MCLC: How Hollywood sucks up to China (1)

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How Hollywood sucks up to China (1)
I saw The Martian last night too, and we also cringed when the Chinese got involved in the rescue mission as Magnus describes. It puzzles me though, because the analogous China-nod in Skyfall involved gratuitous (but genuine) Shanghai footage, which clearly looked negotiated in. But in The Martian, I’m not so sure the “China” footage was actually in China (there was a green, European-style electric rail tram in the background of one shot of their hulking NASA-equivalent that I have never seen the likes of in China, for example).
Neither Skyfall nor the Martian have A-list Chinese actors, but both have Hong Kong actors playing mainland Chinese roles (in addition to some unknown actors who may be from PRC, not sure). For example, if I got the name and the role right, the Chinese space administration director Guo Ming, for example, is played by Eddie Ko, a Hong Kong actor who made his name in martial arts films in the 1970s. I haven’t seen Transformers 4: Age of Extinction yet, but it seems to have a whole PRC cast led by superstar Li Bingbing; did they film in China too? All this makes me wonder about the details of the Martian negotiation that led to this contrived “Taiyang shen” sequence (it seems very odd to me that China would call their own space program “Taiyang shen” or Apollo, by the way); could it be that the Chinese wanted more than they got, and the result was a compromise?
Charles Laughlin <cal5m at eservices.virginia.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 12, 2015
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