Playing time, not just "creed"

　　Reporter Dong Ming

　　As the most watched summer blockbuster this year, the famous Hollywood director Christopher Nolan's "Creed" is highly anticipated.

The film was postponed many times due to the new crown epidemic, and finally met with global audiences at the end of August and early September, and it was a return to traditional theaters.

On the 4th of this month, "Creed" was released in China. The large number of dazzling visual spectacles and deafening sound effects in the film are indeed the most suitable for watching in theaters.

The film's complex dismantling of the concept of "time", beyond the general level of Hollywood blockbusters, "confused" has become the most emotional after the audience walked out of the theater.

The world is "unintelligible"

　　The epidemic situation in North America is still severe, and Warner Bros. and Nolan's "Creed" shoulder the "heavy task" of saving Hollywood.

The professional box office website "Boxofficemojo" believes that the box office performance of "Creed" will be an important industry signal, and the box office level represents whether the film market has recovered from the epidemic.

Although the North American and global box offices have not yet been counted, the American media is generally optimistic about the market performance of "Creed". After all, the film has a good reputation (74% freshness of Rotten Tomatoes, and an average score of 69 for Metacritic media), and most theaters in North America It has been reopened (70% of the AMC theaters opened, and the highest attendance rate is 50%). "Boxofficemojo" stated that the box office of "Creed" should pay attention to the "long-term". For future trends, please refer to "Inception" which is also a "high-concept science fiction film" .

　　In China, the box office of "Creed", which was released on the 4th, exceeded 200 million yuan at the weekend.

For ordinary audiences, the threshold for the concept of science fiction in "Creed" is much higher than in "Inception".

Nolan "invented" a world where "positive time and reverse time exist simultaneously" under the shell of the traditional 007-style spy film.

Especially in the second half of the film, there will be multiple protagonists in the state of "forward/reverse/positive" at the same time.

While the audience is shocked by the "upside down" lens, they have to think about the true identity and intention of the character.

It is indeed not easy to keep up with the director’s thoughts in fast editing and a large number of dialogues. Many viewers said that "the brain is blank" when they walked out of the theater. After watching the online analysis, they still feel confused. This also brings a lot of topics to the film. degree.

　　Regarding the complex perception brought by the "Creed", the US "Globe and Mail" and other media recognized that this is Nolan's "extreme exercise in reverse engineering of time."

The “New York Times” thinks that the “dazzling grand scenes in the film are nothing but clever”, while the “Boston Globe” criticizes the film as “the more chaotic the later.” The BBC bluntly stated, “The plot of the film. The concept of harmony collapsed under heavy pressure.” As one of the first countries to be released in the world (August 26), the reputation of "Creed" (3.7 points) is slightly lower than Nolan's previous work "Dunkirk". "(4.1 points).

"Parisian" commented that the film is Nolan "a tribute to the 007-style spy film and a'metaphysical thinking' of time", while "The New Observer" said very angrily: "(This film) everything No, it's disappointing!"

Time filming, not easy to shoot

　　In science fiction literature and related film and television works, "playing time" can be regarded as one of the most popular "themes", especially the theme of time and space travel, which always makes people enjoy it, and can be easily grafted with comedy, love, and action drama.

"Old Superman" starring Christopher Reeve's "70 Years Back in Time" is about a touching love encounter; and Robert Zemigis' "Back to the Future" trilogy includes comedies from youth adventure films Elements also explored the possibility of parallel universes.

　　Many sci-fi and fantasy films have discussed the logical paradox caused by disrupting the timeline. The grandfather’s paradox has been discussed many times in "Creed" (French science fiction writer Héne Bachzaville in the novel in 1943 In "The Careless Tourist", the paradox situation is as follows: if you travel back to the past and kill your grandfather, there will be no "you" born in the future), and there are different solutions in different films.

In "Pre-Destination" adapted from the novel "You Are Back to the Soul" by the sci-fi master Robert Heinrhein, the protagonist played by Ethan Hawke completes the miracle of "giving birth to yourself after marrying yourself" by crossing the timeline; In "Loop Messenger" starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the protagonist needs to "kill himself" to form a "closed loop".

　　For the paradox caused by the chaos of the timeline, more films choose to resolve it through the concept of "parallel universes": In the third and fourth "Avengers", Iron Man and others, in order to prevent the timeline from bifurcation and collapse, from the past After borrowing gems, they need to be returned to the past, and Captain America still meets his past self.

This explanation seemed reasonable, but in the end it didn't make sense for the old American team.

It can be seen that although "playing time" is good-looking and fun, it is not easy to make it clear.

　　Nolan has always been fascinated by the possibilities brought about by time. The early representative work "Shards of Memory" overturned the linear nature of time, cutting the protagonist's past memories and current experiences into fragments and re-representing them; "Pirates of Dreams" In "Space", each time the protagonist goes deep into a layer of dreams, his time axis will be stretched; "Interstellar" uses visual methods to present the "time dimension", which can be called a theoretical physics textbook.

Nolan, "Real shot madman"

　　In increasingly digital Hollywood, directors like Nolan who insist on real shooting and obsessed with traditional film photography are the only "alternatives" left.

After all, more and more realistic CG technology can achieve almost all the intentions of directors. Although it is expensive, it is convenient to control the scene and progress.

However, if you are not careful during the actual shooting, huge risks will occur.

This requires detailed and thorough planning and a lot of rehearsals in advance to ensure that the actual shooting is "one pass."

　　The highlight of this filming of "Creed"-when Oslo Airport was attacked, Nolan really found an obsolete Boeing 747X1 to film the real scene of the engine exploding after the plane crashed into the building. The final screen effect is undoubtedly better than CG production. Or the miniature model is much more realistic.

Although many of Nolan's previous works are "high-concept science fiction films", in order to show the realistic physical texture, most of them are still shot.

　　In Nolan’s masterpiece "Inception", the shots of Paris streets exploding and debris flying in the dream are real shots; the zero-gravity fighting scenes are specially constructed to be 360-degree rotating scenes, allowing actors to spin around the world. In the show.

The 500-acre cornfield at the beginning of "Interstellar" was planted by the crew for the sake of real shooting. The five-dimensional space beyond imagination at the end of the film is also a real scene built with props.

Many movie fans also talked about the real scene of the Joker blowing up the hospital in "Batman 2: The Dark Knight."