Ocean Rescue (2023)

Not recommended

I was interested in Qu Jingjing's other work after watching and enjoying Mr Bad (she was really cool and sophisticated in it, from what I have seen so far), and saw this recent movie under her profile. Now this was probably a mistake, but I'll get into why:

This is one of those films that China makes available for free on youtube (because it can't harm domestic consumption since youtube is banned), so it's pretty easy to check out. Unfortunately, that meant that a lot of the music was removed, or at least it seems like it has been removed, because the film goes silent at times (especially during action sequences), coupled with some terribly awkward layering of the voices over the now-silent film, very obviously done after the film was completed. I imagine at moments like this, action/suspense music would have been playing in the Chinese release version. For music, that makes it a 0, but I guess I'll have to put it as 1.

As for the plot, granted that I got annoyed with the audio issues (and the fact that the mouths weren't matching the sound....) and skipped a lot, it is just an anti-terrorism action movie. None of the following is a spoiler, because it's in the synopsis of the cn Douban (豆瓣) page: terrorists commit crimes and murders, terrorists invade China's 'territorial waters', terrorists plan to detonate a nuclear bomb along a fault-line so the leads must protect the people living on the coasts, etc. The terrorists in the film are foreigners, typically appearing middle-eastern, but just in general, they are foreign and speak english. The plot didn't grip me in any way, though I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed the earlier action sequences if they weren't so awkwardly silent, and the special effects were of poor quality. 1.5 stars.

To quote a reviewer on the overall quality: "小儿科级别的反恐力作，愚蠢，幼稚，肤浅，生硬，对人类审美和智商的严重侮辱。" (-Douban page for 深海危机 ).

Now, if anyone had any doubt about the purpose of this film and missed the 'territorial waters' reference in the synopsis, it ends with a dedication to the PLA for safeguarding national security. TLDR: it's a bad quality propaganda film, and I wouldn't recommend it.

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