Jia has kept his style but lost some of his edge in this state-funded effort with its rather relentless harping on the irony of a globalized China whose underlings can't get out of the country and are stuck in menial jobs in Beijing, cut off from their native dialects and where they came from and reduced to expressing their strongest emotions in text messages and cellphone chats. There are compelling moments, like the two main lovers Taisheng (Taisheng Chen) and Tao (Tao Zhao) lying on Taisheng's hard dormitory bed and even the schmaltzy wordless communing between Tao and her Russian friend Anna (Alla Shcherbakova), but in the aimless round of daily emptiness of working at this trashy hi-tech carnival falsification of "The World" outside, which the workers will never see in person, Jia loses the momentum of the turbulent, emotional decade he chronicles in "Platform" or the tragic downward spiral of the two boys in "Unknown Pleasures." I don't object to the animations, because they're thematically unified by always being connected to travel and cellphones and they create a sense of link with the 20-somethings, the generation after the director's that he's focusing on here; the fact that they're glib and kitsch just fits with everything else quite intentionally. So does the New Age-y techno music score, which is annoying and repetitious, but again, intentionally so. This time there is a bluntly ironic contrast between the pretty brightly colored costumes of the World shows the girls put on, and the shabby run down environments in which they live off-duty. The contrast is a little too pat: surely some of the environments -- and there is one, at the train station -- off duty are as glittering and new as the World stage shows. One can't say that Jia has lost the complexity of environment he achieved in his earlier films; he's just limited its focus. One may miss the jangling ambient noise of Platform and Unknown Pleasures, though, and particularly the informative TV broadcasts of the latter, which always fit in context even though they may speak to us more than to the characters.<br /><br />For me, Unknown Pleasures is by far the emotional peak of Jia's work so far, and hence the film that puts across his themes most powerfully as well. Next comes Platform, which is off-putting and sometimes almost absurdly hard to follow, but which nonetheless obviously has deep personal significance to the director as an authentic portrait of his generation's journey into the Nineties. The World is almost too self-consciously a development of his themes of alienation and globalization and of a generation without hope or aims. The theme park is almost too obvious and too good a metaphor, and it robs his excellent actors of the opportunity to be themselves for more than a few minutes at a time.<br /><br />What does the ending mean? It seems to mean more than anything else that Jia wants to hit us over the head with the idea that his characters have nowhere to go, and it also seemed to me to be somehow a too-late subconscious attempt to steal from the kind of effects we get in Kiselowski's Dekalog. But it only underlines that this is a world seemingly cut off from any moral system.<br /><br />The World meanders too long, given the failure to connect emotionally, but it is nonetheless a powerful, rich, and original work and Jia is unquestionably one of the great ones of his generation working today, and representing as he does literally millions and millions of people in a dynamic enormously changing country, he stands as one of the world (small W)'s most important movie directors. Whether "success" in the form of open film-making and state funding will "destroy" him or water down his raw originality remains an open question.