I was reading a lot about this movie called The Mermaid that broke box office records in China and pulled in $543 million in the box office. That is crazy.
I watched some of the trailers and I wasn’t overly drawn in on it because the excessive CGI looked really fake. However after I watched this trailer… I thought it was hilarious so I decided to watch it.
And the verdict was… Shorty thinks it’s 90 minutes of her life she’ll never get back but I enjoyed it. Haha it was fun. Sure some of the jokes were lame but I liked some of the other jokes.
The CGI was excessive and not great. There were some scenes I felt they didn’t even need to do in front of a green screen (like outside the Mermaid’s house) and just find somewhere with scenery but it’s almost like they wanted to do it so they could film from the comfort of the studio.
I did however think about how this would change the China movie industry. Already there is so much money being poured into movies in China given the size of the box office. Today in terms of special effects they’re really far behind Hollywood but with the amount of investment going in, I think it’s going to be a really short time before they catch up with hollywood.
I think it will be a short time, maybe 3 years.. and we’ll start seeing local Chinese movies with kickass special effects like we saw in Avatar, or San Andreas or The Revenant where a CGI bear looked just like a real bear.
On The Mermaid… watch it if you like slapstick kind of comedy. I’m not particularly into slapstick so much but I still found their humor funny. Like the scene in the trailer above with the policeman sketch artist. I found that hilarious… although I gotta admit it was funnier in the trailer than it was in the actual movie.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space