Author: Monsterday
This article was originally from VICE France, and there are micro-spoiler warnings about Nolan's filmography.
This headline highlights a sensationalism
After the release of Dunkirk in 2017, you may be tricked into believing that Christopher Nolan is about to reach the pinnacle of his career — that he only needs to make a final sprint in front of the jumping stage to become a true genius by word of mouth.
But unfortunately, you are wrong.
Christopher Nolan on the set of Creed
Three minutes after his most high-profile new work, Creed, began airing— Nolan's most puzzling work, and quickly collapsed into an incredibly twisted story that made it harder for viewers to keep up with the plot.
The entire storyline can hardly be summed up briefly, so the following content appears in the film: a series of car chase scenes that span time and space, entropy that reverses the whole earth, a shocking crisis, and a spy story line about stealing plutonium 241 with a fake picture.
In a sense, "Creed" is Nolan's most radical work. In this film, he doesn't seem to care at all about the development of the storyline, the arc of character growth, and even the hints of reality that are lost. "Creed" also packs all of Nolan's favorite elements at once: faith, time and space, beautiful heroine, death, family, and the use of a car to set off fireworks; yet it lacks the sentimentality that appears in most of his films (such as the scenes of Marion Cotillard in all of Nolan's films, and the entire Interstellar film).
However, in terms of results, "Creed" is an extremely cold and mechanical film. If you're watching a movie trying to pick up the pile of theoretical crumbs that Nolan has sprinkled, you're risking burning your own brain. The film is so extremely trapped in this indulgence that it even begins to seem a little tacky.
To give a few examples: Kenneth Branagh's Andre Sathor, a Russian arms oligarch with a Big Bad Russian accent, is directly reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Detective or John Markovich in The King of Gamblers; and when the film ends, Robert Pattinson's character says to the film's protagonist, played by John David Washington, "I think this is the beginning of a good friendship, but in reverse"— This is actually a poor imitation of the classic line in Casablanca.
André Sathor, played by Kenneth Branagh in Creed
"Creed" is like a balloon that is constantly inflating, but it never explodes, leaving the audience with only doubts about some of the key decisions made in it and where certain key items are.
There is a theory that Nolan did not know himself clearly at all. Instead, he cheats audiences by adding high concepts, Easter eggs, and narrative hidden doors to his films. The biggest Easter egg in this movie is that the name of "Creed" (TENET) is itself a back text. So before you look at it, you'll start wondering if the name itself hints at the story in the movie: "Hey! Could it be that the ending of this film... Is that the beginning? ”
TENET
If you consider that Nolan's greatest feature is to set up deception points in movies, this all makes sense - he has made the audience believe in several films that does not exist in reality. If you say that's the focus of cinema since its inception, that's fine, but in Creed, it feels naïve and conceited.
This kind of magic trick, which is both cheap and extremely delicate, occupies a central place in Nolan's "Deadly Magic". In a film that is almost a critique of his own work, Nolan once again leads the viewer into a narrative of empty talk, this time about the artist's self-sacrifice. The ending? The final reversal is reminiscent of director M. Knight Shyamalan's most iconic (or most obnoxious) work – it turns out that Christian Bell has always played two roles in one person! Like the magician in Deadly Magic, Nolan's work has always been based on this deception of the audience.
Deadly Magic
"Creed" was supposed to be a rescue blockbuster released after the ban was lifted in theaters, but he looked as stupid as any Marvel movie and pretended to be "2001: A Space Odyssey". But it has to be admitted that in the current economic situation, choosing to produce such a bad two-and-a-half-hour movie that costs $200 million does prove Nolan's amazing talent at deceiving audiences. And this is something that no one can take away from him.
At present, "Creed" has not been returned
Vice English version of the original text:
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/dyzjy7/what-if-christopher-nolan-movies-are-actually-crap
Vice France French version of the original text:
https://www.vice.com/fr/article/dyzjy7/tenet-christopher-nolan-film?