Creed: How to turn a mediocre film into gold

I believe that after seeing this title, many Nolan loyal fans have begun to prepare to sharpen their knives.

However, the sci-fi blockbusters in recent years (including Marvel's "sci-fi" movies that sell dog meat with sheep's heads) feel like this - you just need to grab a handful of the following aspirin and stuff them into one. In the mouth of a near-death movie, he can hold on until you make money:

1. Rumble and never stop talking a bunch of pretending to be tall and making lines that make him seem like a villain with a lot of ideas
2. A bunch of uncommon physical terms in daily life found in a random book of university physics
3. A cool-looking setting that's actually pure magic - here's where you can bring in the Clark Gods when you need them
4. Crushed the timeline, whatever that means
5. Don't forget to bury a dozen tribute stalks, if necessary, it is not impossible to bury hundreds of them
6. Finally, make the visual effect vertigo - vertigo in the physical sense, otherwise you will be embarrassed to recognize other sci-fi films

One of the most successful works is "Blade Runner 2020". The long line of the villain at the end makes people feel that the villain is really too thoughtful. This is not too great a movie - in fact, it is indeed very good. great. So in Blade Runner 2049, the standard aesthetic villain—a middle-aged white Christian male—takes this trait to the extreme, and biologically because his brain obviously doesn’t know it When should the mouth rest, so if you put two such tireless him at the same point in time, they would constitute a perpetual motion machine.

The stacking of physical terms, or more generally, the stacking of scientific and technological terms, has been on the list since the early days of science fiction, and literati have criticized science fiction as a weapon that is inexperienced - you write a pistol as a laser gun, and a bullet as an aggregation of antimatter energy. Body, the killer is said to be a member of the Freedom Alliance wearing exoskeleton armor, the horses are read as the trans-galactic airship of the Wannian Eagle, the grassland PS becomes a galaxy full of black holes, and a third-rate western novel is immediately tall.

Ah, and don't forget to bury the stems. The more the better, you don't even have to consider whether it is appropriate or not. Just bury it. Naturally, there will be grave diggers who are addicted to this huge corpse treasure that you provide. In the picture, they are not tired of it. They are like mice that fell into the rice jar. When someone wants to take the rice jar away and say it is a jar of garbage, these mice will naturally jump up to protect their food.

There are also a lot of successful examples in other points, so there is no nonsense here.

So, you see, it's actually very easy to make sci-fi film and television works, as long as you have enough start-up capital (of course, your reputation must be louder), you can naturally profit.

Therefore, I often say that resources have their own enrichment attributes.

Of course, that's not to say that all the six knives above were made to turn bad slices into beef slices. For example, visual effects, sometimes it is necessary, otherwise the desired effect cannot be achieved, such as Gargantua in "Interstellar", which requires special effects (although the colors are obviously brightened for visual effect. , otherwise it should be much darker). The question is just why it is used like this - is the plot not enough visual effects to make up, or is it icing on the cake for the plot?

The same is true of burying the stalks - not all the details are dispensable stalks, and although some have nothing to do with the plot itself, it will be fun to add to the aftertaste.

For example, "Langya Bang" has a good grasp of the details, and the details of the first half of "Chang'an Twelve Hours" are also very good. But if you bury a bunch of immortal swords and Xuanyuan swords that have nothing to do with the plot in "Langya Bang", then everyone will not think that this is a detail, it is purely to attract everyone's attention. Many of the memes in Ready Player One are interestingly buried, and in fact the plot itself is about how the protagonists dig out the secrets from the details. But if it is a plot like "The Great Wall", and then it is full of stalks of "Shan Hai Jing", it will be called chaos.

So the key is not that using these six knives is a hooligan, but that the hooligan is playing with these six knives.

Alright, back to the movies.

Just like Nolan's most famous "Memento" in his early years, what would the story look like if we smoothed all the timelines?

Male lead:

The male protagonist participated in a test arranged by the creed organization (find out the plutonium element, and then added a drama to rescue the hostages), and was later caught by the Ukrainian undercover agent and tortured the plutonium element. Loyalty and bravery passed the test, joined the creed organization, and after understanding a bunch of settings, went on to look for the plutonium element, met Neil during the period, and cooperated to come to Puglia to get the next level script, and then went to the Sir to pick up the equipment. Approaching the heroine, and then making a quarrel with Neil and entering the most central area of Freeport, encountering the anti-time future me, after a fight, the other party left, and after I escaped, I saw the heroine again, and I was able to approach the villain, and then found that the other party also Mastering the anti-time technology, so the design got the plutonium element whose whereabouts are unknown, but was threatened by the anti-time villain with the heroine to hand over the plutonium element and followed to the reverse gate, and was threatened by the anti-time villain to tell the whereabouts of the plutonium element. , and then the villain who appeared at the same time continued to ask the whereabouts of the plutonium element, and then Neil led the reinforcements to arrive, but the heroine was hit by a bullet in reverse time. Go to the big villain, and then try to stop the past chrono from giving plutonium to the current anti-time villain, but the plutonium is still taken away in a car accident. In order to save the female lead, the male lead and Neil returned to Freeport and ended up fighting with the former Shunshi male lead. After the reversal, the past Neil found out that he was the one the male lead was attacking, so Neil went back to save himself. After a bunch of meaningless explanations of the set of plots, the final battle begins. The male protagonist attacks the place where the explosion happened as Jazz mentioned earlier. The goal is to stop the explosion, retrieve the plutonium element, and then disguise an explosion (let Sir et al. The plan went smoothly, but it was ordered by the villain's men. Fortunately, it was saved by the future anti-chrono Neil, and then the task was completed. Many years later, the male protagonist founded the creed organization, and then went back to the past to recruit Neil,

Neil Line:

Many years before the story, he was recruited by the future male protagonist into the creed organization, and then arranged to be the male protagonist's partner now, approaching Puglia, bombing the free port, stealing the plutonium element, and then reversing time to save the man who was about to die in a car accident The male protagonist, then started the general attack. Halfway through the total attack, he found that the male protagonist was going to suffer, so he reversed the time to save the male protagonist (pulled out of the hole), and finally continued to participate in the mission and reversed the time again and went to the cave to rescue Man, this time I really got a lunch.

heroine:

A quiet and beautiful young woman, all she thinks about is her son, but her husband has been abusing her domestically (very yellow and violent kind), but she endured it for her son. A few years ago, I was tricked into buying fake paintings. Since then, I have been firmly controlled by my husband. If I want to leave, I have to choose between being free but never seeing my son, or giving up divorce and staying by the tyrant's side and being abused, so I choose She stayed by her husband's side, but when she saw her husband looking for flowers and asking willows when she was away, and the woman jumping on Hai Mingzhi, on the one hand, she envied the woman and on the other hand, she planned to take revenge on her very obscene, violent and unfaithful husband. After meeting the male protagonist, inexplicably developed a favorable impression (from wanting to use to dependence, a bit Stockholm), after being discovered by the villain's husband, he was used to threaten the male protagonist (there are a few meaningless plots in the middle, just skip it), the result After being beaten by her husband's belly and dying, Xin was rescued by the male protagonist and Neil, so he decided to rise up against the villain, and said that the villain used the bracelet to monitor his heartbeat, and once he died, he would start the global anti-chrono The bomb asked the whole earth to be buried with him, and told the male protagonist and the villain that he would definitely return to the time when he went to Vietnam to travel (it was also the time and space where he found out her husband Xunhua and Liu), so he went back by himself and took the time when he left with his son. I went to the "Lust Fan" husband who went back to the past from the present. After successfully delaying the bomb crisis, he killed his husband with one shot (a long and meaningless dialogue in the middle), and then jumped into the sea. As a result, this scene was seen by the past self To think that her husband is looking for flowers and willows. Finally, a bunch of meaningless plot post-HE.

The villain line:

In order to survive, the teenage villain took over a government project. As a result, he dug up a counter-time warehouse and found that there were letters and a lot of materials for himself in it, so he killed his companions and made a fortune on these things. Since then, I have been receiving property and information from the future, and my business has become more and more powerful. At the same time, I have gradually mastered the anti-time technology, and I will also carry out anti-time activities, using the established ending to make my past self profit. This year, the villain found that he was dying soon (the time reversal time was irradiated and ill, it can be called Marie Curie in the time domain), so he planned to get out an ultimate bomb that he had mastered that could reverse the global time, and Working together with my past self, I collected all the 9 parts needed for the bomb, and encountered a little twists and turns brought by the male protagonist in the middle. Then I went back to the cruise ship after a big quarrel between my past self and my past wife, and met my future wife, but I mistook it for my past wife and didn't leave. Wife was shot dead.

Creed Organization and the Future:

The male protagonist was created in the future after learning of the whole plan, and then went back to the past to recruit various people, including Neil, Els, the female doctor (forgot his name), and the male protagonist himself. Through various means, he finally killed the big villain who wanted to blow up the earth time now, but he felt that there was still a crisis to be solved in the future, so the male protagonist created a creed organization.

On the other hand, the Creed organization found in the future that a doctor had invented a machine that could reverse the global time, thus hoping to save the earth by reversing time. But she also felt that this product was likely to destroy the earth, so she disassembled the bomb into nine parts and buried it in nine places on the earth in reverse time, so that people in the future would not be able to discover these nine parts. But this was known to the villain, so the villain wanted to use this bomb to make the world die for himself.

Next, let's consider a question:

If all the time-related gimmicks are removed, what's left of the story?

The villain wants to blow up the earth, which uses the plutonium element, so the male protagonist snatchs the plutonium element several times, but fails, and finally successfully prevents the villain from detonating the bomb at the critical moment, and the villain is killed by the female lead.

Isn't this the plot of the last "Mission Impossible"? The villain doesn't have the character in the villain in Mission: Impossible, and the heroine doesn't have the character in the heroine in Mission: Impossible.

And, in fact, it's not a Mission: Impossible plot, and swap the bomb for something else and you'll find that's the plot of pretty much every spy movie -- yes, every one.

In other words, if it weren't for the time-reversal gimmick, this movie would be an old-fashioned spy action movie, and the effect is not as exciting as the Mission: Impossible series - so, Nolan really doesn't consider using visual effects. Bomb this trick? Didn't you play it once in Interstellar?

As for what deep topic you're talking about - well... if you think the words of the train-mouthed villain in Blade Runner 2049 are nutritious, then you probably think the movie is really talking about something. Profound content - this kind of profound content also has a very specific name, that is: the sophomore show amusing and trivial, which is piled up with tall and cool words.

I'm curious, why do people who rarely read books or who only read official accounts and read novels at the most think that these unnutritious lines contain profound thoughts? Can they see a menu of Shaxian snacks from it? Did you know something about the cosmic avenues?

Of course, you can say that if all the details are removed from most stories in the world, there are only a few plot modes in total, so can't science fiction movies be special action movies?

Of course not.

The question here is: Are these details an unnecessary gimmick for the plot, or are they crucial to the development of the plot?

Before discussing "Creed", we can make a simple comparison: which Chinese element appears as a gimmick in "The Wandering Earth" and "Crazy Alien", and which one is not just a gimmick?

Obviously, the so-called Chinese elements in "The Wandering Earth" are nothing but red lanterns and firecrackers. If you want to say that gathering everyone together at the end is a Chinese element, what do you think about Wukong and Mr. Satan in "Dragon Ball" ?

In "Crazy Alien", the Chinese elements are no longer the symbols above the temples, but become the monkey opera, wine culture, cupping, etc. that everyone can almost see in daily life. Moreover, these Chinese elements in "Crazy Alien" are also indispensable elements to promote the development of the plot. Without them, the plot cannot be established - but without the red lanterns in "The Wandering Earth", the plot cannot be pushed forward. Is it? Obviously not.

This is the difference between a gimmick and a necessary element.

Back to the Creed.

We can compare it with the famous Heinrich Rhein's "All You Zombies".

First of all, we have to understand, why use the word Zombie?

Obviously, the plot here has nothing to do with supernatural concepts such as zombies and reviving corpses, so Zombie is obviously not a "resurrection corpse" in the literal sense.

That word actually gets to the heart of the whole story: Are you seeing individuals with free will, or Philosophical Zombies? The meaning of a philosophical zombie is that in terms of behavior, it is completely no different from a person with free will, but it has no soul in its heart, so it does not have real free will.

That is, the Philosophical Zombie has free will from the outside, but does not really have free will from the ontological metaphysical point of view.

In the story, Zombie is embodied as: since the future part of the protagonist and the past part are completely integrated, that is to say, what the protagonist has experienced in the past is everything that will happen in the future, in other words, all his actions are given. Yes - he can't make any changes, because once changed, it affects the past that has happened, and the past is unchangeable.

Therefore, from the perspective of the protagonist's own timeline, he does not have the right to freely choose his future behavior at any point, because all the choices he thinks he has not made have already happened in the past, and thus have been decided. of.

So, is the protagonist a person with free will, or a philosophical zombie without free will?

Going a step further, we now think we are making free choices, but is the future predestined, but we are not unfortunate or lucky enough to see ourselves back from the future?

So, all of you, are nothing but Zombies.

That's where this piece of work is higher than Nolan's "Creed": behind an interesting story, is a deeper thought.

In fact, "Creed" can be considered as a more complex version of "You Beasts" (the last complex version was to add a backstory to Zombie, this movie is "Predestination"), But in essence the two are almost identical.

But the problem is, the answer given by Nolan is obviously insincere.

He said through the mouth of a female doctor: Free will exists, because from your perspective, you choose to "drop" the bullet, and you do make a choice.

But on the other hand, the entire pincer program (from the small war at the end to the polarization of the entire creed organization) is based on the premise that the future is fixed - in other words, here again "free will" considered as non-existent.

The practice itself is certainly better than the nondescript "Avengers 4", and better than the "Back to the Future" trilogy that pioneered the concept of time, but it essentially avoids the discussion of Zombie - you If you think you're not a Zombie, use it when you're working, and don't think about it if you don't.

In fact, there are many such "double thoughts" in "Creed" - Neil just told the male protagonist that you should not go to contact with your past self, otherwise the encounter between positive and negative matter will be bad luck (the earth's time is reversed) Destruction is based on this), but just after the male protagonist had a fight with himself... Neil said that the grandfather paradox may lead to a parallel universe, but the whole film is actually based on the "almost grandfather paradox" But it is not to engage in cosmic affair".

So, Nolan's film is actually not answering questions at all - he asked questions, and then told everyone: I said a lot, and you didn't understand anyway, so don't worry, let's get high together!

This is where it is worse than Heinrich.

In Da Zhangwei's words, "there is nothing difficult in the world, as long as you are willing to give up." In Li Dan's words, "escape is shameful but useful."

To make up for the film's lack of answering questions, a staple of sci-fi, Nolan intends to start using skill to win.

So, time travel was replaced by time reversal - God, the difference between the two is that the latter brings much more bugs than the former, and Nolan chose to be Da Zhangwei and Li Christmas followers. The point is, we don't see any reason other than VFX that you have to use time reversal instead of time travel, the concept is completely separate from the plot, and there's nothing wrong with time travel ( The setting that the heroine was maimed in reverse time can only be rehabilitated in reverse time. You can say that it is a black technology in the future, so it can only make sense to go to the future doctor). Of course, you can still forcibly construct connections from the cracks cut by the 40-meter long sword, that is your ability.

In order to cover up a problem, a new concept was introduced, and then, not surprisingly, it was not done at all, bringing a lot of new problems, and then chose to let it go, and everyone looked happy.

This is the reason why I think the plot of this film can only be given two stars (although I gave three stars, it is purely because the acting skills of Twilight Boys have improved a lot, so I gave one more star).

Using skills to win is like He Guangzhi's text is not good, but he keeps betting on "Shandong people" to attract the lights. Skills can bring a momentary burst, but after calming down and thinking about it, you will think: I will let you go and you will show me this?

Of course, it is not ruled out that those who succeed in playing by skill will play more smoothly than those who try to speak their minds without playing tricks. Therefore, Nolan's "Memento" was praised on the altar. Although the second half of "Interstellar" has become a golden finger, it is still widely sought after (large-scale use of love to generate electricity is really disgusting). "Kirke" even forcibly created highlights by dismantling a simple timeline that has no room for sci-fi to intervene into three sections - it has been regarded as a mixed blessing here.

But skill is always just skill, and cannot turn a mediocre script into a masterpiece.

Doing some "Ouroboros"-style Callback-Punchline skills common in timeline sci-fi is considered a masterpiece? There are too many gods in this world, they are just not as famous as you Nolan.

So, but from the story itself, this film can only be regarded as a crazy test on the pass line - worse than the Mission Impossible series.

There's still a lot to complain about in the plot.

For example, the emotional scene between the male lead and the female lead feels completely superfluous. Can't it just be the relationship between using and being used? Is it really necessary to add emotional drama? The male protagonist has been rendered as a person who cherishes life from the very beginning, so why must there be an emotional scene? It might make sense to say that the heroine is Stockholm.

The reason why the heroine betrayed the big villain is also shocking - saying that she wanted to leave because she was abused, this is very reasonable, and it is reasonable to stay for the sake of her son, but seeing the villain's husband having an affair and wanting to do something, what is this...

A lot of mother-in-law's nonsense lines are really no more nutritious than reading books quietly - you will definitely jump out at this time and say that if you want to read books, you should go to books, movies, movies, what else to read? In the same way, if you speak ruthlessly well, then you will speak ruthlessly, and start reciting a bunch of lines that are comparable in length to Shakespeare, but whose depth is beyond that of a junior. Is it worthy of the audience?

Also, the villain is really a very well-behaved villain. Although he likes to run from the future to the past to do things, he is also happy to abuse his wife and beat women, and even swear at his genitals, but when he wants to PK with the male protagonist, he is determined not to. Leave a note for your past self and write that the male protagonist is an undercover agent.

You see, according to the plot, after the male protagonist lurks on the ship, the villain's future version passes this time point in reverse time at least once (from the future plutonium grab element to the past vacation in Vietnam), during this time, the villain will Thinking about how to go back to the past and relive the old dream with my wife, I just never thought of giving my past self a note telling him to kill the male protagonist quickly.

Some say that because he did not do it in the past, he cannot do it in the future.

But, you think, if the villain decides to do this in the future, then there will naturally be a history of him doing this in the past, unless someone has been watching him for so long not to do it, otherwise you The so-called "future" not doing this is just what he meant by "the past", so his decision not to do it in the "future" is just what he meant by not doing it in the "past", so I can still Ask the villain why they haven't done this in the past.

What's more, why connect your heartbeat to a bomb? At least it must be connected to a signal transmission station, so that all the self at the same time and at any point in the future can know that they have been killed at a certain point in time. Isn't that the chance of success in blowing up the earth? A "single-point error" that even code farmers know, a villain who claims to blow up the world to be buried, didn't expect that your villain is specifically for LEVUP, the male and female protagonists?

Also, the setting that cannot modify history (in order not to violate the grandfather paradox and cause confusion in the flow of time) is actually really super easy to crack. Take the male protagonist finally seeing Neil dead in front of him as an example. What the male protagonist sees is that Neil is suspected to have died there, and the cause of death is to block a bullet for himself. But does what you see have to be the truth? The male protagonist didn't see what happened to Neil after that (before in the male protagonist's timeline), so if the male protagonist told Neil about this, Neil just kept suspended animation, and the male protagonist himself It was done at the beginning of the movie.

Therefore, the sensationalism at the end is beyond my head - and this trick was used in "Back to the Future", how old-fashioned.

The plot can only be said to not stand up to scrutiny.

This is not to mention that the result of the time-reversal setting is that as soon as any macroscopic object leaves the reversal gate and touches the earth in the reverse-time, it will inevitably cause a big bang caused by the annihilation of positive and negative matter, which is an invincible big BUG—— Maybe that's where the Tunguska came from.

All in all, this movie is definitely not a good Nolan movie in my opinion, nor is it a good movie.

It is a third-rate special agent film in a sci-fi guise. The plot is completely achieved by kneading the timeline, and the settings used in the kneading timeline itself cannot promote the plot itself except to disturb the audience's memory sequence of events. .

Fortunately, although the visual effects are average, they are curious enough.

Therefore, it can be characterized as a mediocre film whose "form is far greater than content".