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Helming Hollywood

Levin, who had experienced ups and downs in the entertainment industry in his previous life came to Hollywood in 1996 from 2014. It's a slow-paced novel. Unofficial translation of the novel by heracross. Raw version can be found at https://www.uukanshu.com/b/24330/. You can read advanced chapters on my Patreon account: https://www.patreon.com/Sayonara816.

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342 Chs

Three Clues

The long-awaited movie finally started in the cinema.

At the beginning of the movie, the scene is in a courtroom. What is surprising is that this is not a modern court but looks more like a court in the 1950s. And the case in the court quickly let people know that they were not wrong.

The person being tried in court was a physicist. The mistake made by this physicist: In his own research, he quoted the experimental data of Soviet physicist Landau, so he was considered to be suspected of conspiracy.

It was immediately clear that this was the era of McCarthyism.

When McCarthyism was prevalent, 20 million people in the United States were subject to political persecution. During this period, almost anyone who had the slightest chance of being associated with the red regime would be persecuted. 

Many great scientists, including Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, were accused of conspiracy.

Most of these accusations are extremely unreasonable. However, in that era, it persecuted many people and was indeed a tragedy.

Landau is a very famous figure in the physics community. It is not unreasonable for physicists to quote his research results. However, in the era when McCarthyism was prevalent, this was not allowed. 

In court, the physicist spoke poorly and kept talking about his thesis, while the prosecutor opposite him was full of inflammatory words.

"We should always be vigilant against our enemies, but this person is using the enemy's research results..."

"Scientific research has no borders..."

"But you should serve our country!"

In the court, the physicist, who emphasized that science has no borders, was quickly seized upon by prosecutors and squeezed in. Everyone in the courtroom was already incited.

"Guilty, guilty, guilty!"

Almost the entire courtroom was shouting wildly. The footage was specifically given to the jury. They were also chanting that it was self-evident how this person would end.

The camera of the movie began to change. It first rose up, looking down from the sky at the enthusiastic crowd in the courtroom. Then, the camera started aiming at the auditorium. 

In the auditorium, only one woman with a little girl sitting next to her showed a completely different look from the others. She burst into tears and looked extremely painful while those around her shouted guilty.

Judging from their expressions, these must be the physicist's wife and daughter.

The young girl bit her finger and stood in the court, watching her father argue with others. She didn't know that all these debates were developing in a direction that was even more unfavorable to her father, but she could clearly see her father being criticized by many people in the court. She can see the undisguised hostility towards her father from the people around him.

These fanatical crowds were incited. They all hate her father.

For adults, that short memory may be just a painful memory, but for a little girl, all of this is enough to leave a lingering shadow in her heart.

She stared blankly at the excited crowd around her, with a lingering darkness in her eyes.

Even moviegoers, at this time, couldn't help but secretly admire the young actor's acting skills.

This little girl is named Dakota Fanning. She does have excellent acting skills that other child stars don't have.

Such a background is not surprising.

In this story, in fact, the background of the times is more about a process that gradually pushes people towards hatred towards human beings. 

The most crucial step in this process is the psychological shadow of childhood. The little girl witnessed the trial of her father, which was an unforgettable memory for her.

The entanglement of this kind of memory, coupled with the fact that the situation is developing in a worse direction step by step, the lack of care from others during her growth process, and the fact that this person is an intellectual with weakness. After suffering setbacks, it is easy to have a decadent mentality, all of which created her tragedy.

Levi cannot completely copy the original work, but what is more important here is to capture the character's mentality rather than completely copying the story.

The camera flashed by and changed to another scene.

This time, what appears in the picture is modern society. This also makes people a little curious: what is the connection between this story and the previous story?

In this case, it's a person who just received a package. He opened the parcel and took out a strange set of equipment. He opened the box and talked to the postman.

"This is a gaming equipment introduced to me by a friend. It is used to play a game..."

The man named Paul looked a little frail, but as soon as he received the equipment, he closed the door and impatiently connected the game to the computer. Through the fonts he entered on the computer, people also knew that this was a game called Three-Body Problem.

The name of this game is the same as the movie, but does it have anything to do with the previous story?

The camera focused on Paul, who was wrapping himself in gaming equipment, first a close-up of his face and then a close-up of his pupils. The camera zoomed out again, and people discovered he was already in a desert.

Judging from the fact that he only wore a linen tunic, he should be in ancient Egypt. The music also began to become ethereal and vast, and everything seemed different from before. This gaming equipment allows people to truly enter the game immersively.

This equipment really looks a bit sci-fi. This made people start to get a little excited, and the story seemed to be getting to the point.

And in this vast desert, figures also appeared from the haze on the horizon.

This man was wearing a robe and accompanied by an entourage. It is evident at first glance that he was an unusual person. He and Paul also started introducing themselves.

"I'm Ahmes." The visitor introduced himself. 

Then, the two of them started communicating. The visitor called himself Ahmes, and Paul immediately adopted the pseudonym Copernicus.

Those who are knowledgeable about ancient Egyptian science may be aware of Ahmes, an ancient Egyptian mathematician who was not an obscure figure. 

As Paul named himself Copernicus, their encounter can be viewed as a meeting of two scholars engaged in the pursuit of knowledge.

Paul seemed to think so too, but soon, he discovered some differences: the Egyptian desert was not that hot, unlike Egypt, and the sun had not come out for too long, which was different from what Egypt should be like.

He had questions about this, and from Ahmes and his followers, he also got some information: the place he is in should not be a place similar to the Earth. 

Here, the movement of celestial bodies is extremely chaotic, and the sun rises and sets irregularly. What Ahmes has to do now is go to the Pharaoh and explain the laws of movement of celestial bodies.

Their journey was also full of hardships: soon, Ahmes's entourage was dehydrated due to lack of food and water.

All this seems a bit weird, but first of all, it is a game, and secondly, people who watch the movie also know that it is a science fiction film. People have no doubts about this, and they are even more looking forward to the answer to the question.

Paul and the audience agree on this. Full of questions, he followed Ahmes and listened to him talking about his ideas in front of the Pharaoh. He wanted to use astrology and theological theories to explain the astronomical calendar.

Even the audience could see how unreliable this behavior was.

And his is unreliable. Soon, he got his retribution: three flying stars appeared at the same time, and the sky became cold.

In the sky, light blue snowflakes floated up. Below absolute zero, water comes first. Then, dry ice, and finally, oxygen and nitrogen condensed - this was so cold that even the air was frozen.

All this looks so beautiful, but this is the destruction of a world.

People also knew at this time that this game was a process of speculation on the movement of celestial bodies in alien worlds. If the speculation is wrong, the result will be the destruction of the world.

The camera changes again, this time to the police station.

This time, the protagonist of the story is a policeman.

His story seems more straightforward: Not long ago, a physicist committed suicide. There is nothing suspicious about her death. However, when investigating her belongings, he discovered something wrong. 

He found something similar to a countdown in the deceased's belongings. These countdown records were very detailed. Chaotic, but close in time. 

Relying on the quality of a police officer, Renault believed that there was something fishy about this suicide case, and he tried to investigate it himself.

"I will not let her death go just because she committed suicide. There should be some reasons for her death."

In this regard, Renault's attitude is very firm.

However, this investigation is not very easy because the deceased did commit suicide, and the deceased was a physicist, and Renault could not understand many of her notes. 

Even with the conditions very difficult, Renault did not give up. He carefully searched for the deceased's articles, and among them, the words shooter and farmer also attracted Renault's attention.

What do these two unusual words mean? This became something Renault needed to consider. He tried to find the meaning of the two words, and after much questioning, he figured it out.

For a shooter, the five-centimeter bullet holes created by the gun could be the truth of the universe; for a farmer, hens eating at 11 a.m. every day could be the truth of the universe.

The shooter and the farmer are talking about the same thing - human beings are limited by their own understanding. 

They are likely to regard something that is actually ridiculous as the truth of the universe.

So, what is this absurd truth about humans?

"If this was the cause of her death, then what motivated her to commit suicide was the truth she believed was found to be false. She thought she was as pathetic as that farmer, so she committed suicide. 

 She studied physics faithfully, but she seemed to have found that physics is fake. Because of the death of physics, she committed suicide."

Physics is dead - a word that appears many times in the trailer; at this time, it finally officially appeared.

But how did physics die? What's going on in the world in that game? What does the little girl at the beginning have to do with this? What is the connection between these three?

At this point in the story, the answer has not yet been given.

*****

Thanks and kudos for my patreons 

Marcelo Maia

Britanna

Mandy G

Scott DePaepe

You can read advanced chapters on my Patreon account: https://www.patreon.com/Sayonara816.

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