a review of 飞侠哥顿

While Star Wars is myth, Flash Gordon closer resembles a dream. Because, despite being outlandishly fantastical, it's filmed entirely with practical and very limited means. It leads to this projection of imaginative escapist concepts over the grounded, familiar reality. It produces a different visual language, and objects become subconsciously recontextualized and gain new meanings. Seeing iguanas as aliens may be amusing on the first glance, but once you're completely immersed in the story, it becomes subtly unnerving. The tiger scene towards the end was genuinely scary precisely because of how out of place it feels. It's like it rips you out of the seemingly safe and childlike fantasy back into the brutal reality. Underwater city and Cloud city both feel simultaneously escapist and oppressive because their artificiality renders them as prison worlds. This further applies to the entire planet Mongo and is reinforced by the plot. This whole serial is a story about escape in two contrasting senses of the word: escape from the real world into fantasy and escape from an imprisoning dream to a freeing reality. The story is meant to be simple, but even here the serial is so eager to escape the material world of mundanity and throw us headfirst into the exotic that the effect is akin to that of falling asleep. One could justify this by comparing it to the comic strip, but the comic strip in general was very much macro-storytelling, where it focuses on big events and skips over a lot of detail, dialogues and character development. This serial focuses on a lot of stuff that the strip kinda glossed over, but interestingly still chooses not to expand on the earthly life. From there Flash (the character) quickly develops into a Heracleian hero, accompanied by an archetypal old wise man and a damsel in distress. Many inspirations behind Star Wars can be seen here, entire sequences and plot points, but this only reaffirms the genius of George Lucas, who somehow managed to enrich those ideas without taking anything away from them. At the end of the day, Flash Gordon is a product of its time (emperor Ming is surely a product of the yellow peril, even if not as overtly racist as many other characters of the era) and a piece of kids' entertainment. Still, the sheer volume and imaginativeness of the adventures here, in just 4 hours, is kinda impressive. There are no slow or subtle episodes. Which, the flat-high dramatism of it further contributes to the strange dreamlike feeling of the serial, and I think that's something to be adored. It's purity.