I come home late night, tired, sit in my sofa, turn on the TV & there is this Chinese movie. It has just started, I want to change the channel, but I don't do it. I am curious, cos I have never seen a Chinese movie before. & there is this opening scene with long tracking shot & I say WOW & I watch it to the end.<br /><br />These have been the surprising 2 hours. This film is so great that it is hard to believe. Actually, it's not about some Chinese people doing their Chinese things in their China; It's about People in general. It is a film with a very UNIVERSAL approach to the very UNIVERSAL issues. The themes in this film are not limited in any particular space or national frontiers, they can be applied to any people of any country in the modern world. This film deals (at least tries to) with such common questions concerning the human lives as love, hatred, despair, pain, loneliness, death, friendship etc. With its level of the variety of these issues, I would compare it to MAGNOLIA, with the difference that WORLD probably goes deeper in the exploration of a human destination. To say briefly WORLD is about people on the planet Earth, about the complicated interactions of the ways of their dismal lives & about constant & incomprehensible feeling of sadness which covers our planet soaked within its thin layer of atmosphere. The film manages to be sad itself, using some nice & unidentified (for me) music. But the most surprising thing about WORLD is that it evokes some sad & beautiful emotions into viewer, & call it a cinematic trick or a cheap manipulation but the animated sequences are really great. They performed the condition of the characters' inner worlds, their diverse sensations evoked by the various messages they got on their cell phones.<br /><br />Now to my favorite part: the techniques. Cinematography is great, very colorful, very tracking but slow, well executed. Lighting is OK, but could be done more professionally. Production design is strange, scenes are shot from very few angles, in some sequences there is only one single camera used, but since it contributes to entire film's not so dynamic & fast pace, it can be considered decent. Editing is by far the weakest point of the movie, I don't know whether it is cut on Avid or not, but it looks more like an amateur Moviola editing. As for acting, well to say frankly it was a little bit hard for me to follow the acting, cos these Chinese guys are so different & their mimics & ways of expression are not familiar to me.<br /><br />As a result, I can say that cinema is being made in China & this cinema looks better than you can imagine.