外媒是如何报道《流浪星球》的？

春节期间上映的电影一部都还没看，中外影评倒是看了不少。今天我们从外媒对《流浪星球》的报道中一起学点儿英文。

先看《卫报》：

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/11/china-first-blockbuster-sci-fi-film-wandering-earth?

从标题和首段可以看出这篇报道主要介绍了《流浪地球》的成功和意义。文中是这样介绍影片情节的：

Set in the distant future, the governments of Earth, confronted with annihilation from an unstable sun, have strapped thrusters on to the planet, ejecting it out into the universe in search of a new home. But as the Earth approaches Jupiter, a malfunction in the system puts it on course to crash into the planet.

《流浪地球》是中国科幻片的代表作，作者是以它为引子介绍中国科幻片，因此只用了两句话介绍了故事背景和主要冲突，没有任何剧透。为了让没看过这部电影的读者快速了解它的风格，作者接着说：

Described as a cross between Armageddon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film is seen by some as the dawn of Chinese sci-fi – a genre that has long been dominated by Hollywood.

《流浪星球》=《世界末日》 + 《200太空漫游》。我们在介绍中国影片和演员的时候就要有这种比较意识，当我们向别人介绍一个事物时，也可以主动问在他们的文化中是否有类似的事物。

顺便说《卫报》的开头段和《纽约时报》的标题很像，我们可以在交叉阅读中找到一些写作套路，把他们占为己有：

“China was a latecomer to space exploration, and in the movies, it has been a latecomer to science fiction, too. That is about to change.”

The Forbes 主要介绍的是春节上映的电影票房，于是用插入语的方式一句话介绍情节：

If The Wandering Earth, which is a $50 million-budgeted sci-fi drama concerning Earth having to build rocket thrusters to essentially launch itself out of the solar system after the Sun expands and threatens to scorch the planet (it makes sense in the movie, honest), is as leggy as Detective Chinatown 2 from here on out (1.6x its seven-day gross), it’ll end its run with a still-dynamite $558m Chinese total.

这里我们可以学习两个小词：concerning 和 leggy。

concerning 在这里是介词，表示“关于”，常常可以用来替换 about，involving。它的动词形式 concern 也可以这样用，比如 The story concerns a group of Chinese workers’ efforts to save Earth.

leggy 字面意思是“大长腿”，在电影票房中一个影片有 legs 或者被称为 leggy 是说它有后劲儿，能长期卖座。

Forbes上对leggy的解释

The Verge 的报道就比较细，语言较口语化，可以用于我们的口语素材。这里只选取一部分：

The film, based on a short story by Three-Body Problem author Cixin Liu, lays out a crisis of unprecedented proportions: the sun has become unstable, and within a hundred years, it will expand to consume Earth. Within 300, the entire solar system will be gone. Earth’s governments rally and unite to face the problem, and come up with a novel solution: they speckle the planet with 10,000 gigantic jets, and blast it out of its orbit and off on a hundred-generation journey to a new home 4.2 light-years away. The idea is to use Jupiter’s gravitational well to pick up speed for the trip, but a malfunction of the Earth Engine system leaves the planet caught in Jupiter’s gravity, and gradually being pulled toward destruction. A frantic group of workers have to scramble to reactivate the jets and correct the Earth’s course.

介绍完了影片，我们再来看两段评论。

Critics of the film have pointed out plot holes, cloying sentimentality and one-dimensional female characters – traits Wandering Earth shares with its Hollywood peers.

plot hole 或者 plot error 就是“剧情漏洞”。很多人说《流浪地球》的不足之一是过于刻意煽情，用英文就可以说成 the cloying of sentimentality：

我能想到的类似的表达还有 saccharine，cheesy，mushy，touchy-feely，有兴趣的朋友可以查一查。

The Verge 的报道中也提到这一点，不过作者把 cloying 换成了 sticky。一个甜的发腻，一个黏的发闷：

Pretty much any flaw The Wandering Earth can claim — flashy action scenes without much substance, a marked bent toward sticky sentimentality, an insistently pushy score that demands emotional response from the audience at every given moment — are familiar flaws from past blockbusters.

这段出现了 flashy, sticky, pushy 都是简单实用的好词，放在一起很有意思，写出了大片的通病。

还要注意这里的 bent 不是“弯曲”，而是“爱好”；score 不是“分数”，而是“配乐”，常指专门为某个电影量身创作的配乐（original score），一般都只是渲染气氛的纯音乐（instrumental music）。

这次读外看学英文就写到这里。明天就回国了，找空补补电影。

你假期看了哪些电影，学到了哪些英文？欢迎也分享给我。