the camaraderie of friends, the cheapness of life.. somehow all of these themes are jumbled into a glorious presentation that you can't take your eyes off of.

The film is beyond surreal, its real setting makes it all more spectacular and that more effective. I had a hard time separating the actors from the characters, at times I thought I was watching a documentary and I prayed or hoped for someone to do well and be happy and find themselves thinking that these were real people in harsh sometimes difficult situations. "The World" has this effect on you, you can't begin to believe the beauty and harshness it shows, and it tricks you in the most crafty way.

The World is a truly fantastic small place in more ways than one...

The World is aptly named; it's set in Beijing's World Park--a real theme park in China's capital, complete with miniature versions of landmark buildings and monuments from all over the world including, in this film, the often-mentioned Eiffel Tower, as well as the pyramids of Egypt, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Moscow's Red Square, the Taj Mahal, and so on.

The director, Zhang Ke Jia, focuses on a number of younger people (in their 20s) who work at World Park, interleaving their lives with each other to ultimately present a vision of 21st century urban China. This has a markedly different feel and tone from his earlier Unknown Pleasures, set in a rural provincial area, and from my point of view, is all the better for that change of setting.

The underlying thematic feel of the film is the inevitability of ephemeral relationships given not so much the availability of current technologies like the cell phone, but more so the reliance on them and, maybe most importantly, the enormous degree to which people's psychologies have been changed by these technologies. In fact, this short-lived nature of relationships, indicates Zhang, is inextricably enmeshed in the existence of World Park itself. People want to see and hear the world, all of the world, as quickly as possible, and World Park gives them that opportunity, even if in a fake kind of way--just like cell phones give people the opportunity to connect to anyone anywhere at any time, just as the Internet itself does.

But it's this instant "connectability" that also fosters relationships that cannot last. Tao, the female lead and a dancer at the World Park, has a strong emotional connection with her boyfriend Taisheng, a security guard in the same place. But he cannot commit; he cheats on her; she finds out. Meanwhile, another relationship is characterized by a boyfriend who always wants to know where his girlfriend has been, always asking her the same question--as if desperately trying to reverse this instant "everywhere at once" psychology that current technologies--and World Park itself--perpetuates.

This is a truly intriguing film, because it probes more deeply than a lot of other films have managed to do the nature of how globalization has effected a paradigm shift in how we think about our relationships with others, how we see ourselves--or maybe don't see ourselves too well at all--in the context of the world, and how we cope with those around us who have, just like us, changed--likely in the same way we have.

Highly recommended. A real find and worthy of the high praise it's received from a number of critics.

Zhang Ke Jia's The World is a great location in search of a movie. Set in a Chinese theme park recreating the major cities of Europe dominated by a one-third scale replica of the Eiffel Tower and dealing with the employees and their friends, it's really just comes over as a whole lot of nothing. Scenes may be true to life but they're trivial and, like the characters, never really go anywhere. That may well be the point, but that doesn't make watching it easy going. There's possibly something about the globalization of Chinese culture lurking in their somewhere and the contrast between the glamorous face of modern China vs the poor quality of life for migrant workers, but nothing really comes through because the characters are so univolving. Instead it's like watching people out of a bus window on a rainy day while waiting for the traffic lights to change, images washing over you inoffensively but without leaving any lasting impression as you move on.

Be aware that some Asian releases of this title are the much shorter 105-minute Chinese theatrical version rather than the international 139-minute version presented here on Zeitgeist's DVD.

This film starts out with a great deal of gusto - unfortunately, too many underdeveloped characters are introduced into the story which makes it progressively slower and less interesting.
The plot involves young people drawn to Beijing for work in various industries, but most of the action takes place at an amusement park with replicas of famous places around the world- The Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, Manhattan, Egyptian Pyramids, Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc. As we get deeper into the lives of the characters, we find they are not happy with their work situations in Beijing. No doubt they feel trapped in low-wage jobs that leave them unfulfilled and yearning for something more. Their personal lives are not going that great either- with cheating boyfriends & girlfriends, separations from children and spouses, problems with siblings, etc. I think "The World" is suffocated by the overwhelming sadness that touches the lives of the characters and the birth of 21st century Beijing. This film even has you feeling a deep sorrow for the camel who is used as a live prop for the Egyptian Pyramid display. There he stands, alone in his boredom, tethered to a boulder in a barren landscape for the amusement of paying guests. The end of the story is nothing short of perplexing. Watch this film, but be forewarned: this is no merry romp through an amusement park.

This movie is set in a theme park in China, where some of the more famous monuments of the world (the Eiffel tower, the Statue of Liberty) are reproduced in a much reduced scale. Meanwhile, the workers at the park live empty, unsatisfying lives, overburdened with work and empty of personal projects for the future. The main point of this movie seems to be that capitalism and modernization might have brought prosperity to some in China, but not to the majority of the chinese people, and in any case it has left the country spiritually void, without a common goal for the people with the exception of making money. Director Jia Zhang-Ke might be right in his analysis, but did he need to tell this story in such a ponderous, gloomy manner?.

Chinese from the provinces live in the new capitalist world of Beijing. It is not so much represented by economic growth as by symbolic and material change, specially the use of cellular phones. Society is still in a transformation phase, when women start to act as legal prostitutes using sex to advance and men start to steal, die, kill, or pay accordingly. Not showing how was life in the provinces makes difficult to compare with the actual situation of the protagonists, but the antagonism is nevertheless expertly crafted by opposing the fantasy world of a theme park with the real life of its workers. The most important theme in this film is the relationship people have with money once the process of capitalist social differentiation is put in motion. Some of them prefer to sacrifice comfort for old values (as love or family) and others go with the current, because they don't have options or because they want to live a better material life. Beijing seems an oppressive place to live, a monster that transforms its citizens in an anonymous mass of workers, like a futurist dystopia (and is not communism the responsible here!) The mix of personal poverty with superficial opulence for tourists seems lethal for the construction of a positive life-story (a narrative): the options seem to consist in escaping abroad or being subservient to somebody more powerful (in general, women to rich men). Governmental policy seems to be the only barrier between dozens of millions of migrants and the developed world. The creation of this longing for the outside world comes together with the development of Chinese capitalism, and the theme park is only the symptom of the phenomenon, giving our heroes a little respite from the life of the metropolis in construction. Beautifully filmed in DV, "The World" is a statement against the way in which some societal changes are made by unseen people that forgets how they affect to the big (in this case, the really big) part of the population.

A look at the transformation of China to a capitalist system and its effects on the inhabitants of a theme park. I've seen this 3 or 4 times now, and never tire of it.

It is a movie about modern China where mosaic of characters' interactions has been assembled on a landscape of The World Park presenting iconic landscapes from around a globe.

This review is a correction that may help search engines.

The location of the movie is "Window of the World" park, in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is next to Hong Kong. Window of the World is just one of several OCT recreation complexes in Shenzhen, including two other amusement parks: "Happy Valley" and the Chinese Folk Village/Splendid China.

The location is not Beijing, as listed in other reviews. Saying Window of the World is in Beijing is sort of like saying Cedar Point park (in Ohio) is in New Orleans.