An American documentarian like Errol Morris would visit this world and find easy humor in its stunted grandiosity. But The World has been made in China by Jia Zhangke, a director who has been in much trouble with the authorities -- not because he embraces the West, but because he mocks modern China for trying to become Western in such haste. He doesn't yearn for the days of Chairman Mao, but he doesn't find the emerging China much of an improvement; the nation seems trapped between two sterilities. [There] is integrity in a movie that refuses to pump up melodrama where none belongs. This is not a movie about an amusement park threatened by a bomb, or populated by colorful characters, or made into the object of satire. It is a movie about people doing boring and badly paid work day after day while being required to look happy.
At Beijing World Park, a bizarre cross-pollination of Las Vegas and Epcot Center where visitors can interact with famous international monuments without ever leaving the city’s suburbs, a security guard betrays his dancer girlfriend by pursuing another woman.