1. Why do I give 8 points? (evaluation, perception and movie viewing suggestions)
Let's talk about the structure of the article first:
1 is the perception evaluation and movie viewing suggestions
2 is about the origin of the title and the subject of fatalism
3 is about the background knowledge in the film such as the grandfather paradox
4 is the basic setting explanation of inverse entropy of this film
5 is time line combing
The first three parts basically don't involve spoilers, you can watch the movie if you haven't seen the movie, and those who have seen the movie will also benefit from these parts, and the last two parts involve complete spoilers! Total spoilers! caution!
The first Hollywood blockbuster since the resumption of theaters, "Creed" directed by Nolan, has finally been released. As a film that is sure to be incomprehensible after reviewing it, I will give 8 points. In this part, I will talk about the look and feel and for fans who haven't watched it yet. A little viewing advice.
For the quote in the film is, " Don't try to understand it, just feel it ".
In terms of viewing experience, the first hour of the film, that is, from the beginning to the time the protagonist goes to steal the painting, there are many dialogue scenes, which will be dull for some fans.
But after that, starting from the protagonist's reversal and fighting, it can be said that there are climaxes one after another, and many scenes that have never been seen on the big screen before will unfold slowly in front of your eyes.
After all, we know from films such as "Inception" and "Interstellar" that Nolan will not disappoint in creating a visual spectacle on the big screen.
Although the details of the film are very brain-burning, the essence of the type of film it belongs to is a very old spy film. Of course, the "007" series is the representative of this type of film.
On the whole, the routine of this type of film is that there is a villain who wants to destroy the world for various reasons. As the incarnation of justice, the male protagonist will defeat the villain at the last moment to save the world with the help of his companions, beautiful women and high technology.
The film still follows this formula, but the way to save the world involves a very brain-burning time travel element.
Although the film is not very good in action scenes (which has always been Nolan's weakness), it does a very good job in creating suspense, ending battles, soundtracks, etc.
Needless to say in terms of performance, the male protagonist is the son of veteran Hollywood star Denzel Washington, and the acting skills of several supporting roles are not mentioned.
However, although time travel is partly brain-burning (the detailed timeline will be given below), the structure of this circular travel has been shown in "Former Destination", that is, the protagonist travels back to the past, not only can it not change everything that has happened , and he would be surprised to find that many of his past actions were the result of his own crossing, thus forming a closed loop.
And if you have seen the Japanese movie "Tomorrow's Me and Yesterday's You", you will naturally understand the emotion brought by the big reversal at the end of the film. In this film, the girl's time flows in the reverse direction. It's a goodbye for the heroine.
After the film was released at 0:00, it showed a bipolar reputation among the audience. The reason why I gave 8 points is because I saw Nolan's attempts and innovations, so here are some pre-screening suggestions.
If you are a fan of Nolan or brain-burning movies, then this film will bring you a very strong movie viewing pleasure. If you just want to have fun and don’t want to go out of the theater and you are confused, then don’t try it lightly.
In addition, this film is not afraid of spoilers, because even if most people want to spoil, they will not be able to talk about it. After all, he doesn't understand it himself. How to give people spoilers?
2. The title tenet explains the theme of fatalism in the film
In fact, the title of the film is the key to uncovering the theme.
After a little observation, you will find that the English title of the film is "Tenet".
An example in Chinese is "Shanghai tap water comes from the sea", which means the same as reading from left to right and reading from right to left.
This kind of word is called a palindrome in English, that is, the word itself looks the same from left to right and from right to left. There are many similar words, such as dad is one.
Of course, the tenet in the title actually comes from a stone tablet found in the ancient city of Pompeii.
There are also four words sator, opera, rotas and arepo on this stele.
And sator is the name of the villain in the film Sator, opera is the meaning of opera in English now, and the first scene in the film takes place at the Ukrainian Opera House, and rotors is the name of the artwork warehouse in the film.
So it can be seen that this stele and palindrome have a deep connection with the core of the film.
That is to say, the male protagonist, whether it is a positive experience or a reverse experience, is actually in a closed loop, and the past things will not change, what happened is what happened.
"What happened is what happened", this sentence is repeated in the film, it is to emphasize this theme, and it can be summed up in one word - fatalism.
Since everything is doomed, going back to the past naturally can't change anything. Use Kate in the film to illustrate this example.
(There are minor spoilers below, if you don't want to see it, you can skip directly to the part after the second picture below)
The last happy time Kate remembers was a family vacation on a yacht off Vietnam when he saw a woman jump off the yacht and disappear. He thinks that his husband (that is, Sator) is having an affair, so there is no possibility of repairing the marriage, and the relationship between the two people is completely broken.
It was precisely because of the break that she met the male protagonist and began to deal with her husband and save the world.
The method is to go back to the time of the vacation, find a way to delay his husband's suicide, and let the male lead team get the "algorithm" first (explained later).
After that, she jumped into the water to escape after killing Sato, and this scene happened to be seen by herself in the past timeline.
And so the cycle begins, she breaks with her husband because of the woman who jumped into the water, and this woman is herself, where the cause becomes the effect, and the effect becomes the cause.
It is very similar to the Mobius ring, as shown in the picture below, imagine that you are an ant crawling on this kind of ring all the time, so which direction is the front and which direction is the back?
So that's the case with everyone in the film, so they're all in a huge closed loop where everything is predestined.
This is the problem of the translation of the Chinese title of this article. Although the literal translation of tenet is indeed the meaning of creed and principle, but if you want to better correspond to the English title, I think "Ye Fei Ye" is better.
First of all it is in the form of a palindrome, which reads the same from right to left as from left to right.
Secondly, "karma" has the meaning of "already", such as the word "karma", "karma is not karma" can express the theme of fatalism in this film, the beginning of everything is also the end, but the male protagonist does not know, he wants to change , reversed things, that is, "non", and finally he found that everything was already doomed, so he returned to the state of "karma".
Finally, "karma" and achievements and "retribution" in Buddhism (not necessarily a derogatory term) are also linked to the actions of the protagonist of the film.
3. 5 things you should know before the screening
There are a lot of details in this film, and some of the films are only briefly mentioned. If there is no relevant background introduction, a lot of the pleasure of watching the film may be lost, so I will briefly talk about it.
A terrorist attack on the Bolshoi Theater
The "terrorist attack" at the Ukrainian opera house at the beginning of the film is actually based on real events.
On October 23, 2002, more than 40 terrorists broke into the Palace of Culture Theater of a factory in Moscow, took more than 800 hostages there, and demanded that the Russian government withdraw its troops from Chechnya.
The Russian military police and other departments finally injected anesthetic gas into the theater, causing the terrorists to coma and relieve the crisis. But in the process, at least 129 hostages died due to an overdose of anesthetic gas.
B entropy increase, entropy decrease and the second law of thermodynamics
I'm not a physics major, so this is just a brief explanation.
Almost all the basic physics formulas we have learned, including gravitation, are symmetrical in time, which means that even if time is reversed, gravitation still exists.
But the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics gave time a direction, that is, in modern physics, the river of time can only flow in one direction.
As Nolan's own "Interstellar" said, you can slow down time, such as the hero and heroine near the black hole in the film, but it is impossible to go back in time.
And the reason for all this is this law, which, in simple terms, describes the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes—isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy.
For example, in a closed system, gases tend to diffuse throughout the space, not the other way around.
In other words, when we charge the mobile phone, part of the electric energy is lost in the form of heat, and we cannot recover this part of the energy in a closed system.
The setting in the film is that future scientists have mastered the method to reduce entropy, so time can flow in reverse.
Of course, the film does not explain the principle of this invention in detail, and this is not important, as long as the setting of this film is recognized. Because purely from a physical point of view, it is impossible to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
C grandfather paradox
The grandfather paradox is a logical paradox that cannot be avoided in time travel movies.
It means that if a person travels back in time and kills his grandfather before his father is born, then the person will not be born, so who travels back in time?
And this film, like "The Messenger of the Ring", adopts the principle of not excessive interpretation of this paradox.
D pincer combat
The film mentions pincer combat in the time dimension. Originally, this word is used in the military, and it generally acts on space.
As shown in the figure below, pincer combat generally refers to attacking the enemy from two directions, causing the enemy to fight on both sides. It is named because of its shape like a pincer.
This offensive strategy was widely used in World War I and World War II, such as the Battle of Kursk.
E "Casablanca"
At the end of the film, Neil said, "This is the end of a beautiful friendship."
This sentence is obviously a tribute to the end of the famous spy war movie "Casablanca", at the end of which the male protagonist said a sentence. "This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship".
To put it another way, the emotional entanglement between the male protagonist and Neil in this film is more emotional than the interaction between the male protagonist and Kate. (It can be called CP sense!)
4. In-chip settings that need to be accepted
A
One of the most important settings to accept is the ingenious way of traveling through time and space in the film.
In previous movies of the same type, whether it was "Back to the Future" or "Terminator", when they traveled through, they entered a certain time machine and reached a certain point in time in the past instantly.
For example, in "The Terminator", Schwarzenegger instantly reached the point in time where Sarah Connor was.
However, the method of this film is that after entering the reversal device, you will experience the reverse flow of time. For example, when you are 20 years old in 2020 and want to travel to 2010, you will experience a 10-year “reverse flow” of time after you enter the machine. Reach 2010 when you're 30, then get back into the machine and let your time flow in the right direction again, so you can start moving freely.
Note that at this time, there are 2 you in the same time and space, one is 10-year-old you, and the other is 30-year-old you, and then you only need to experience another 10 years normally, and 40-year-old is returning to 2020.
B
In order to mark the forward and reverse time in the film, Nolan uses an oxygen mask as a sign when it is reversed, so that the audience will not be confused. According to the explanation in the film, breathing is also reversed, so this must be brought.
And the use of red and blue light also plays the same role.
If it is a red room then time flows forward, and in a blue room it flows backwards.
If he is not in the room where the machine is located, Nolan will try to make the color tone of the film close to this rule. The heroine's red dress is also a good marker.
C
There is also a setting that the future of mankind is on the verge of "doomsday" due to the impact of global warming.
At the same time, a female scientist invented an "algorithm" (divided into 9 parts) to destroy the world, and she hid the 9 parts in the nuclear weapons of the past 9 nuclear powers. (relative to her, she hid things in the past)
And the people of the future don't quite believe in the grandfather paradox, they think it's possible for them to survive as long as the humans of the past (the present us) that caused global warming are erased.
5. Timeline combing
Because the timeline of this film is too complicated, I can only do my best to organize it. Here I use a picture provided by Gyro Movie to sort it out. It is easier for everyone to see this picture.
A terrorist attack occurred at the Ukrainian Grand Theater. The protagonist pretended to be a special police officer to find the VIP and the mysterious box in his hand (thought it was a radioactive element, but it was not). After seeing that the special police wanted to sacrifice the entire audience, he took the risk of recovering the bomb and almost lost his life. Saved by a mysterious man who can shoot bullets in reverse. This mysterious man is Neil!
The beginning and the end of the film, closed loop!
The protagonist failed the mission and returned to the car. After being subdued, he was tortured and decided to commit suicide by swallowing poison.
It turns out that everything is a test. The protagonist successfully joins the creed organization. After his body recovers, he finds a scientist who knows the existence of the reverse sports bullet.
The protagonist successfully found the Indian arms dealer Priya by analyzing the bullet, and learned that the real source of the bullet was the Russian rich man Sator.
In order to get close to the protagonist of Sato Sator, he found Michael Caine, and learned that Sato and his wife Kat had a bad relationship, and they were still together because of the custody of their son and a fake painting as a handle.
The protagonist meets Kat and promises to steal the fake painting from the airport terminal. At the same time, there was a fight with Sato's men.
The protagonist and Neil crash into the warehouse with a Boeing 747, causing chaos and the two enter the art warehouse. The two suddenly bumped into a man in black who was moving in the opposite direction in two rooms, and they fought separately. In fact, the two men in black are the protagonists themselves. Neil discovered this fact when he pursued them, but said nothing, letting the forward protagonist from the future go away, while the reverse protagonist also escaped.
The protagonist failed to steal the painting, but he succeeded in deceiving Kat, and finally met sator. After some twists and turns, the protagonist decides to steal the only thing Sato is interested in - plutonium-241 on the highway.
The protagonist plans to clip the delivery vehicle with several trucks on the highway, and then successfully get the thing.
But Sator uses a time-dimension pincer attack here.
The protagonist finds that Sator is sitting in a car driving in the wrong direction and uses Kat's life to coerce the male protagonist to hand over "Plutonium 241". During the car chase here, another car rolled over in the middle of the road.
After getting the plutonium element 241, sator grabbed the protagonist and others and took them to the room where the reversal machine was located. Apparently sator was moving backwards in the other blue room, again threatening Kat and hitting Kat with a reverse bullet. The protagonist lied that something was hidden in his BMW.
But at this time Sator also appeared in the red room, and asked the protagonist to provide more information.
Tenet organizes soldiers from the future to arrive. When the protagonist wants to use the machine to return to the high-speed car chase, it turns out that everything is in vain. Sator still gets what he wants, but his car overturns and almost freezes to death ( Because the car explodes in the reverse world and is burned to death, it will freeze to death).
Everything that has happened has happened.
Finally, in order to treat Kat's reverse wound, the protagonist, Neil and Kat use the reverse machine to become reverse, so that after Kat's wound heals for a week, the three people can be returned from the machine at the airport terminal.
At this time, the protagonist entered through the shutter door and fought with his past self (from the perspective of the protagonist now, he is moving in the direction of reversing the machine, from the perspective of the protagonist in the past, the man in black is the reverse). After the fight, the protagonist succeeds Get into the machine and put yourself right back.
Then he ran out and met the past Neil in the next room, the past Neil chased after him and let him go when he found out that it was the protagonist. (The previous plot was explained).
At this time, the former protagonist and Neil were not in the room where the machine was, and the reverse Neil and Kat went in and brought themselves back. Kat's wound heals, and the mission is complete.
The protagonist learns that Sator has had pancreatic cancer and will die soon, so he wants to find an "algorithm" that can destroy the world with the help of people in the future, and bury it deeply underground, so that people in the future can use it to destroy the world. . And this needs to be detonated by an explosive device to be buried deep enough, and this switch is connected to Sator's life detection device. Once Sator dies, it will detonate.
At the same time, we also know the history of Sator's fortune. When he was exposed to nuclear radiation in the Soviet Union's secret city No. 12, he "earned the first pot of gold" after finding the information sent by the future people, and began to look for scattered "" Algorithms" sections. His creed is that what he can't get, others don't want to have. This is the attitude towards his wife Kat, and the same is true for the whole world.
According to Kat's guess, Sator is likely to end up on his own when he returns to Vietnam for a family vacation, so their plan is for Kat to return to the vacation time and hold Sator so that the protagonist and Neil can grab the device before Sator detonates the device. "algorithm".
This is the last climax of the whole film.
Here the protagonists use a pincer offensive, that is, the red team is acting in the forward direction and the blue team is acting in the reverse direction. Because the red team starts at the same time as the blue team ends, the information that the blue team knows can be used to act. The two sides signaled that the whole building would be bombed in the middle 5 minutes.
The protagonist and Ives (the future leader of the Creed Soldiers) finally entered the tunnel, but the entrance was blocked immediately, and they had to keep going.
Neil was originally a reverse engineer in the blue team. He saw all this, so he entered the reverse machine and turned himself over. He honked his horn in the car and wanted to let the protagonist not go in, but it was too late, and the two protagonists still went in. .
So Neil drove to the top of the mountain and pulled the two people who got the algorithm out of the deep well.
So how did the protagonist get the "algorithm"?
He and Ives got in and got trapped by Sator's men, trapped. Just when the protagonist was about to be shot, a dead BLU soldier on the ground suddenly stood up to block the bullet for the protagonist, and then successfully unlocked the lock, allowing the protagonist to get the "algorithm", and escaped at the last moment.
And this mysterious blue team soldier is also Neil. After he drove outside to save the protagonist just now, he returned to the machine to make himself reverse, so the scene of blocking the bullet happened.
In the end, Ives and the protagonist each took a part of the "algorithm" and separated.
On the other side, Kat and Sator from the future met on the yacht on vacation. Sator and the protagonist had a chat between the villain and the protagonist that is common in "007" movies.
In the end, Kat killed Sator and threw it into the sea before receiving the news of the success of the protagonist and others. After jumping into the water, this scene was seen by the past self (mentioned earlier).
In the end, the black protagonist learned that he was the founder of the Creed Organization, and that Neil himself recruited and sent to the past to save and help him in the future.
Thinking about it carefully, Neil is very similar to Kyle, who was sent back by the future leader to protect his mother in "The Terminator". He also died in the past to complete the mission.
And knowing who Priya is, the Indian arms dealer, he killed Kat before Priya killed her, because Kat called the protagonist (should be at some point in the future) when he sensed the danger, and the protagonist used a reversal machine. Come back and kill Priya.
In fact, the entire operation is a huge pincer attack planned by the male protagonist of the distant future. Neil is acting in the reverse direction from the future, and his past self is acting forward, which means that Sator's action is doomed to fail from the beginning.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the attack on the Ukrainian Theater at the beginning of the film and the "algorithm" battle at the end happened at a point in time. I thought that when the protagonist saw the role played by Michael Caine for the first time, the other party said that at the same time as the event at the Bolshoi Theater, There was a big explosion at another location, the big explosion was the one in the final battle.
Still that sentence, the beginning is also the end, the cause is also the result, everything that happened has happened, and this is fate! !
This is the first draft. It must be written in many places not very well. Criticisms and corrections are welcome!
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