Reversing the future? This Christopher Nolan sci-fi movie is much better than you've ever heard of

Christopher Nolan is Hollywood's greatest performer.

In the 20 years since his second flashback feature film, Memento, in 2000, the British and American blockbuster director has risen to become an ambitious, M.C.C. Escher-style storyteller. Nolan's works are based on time and memory, winning the hearts of the public, both making money and winning awards, which has also earned him an honorary reputation of both selling out and foresight.

Although Nolan has become a more innovative filmmaker, the secret of his continued success lies in his ability to bring audiences an immersive and shocking experience. His latest blockbuster can be considered the most jaw-dropping feast for the senses to date, despite the controversy surrounding its premiere.

In the strange environment of the release of "Creed", Nolan's film shows a wealth of experience. As a staunch defender of the cinema experience, Nolan always delivers on his promise to maximize the power of the big screen. "Creed" is an international spy suspense film set in a short time and space, and it is his most powerful journey to date.

"Creed" tells the story of a secret agent (played by John David Washington) who is responsible for preventing World War III and throws the unnamed protagonist into the theoretical physics of "reversal", that is, reversing the entropy of an object, making it look like it is traveling through time (relative to an external observer). With the help of the mild-mannered Neil (Robert Pattinson of Batman), the protagonist must stop an evil Russian giant (Kenneth Bryner) from using a device called "algorithm" to end the world.

Fundamentally, as a film detailing particle physics, Creed doesn't demystify its time travel mechanisms in detail. A scientist (played by French actress Clemens Posey) tells her dialogue in a thick, listless, and tedious way when explaining the reverse technique to the protagonist, and all the conversation about the impending destruction and the flow of debris from the future war is amusing.

What's even more impressive is that when the protagonist racks his brains to think about the reversal, she says to him, "Don't try to understand it." Feel it. ”

This is great advice for anyone watching Creed. The world is in grave danger, and reversal is the key to saving the world – and you'd better fasten your seatbelts before we go on.

Nolan's main inspiration for Tenet came from James Bond, so his film is a high-risk, global travel adventure filled with perfectly mysterious characters, robberies, car chases, gunfights, military maneuvers, interrogations, and nuclear buttons, all of which are integrated into the plot. At the center of the story is a trained government agent on a top-secret mission. Posey even plays the role of a Q character, who teaches the protagonist to shoot upside-down weapons, which are used to intercept bullets instead of shooting bullets. (The technique comes in handy halfway through missions, such as the protagonist and Neil doing reverse bungee jumping on a tall building in Mumbai, and an upside-down vehicle leaning backwards on the highway during a dangerous chase.)

The Creed also refers to Nolan's previous films. "Fragments of Memory" tells the protagonist's retrograde amnesia in flashbacks, in which a gun mysteriously jumps up from the table and falls into an outstretched hand, and the shell is hollowed out and returned to the chamber. In Inception, as the corridor rotates 360 degrees, a battle intensifies in the corridor, causing both opposing sides to tilt from floor to wall to ceiling until they figure out how to fight gravity. Both scenes are repeated in Creed, as Nolan's palindrome structure allows him to look back at his greatest work.

But under Nolan's design, the twists and turns of Creed's narrative are awe-inspiring. Creed is a soft hue, filled with silver and gray, interspersed with ominous blues and reds that give some scenes a hypnotic glow of the underworld. Hoyt van Hoytma, the cinematographer who worked with Nolan on Interstellar, has become accustomed to mass shooting; From the raid at the Kiev Opera House to the real plane crash, everything was filmed with IMAX cameras, giving Creed an unusually grand experience.

But sound is the weapon of choice for creed. The director's remixes are often sensational, drawing criticism for the way he suppresses action and drowns out dialogue. In Creed, this approach culminates as interactions between characters are masked by oxygen masks, hindered by thick Russian accents, or completely disappear into discordant explosions. Gunfire, plane crashes, and ticking clocks all take a special weight in the Creed mix, adding to the tension of the action scenes.

Much of the dialogue in Creed itself captures attention, reinforcing the film's espionage style in a way that feels coldly ironic, almost analytical, or self-mimicking. "There's a Cold War, cold as ice," chants in a scene at the beginning of the film where the protagonist's CIA boss, Faye (Martin Donovan), chants. "Even if you know its true nature, you will lose it, and this is the knowledge of division." As a dialogue, this is absurd and incomprehensible. But as a deliberately spy language, it conveys the same throbbing and mysteriousness as the soundtrack, leading the viewer into a dark game with musical rhythms.

"Everything I have for you is a gesture, plus one word: creed," Faye continued. Use it with care. It will open the right doors, but it will also open some wrong doors. As a palindrome, this code word subtly embodies the mirror structure of the film. As a plot device, all it does is sound cool. Nolan chose TENET as the title for two reasons: In all the explanatory dialogues aimed at revealing the reversal, the director guides the audience with gestures, allowing the audience to feel the film from the auditory and visual points before grasping the plot.

In the space series Interstellar, released in 2001, and the more experimental Dunkirk, he has shown that he didn't even realize the primacy of dialogue in storytelling. Instead, directors often deliberately incorporate his scripts into the mix, providing the audience with a more immersive experience while challenging them to participate in the film on a sensory level in the first place.

In all of these stories, the narrative of the Creed is so secondary that the protagonist is never named (except that he literally refers to himself as the "protagonist"), nor is his true relationship with Neil revealed until they part ways at the end of the film. Creed doesn't necessarily reward repeat viewing, but on a narrative level, it requires players to watch repeatedly. The maze plot of the film is non-linear, and you can't piece together the trends of all the characters until you see the story of all the characters develop according to Nolan's intentions.

This approach confuses many viewers, but it is also in line with Nolan's unique model of pursuing both the style of directing and the dominance of the box office. Few other filmmakers, even someone as talented as Nolan, get such an original, high-cost idea right from the start. But Nolan went further.

Nolan is an unusually intelligent director who also deliberately avoids condescending words to audiences, prioritizing dense audiovisual spectacle in films with the most complex narratives. With the exception of intellectuals, they exist mainly in the form of experience and are more accessible. In other words: a creed is an atmosphere.