Imagine a disaster at sea, a ship full of people—men, women, children.
The ship sinks, people are thrown into the sea, there’s general mayhem.
And then what happens?
Men start fighting each other for life jackets, men stabbing each other for a piece of plank. And men snatching life jackets away from little children.
Hard to believe, but apparently, it did happen in the sinking of the “Great Peace,” sometime around 1949.
What manner of men would snatch life jackets away from children?
It brings to mind that other disaster, the Titanic, where the opposite happened, gallant men giving up their places in lifeboats to women and children.
Admittedly, both depictions are fictionalized scenarios—in the Titanic and the Crossing II.
It’s hard to know what really happened.
The worst part of it (for me anyway) is, is it a cultural thing?
Did the disaster in the Crossing II really happen as envisioned by John Woo?
Are the Chinese people really so selfish and cruel, will they do anything at self preservation?
Recent stories coming out of China seem to confirm it, that the mercenary and mean side of the Chinese psyche cannot be underestimated.
Melamine spiked milk, dumplings filled with lard enhanced cardboard and what else. To the point where these days, I refuse to buy any food made in China.
Among some of the subplots in the Crossing is that of a woman by the name of Yu Zhen played by beautiful Zhang Ziyi.
The woman, in searching for her true love, had to resort to prostitution to try to get a ticket to Taiwan where she was told his battalion had ended up. Throughout it all, she remained pure in heart and spirit.
At one point, a dying soldier entrusted her with a ring to give to his family.
She found the family, but they were already dead from starvation, and went back to the soldier to find that he had died too. Instead of keeping the ring and selling it to get the ticket she so desperately needed, she put the ring back on his dead finger.
It just goes to show, you can defile a person’s body but you cannot defile the spirit.
Talking about prostitution, I saw the Force Awakens recently too.
And what a letdown it was.
Trust Disney to take a great franchise and turn it into corporate crap.
With precious little plot to speak of, and what little there was were complete rip-offs of earlier Star Wars movies.
It doesn’t take much to connect the pieces together and figure out that Lucas had sold his great legacy to the highest bidder, a fact he unwittingly let out in an interview with Charlie Rose.
Mr. Lucas, you are right, no need to backtrack. Disney is a bunch of white slavers.
It just goes to show, with money, you don’t have to defile a person’s body to defile his spirit.
Philip Hii 