There is no doubt that Nolan has a great range of commercial films at the moment, "Inception", "Interstellar", "Batman"...
"Creed" finally released domestically. It can be foreseen that a major topic discussed by movie fans for a period of time in the future is it.
did you see it yet? Do you understand? It doesn't matter, whether you watch it or not, let's talk about this brain-burning film "Creed".
This article contains spoilers.
1
The story line on the surface of "Creed" is not complicated, and it can even be said to be a routine of a spy film.
The male protagonist is chosen to stop the third world war, the key to this war is to find and defeat a Russian arms tycoon.
The boss has to collect all the parts to destroy the world, and when the parts are in place, whether the world will be destroyed will be in the boss's moment.
The male protagonist bears the safety of all mankind, and uses the boss's wife as a breakthrough to approach him to stop his crazy plan to destroy the world.
The story on the surface of "Creed" is simple and easy to understand, and it seems that it is not much different from the "Mission Impossible" series, "007" series and other spy movies that save the world.
"Mission Impossible 6: Total Disintegration"
But the special thing about "Creed" is that it combines science fiction elements and spy film elements. This rescue operation involves time, and the core is "time reversal".
The root cause of the war is that people in the future world want to destroy the current world and send back a technology that can reverse the flow of time. This arms tycoon is someone who can connect with the future.
This kind of technology that reverses time can make people go back to the past, but this way of going back to the past is very complicated. For those who go back to the past, everything is reversed, and the whole world is reversed.
But in the eyes of normal people, the behavior of transmigrators is the opposite.
They speak in reverse, breathe in reverse, bullets will fly back into the barrel of the gun, the higher the temperature, the colder the male protagonist almost froze to death in the exploding car.
When the present time and the retrograde time are in the same space, there will be a parallel interlace of time. Those wonders that violate conventional cognition are a very novel visual experience.
"Reverse Time" is a new concept played by Nolan, and it is also the strangest part of this movie.
2
Time travel is a large category in science fiction themes, with various modes.
Even if you remove the time-travel packaged romance films, there are too many movies around the time-travel concept itself.
"Back to the Future" and "Twelve Monkeys" with a single timeline, "Butterfly Effect" with parallel time and space, and "Front Destination" with a time loop...
"Twelve Monkeys"
Nolan is also a veteran of non-linear storytelling and playing with time. It would be an extravagant hope to ask him to tell a story without exception .
The first feature film "Follow" is a non-linear narrative, and "Inception" and "Interstellar" also involve the issue of time.
"Interstellar"
Even a war movie like "Dunkirk" has to be shot in an unconventional way, with three threads running in parallel.
Nolan is good at manipulating time in films to influence the narrative. But this "Creed" is the biggest play, and the whole work is playing with time.
The story structures of "Creed" and "Memento" are somewhat similar, and they also involve two timelines, forward and reverse, and finally complete the story.
But the time travel of "Creed" is a "reversal", which is completely different from the previous time travel.
The general time travel is that the traveler returns to a certain time node in the past, and then develops from that point to today, changing or unable to change the past. But time is always positive.
"back to the Future"
But the time travel of "Creed" is the reverse flow of time. After the time travel, the traveler and this world are opposite.
What happened is what has happened. The changes made by the countercurrent time and space are ultimately reflected in the original time and space. This way of constructing time also has a hint of fate.
The plot and picture effects produced by this "reversal of time" are also a new attempt made by Nolan in the film.
Like the battle at the end of the climax, the forward and reverse teams are closely intertwined in the same battlefield.
Different time flows converge, accompanied by dense information, constantly subverting the plot and supplementing the foreshadowing.
At this time, the reversal time of the film overlaps with the original time, making the film essentially form a loop. The dialogue between the two male protagonists is the confirmation, the end is the beginning, and the meeting is goodbye.
This conceptual design has elevated the movie’s brain-burning to more than one level. The two feelings of “I am going” and “I am not aware of it” are constantly looping in the audience’s brain.
3
Of course, "Creed" is not perfect. Playing the concept first, there must be sacrifices, and any emotional lines and character arcs have to be a little later.
Although Nolan himself has said that he is not good at emotional lines, the functionalization of this role has indeed reached a new height.
The characters are basically tool people, and the only main emotional line is the emotional entanglement between the heroine and the boss.
The appearance and actions of characters basically serve the establishment of the concept and the development of the story. The motivations and transformations of the characters are almost non-existent.
Conceptually speaking, it is really dazzling. Entropy reduction, time clamp theory, grandfather paradox, and various physics concepts are also used by Nolan in the film.
Even this play is difficult to understand, John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debeats, the three leading actors after watching this film, do not quite understand what the story is.
Because even if the emotional line is thin, there are so many details that explode, plus the interlacing of reverse and positive time and space , it is sloppy to describe this movie with complexity.
The audio-visual experience of "Creed" also ranks high in Nolan's films. If you just want to watch it and enjoy it, this movie is enough. Judging from the requirements of the spy film, the scene is big enough.
Only Nolan can carry private goods in this way in the scope of commercial blockbusters, willful.
After all, spectacles and big scenes must be backed by money, and Nolan is always burning money.
"Batman: The Dark Knight" blew up a hospital, "Inception" built rollers to accommodate corridors, and "Interstellar" planted 500 acres of corn.
Batman: The Dark Knight
"Creed" was shot in seven countries, and a real Boeing 747 was blown up in the middle.
But Nolan is not a director who only has empty scenes and is only exciting. The spectacle is for the film and television of the concept.
Whether it is "Inception", "Interstellar" or "Creed", the core of the story is not complicated, but there is often a complex concept in the movie. This is his exploration and persistence.
This level of experimentation, within the confines of a relatively popular commercial, is what makes Nolan great.
He has always made commercial films, but is also exploring the boundaries and possibilities of cinema.
Like the "Reverse Time" of "Creed", will it open up another time travel movie? Wait and see.
"Creed" also has side effects. The amount of information is too large, and there are only a handful of people who can understand all the details at once.
It is not a problem to brush Nolan powder two or three times. There is even a little Canadian brother who plans to brush 120 times in a row to break the Guinness World Record. However, for ordinary audiences, it is still the main picture.
So I can't understand it, and it's not important, just like the classic lines of the original film, "Don't try to understand it, feel it."
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