战狼2
Chinese film uses a kitchen to crush Hollywood’s war myth_我的网站
一 | 中新社广州8月21日电(王华 潘俊林)由广州市人民政府主办的第34届广州博览会(简称广博会)、由中国发明协会主办的第十二届国际发明展览会，21日在中国进出口商品交易会展馆同期开幕。本届广博会设立总面积3500平方米的机器人表演专区，集结100多台机器人与观众互动。 本届两大展会举办时间为8月21日至23日。第34届广州博览会以“两业融合提质效、畅通循环向未来”为主题，总展览面积约20万平方米，汇聚超5000家参展企业、近10000家专业采购商，全国50多个省市政府代表团组团参展。
Promotional material for
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East Photo: Courtesy of DoubanIn the days after
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East opened across China, a striking chorus of overseas voices began to surface online. Moviegoers from South Africa, Iran, Thailand and elsewhere hailed the film as a rare departure from Hollywood's war stories, praising its decision to place US forces in the role of invader rather than "liberator." One widely shared post called it the movie that finally showed "the real America."
The excitement is understandable. Director Wen Muye has made something quietly radical: a war film that refuses spectacle.
There is a wedding scene in
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East that stays with you long after the credits. In the middle of a war zone, people still find a way to dance, embrace, and cry as if tomorrow will never come. The joy is desperate and beautiful at the same time. Watching it, you feel the ache of a simple truth: These people should have been allowed every tomorrow. That single sequence captures what director Wen Muye has achieved. He has made a film that only a Chinese filmmaker could have made - because of a sensibility that refuses to treat war as spectacle or moral theater.
The commercial response in China has been equally striking. During the past weekend the film took in 373 million yuan ($55.35 million) at the box office, over 4 times the amount earned by Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in the same market. Audiences walked out of the theater talking about war, food, and the value of ordinary life. The numbers confirm what the film itself demonstrates: a story told from the kitchen can still command a massive audience.
The story follows Xu Fu, an ordinary Chinese chef who travels to a Middle Eastern city (clearly modeled on Iraq around 2003) to work off family debt. With restaurant manager Ma Junsheng, he opens the Dragon Restaurant and serves Chinese food. Even after the invasion begins, the kitchen does not close. The kitchen becomes a fragile island where meals continue to be cooked while the war begins outside. Xu Fu is not a hero in a Hollywood sense. He does not pick up a gun or deliver speeches about freedom. He just keeps cooking.
What makes the film remarkable is how cleanly it rejects the familiar Western war narrative. Hollywood has spent decades following US soldiers into foreign cities, showing their courage, their trauma, and their brotherhood. Films like
Saving Private Ryan and
Black Hawk Down place the US experience at the center and often reduce the local population to a background threat or grateful recipients of rescue.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East turns the camera the other way around. It asks a blunt question spoken to an American officer: "Without you, where would the terrorists come from?" The line is not delivered as propaganda. It is offered as a practical observation about cause and effect. Violence creates more violence. Children who lose everything do not become extremists by nature; they do because the options for a normal life have been deprived.
The film makes this point through a recurring image: the knife. In Xu Fu's hands, a knife is a tool for chopping, flipping, and seasoning. It produces the bowl of "Xu Fu stew" that orphans finish and ask for more. In other hands, the same blade becomes a weapon. "The knife is not good or evil," the film suggests. "People are." The same logic applies to the children. Young Saif learns to cook under Xu Fu's guidance, kneading dough, controlling the flame, earning respect through a plate of food. Other kids the same age are packed into cars with bombs instead of books.
Here the Chinese director's approach proves smarter than the Hollywood model. Hollywood war films usually rely on scale, speed, and moral clarity: big battles, clear villains, and a central hero who grows through combat. The camera stays close to the soldiers, the soundtrack swells, and the audience is guided toward admiration or catharsis. Director Wen Muye does the opposite. He stays small, slow, and unresolved. By placing the story inside a kitchen rather than on the front line, he forces the viewer to confront the human cost without the distraction of heroic spectacle. Instead of telling us who is right, he shows us what is lost. This restraint is more demanding and ultimately more persuasive. It trusts the audience to connect the dots rather than feeding them a pre-packaged moral. Where Hollywood often ends with a sense of hard-won victory or noble sacrifice, this film leaves you with the quieter, harder realization that the real damage continues long after the shooting stops: in the minds of children and in the broken routines of daily life. That choice of focus is not just different; it is more honest and more intelligent.
This perspective feels especially Chinese in its emphasis on ordinary survival. Chinese culture has long treated food as the foundation of life: "Heaven is big, earth is big, but eating is bigger." The dishes in the film, from northeastern iron-pot stews mixed with local grilled fish to carefully prepared fried rice made from whatever ingredients remain, are not exotic decoration. They are the practical language of endurance. One of the most moving moments comes when Xu Fu cooks a simple stew for a group of orphans during their escape. What began as "leftovers not fit for the table" becomes a permanent item on the menu. Anything made with care can feed people. That idea carries more weight than any battlefield speech.
The film's approach to food and daily ritual reminds me of director Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman. Lee used elaborate family dinners to reveal emotional truths that characters could not speak aloud. Wen transplants that same quiet method into a war zone. The kitchen becomes the moral center of the story. Steam, chopping boards, and shared tables matter more than explosions. In both films, cooking is never just cooking. It is a way of insisting that human connection still exists even when larger forces try to erase it.
A quiet but powerful metaphor runs through the story: the potato. A potato is harmless until it sprouts and becomes poisonous. The children radicalized by war are not born poisonous. They become so when the soil around them turns toxic. The film returns several times to the simple instruction "don't waste food." In peacetime the phrase sounds ordinary. In a war zone it becomes a statement about the waste of human lives. War does not only kill people; it spoils what could have been good.
By the final scenes, the Dragon Restaurant has become more than a business. It is a small example that another way of existing is possible. Children are learning to cook instead of learning to kill. The film does not claim this solves geopolitics. It simply shows that the most basic human desire, to eat well and live another day, remains the clearest common language across cultures.
The author is a reporter with the Global Times. [email protected]。第十二届国际发明展览会以“发明创新共创高质量发展”为主题，展览面积约2万平方米，集中展出3700余项中外创新发明成果，设置七大专业特色展区。两大盛会联动举办，实现科创资源与实体产业双向赋能。 据了解，本届广博会创新推行“主宾+国际、白天+夜间、线上+线下”多维融合办展新模式，紧扣大科技、大健康、大消费三大核心赛道，布局智能智造、“百千万工程”和乡村振兴、银发经济与养老健康、医疗与健康产业、品质消费五大特色板块。
二 | 此外，配套多场产业推介、供需对接、项目签约、惠民文体活动，打造高能级产业“会客厅”与高品质市民“嘉年华”。8月21日开幕的第34届广州博览会设立总面积3500平方米的机器人表演专区，集结100多台机器人与观众互动。潘俊林 摄 值得一提的，是本届广博会设立总面积达3500平方米的机器人表演专区，搭建有一个主舞台、两个副舞台。专区集结宇树、众擎、智元等品牌共计100多台机器人，还推出30余场沉浸式科技展演节目，每小时安排一场特色机器人表演，观众可现场与人形机器人互动合影，获得沉浸式科技互动体验。
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