伐木累
Chinese film uses a kitchen to crush Hollywood’s war myth_我的网站
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科技创新，让盐碱地生“金”。图为中国农业科学院农产品加工与营养健康研究院（沧州）科研人员近日在查看旱碱麦标本。
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8月6日，中国科学院南皮生态农业试验站科研人员在实验室测量盐碱地土壤氮磷钾含量。
8月7日，中国科学院南皮生态农业试验站科研人员在盐碱地试验田测量耐盐碱作物株高。
8月7日，中国科学院南皮生态农业试验站科研人员在实验室分拣旱碱麦粒。
良种是丰产核心。
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]
。图为沧州中捷产业园区农科所科研人员近日在实验室进行育种攻关。
盐碱地上麦飘香。图为黄骅市一家旱碱麦面粉加工企业工人近日在查看生产线。
科技赋能让黄骅面花产业成为盛开在盐碱地上的又一朵“致富花”。图为帝鉴食品有限公司工人近日在生产车间制作面花。
8月6日，中国农业科学院农产品加工与营养健康研究院（沧州）科研人员在查看旱碱麦啤酒酿造情况。8月6日，中国科学院南皮生态农业试验站的盐碱地试验田里，科研人员汤博伟、原嘉琪正在开展土壤动态监测工作。两人手持取土钻，在试验田分层采集不同深度的土样，然后细致封装、分类编号。田间采样结束后，样本被送入实验室进行系统检测。
三 | “精准摸清土地盐分、养分变化规律，才能对症下药调整种植方案，让盐碱地越种越肥、稳产增收。
四 | ”汤博伟说，依托常态化土壤监测获得的科学数据，中国科学院南皮生态农业试验站集成推广排盐淋洗、微生物改良、粮草轮作、微咸水灌溉等先进技术，持续优化水土条件，筑牢沧州旱碱麦规模化高产稳产基础。科技创新，让盐碱地生“金”。
五 | 一项项现代农业技术的推广应用，正助力沧州做好盐碱地特色农业这篇大文章。良种是丰产核心。
六 | 沧州中捷产业园区农科所长期扎根盐碱地开展育种攻关，成功选育捷麦19、捷麦20等耐盐、耐旱、高产品种，精准适配滨海特殊土质。系列麦种在黄骅、南皮等盐碱地块大面积推广，抗逆性强、产量稳定，让昔日贫瘠滩涂变身丰收的麦田。从改土育种到精深加工，全链条科技赋能推动旱碱麦产业提档升级。中国农业科学院农产品加工与营养健康研究院（沧州）针对旱碱麦膳食纤维高的特点，持续优化加工工艺，破解加工短板，研发全麦代餐、麦香零食、特色面食等多元化新品，拓宽旱碱麦增值路径。帝鉴食品有限公司通过智能设备精准把控和面、醒发等工序，将18道古法工艺结合现代保鲜技术，让黄骅面花产业成为盛开在盐碱地上的又一朵“致富花”。
七 | 日报记者 张 昊 摄影报道。
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Published on:17:03:25