science fiction subjects are always the darlings of the world of light and shadow, and countless classics are just like a feast in front of them, making people wonder how to eat chopsticks.
's exploration of the universe, the tracing of time and space, the whims of the unknown world, and the search for the meaning of life are always hot topics of science fiction.
And there is one of these movies. Its classic is that it concentrates the most cool and cutting-edge scientific theories currently known, and then uses the most brain-burning art form, but only tells the simplest "choice" story.
Yes, sometimes the simplest choice can change the timeline of a person's life.
It is-"The Man without a Surname"
The cool and fashionable sci-fi shell
If a person has the ability to predict the future or have the ability to foresee all possibilities, due to the irreversibility of time, how should he now make to the future? Your own choice? The
movie "Man without a Surname" unfolds the story with such a proposition. This film is Jacques van Dommel's first English dialogue film, costing 40 million US dollars, based on science fiction, and won the 66th Venice Film Festival's Biographical Film Award and a Fictional Fiction Award. The
film tells the story of Jared Leto’s last 118-year-old protagonist who will naturally die on Earth, Nemo Norberti, recalled about his life and life on various possible timelines in this life. The story of love, and finally find the meaning of life. The
movie incorporates a large number of popular scientific frontiers such as the Big Bang, parallel worlds, superstring theory, reality and illusion, Mars settlement, and even entropy theory, under the complete order of extremely brain-burning multidimensional narratives. element.
The Big Bang has been scientifically defined as a classic theory of astronomy and physics. The universe continues its expansion after the Big Bang in an expanding form at all times, just like a drop of ink being dropped into water, it will quickly fail. The pause began to permeate. Therefore, after every second, we are no longer in the original dimension of the universe.
However, deriving from the existing theories known in the scientific community, we will find that when the tension of the expansion of the universe reaches a certain level, due to the reaction of mass and gravity, the universe will collapse.
If the universe collapse theory is established, time will become a vector. Time has a direction, not just flowing from the past to the future. When the universe collapses, time flows backwards (from the future to the past).
So, just like at the end of the film, Nemo looked at the clock with a weird smile. Less than a few seconds after calling Anna's name and finally passing away, the universe collapsed and everything began to reverse.
Will Nemo be reborn? Will he continue his life in a multidimensional timeline like his memories? Will he have a completely different choice? The director used this cool scientific theory coat, but left the audience unlimited reverie and thinking. The concept of the
parallel world is the same. It is not only interesting but also very fashionable, but at the level of quantum theory, everything is in an active and unstable state, and parallel worlds can exist.
is like you might be begging along the street in another parallel time and space, but in this world, you are curled up on the sofa with a genuine coffee and reading this article. In the film, the young Nemo is dying due to different choices. At the same time, he spent a completely different life in different timelines.
And Mars settles in this human science fiction dream with decades of history. In "The Man without a Name", it is another timeline that Nemo extended to fulfill his promise to Ellis.
includes superstring theory and entropy theory. You will find these cutting-edge scientific theories in the movie, which correspond to certain plots or timelines in the movie.
It is not difficult to see from this that, in fact, all the gorgeous and noisy sci-fi theories are tools that serve the true connotation of the film itself.
And this story itself is actually just the simplest but clichéd love story, but the true meaning of life contained in it is worthy of everyone's thinking.
The brain-burning multi-dimensional narrative is complete and orderly.
Audiences who have not watched the film can hardly understand the film the first time. It is more likely that after watching the first time, they don’t even know what the film will be. What is it that will make you recollect and play with the plot in the film.
this sourceBecause of the fragmented multi-dimensional narrative expression used in the film. The pigeon experiment at the beginning of the
film is very interesting, but it is the finishing touch to remind the audience that it is a certain cognitive defect of people, that is, we often think that certain behaviors and results we do are related, but there are Time does not matter.
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After this thought-provoking experiment, the protagonist appeared in various ages and identities, intertwined with various memory fragments, memories before death, different wives and families, space and mental hospitals, awakening alone, etc. The flashing clips make people seem somewhat contradictory and confused. Audiences who are familiar with this flash-memory narrative technique will smile at the director's skills. It is not uncommon for
to expose and mislead the final outcome in advance. For example, in the opening scene of "Inception", Cobb fell into the deepest dream; another example is "Muholland Road" which is presented in advance. That supposedly perfect world is in sharp contrast with the true story in the second half; the scene where the protagonist wakes up from the memory fragments and the frequent waking up in the film is quite a tribute to "Vanilla Sky".
In general, the above three works can be classified into the category of science fiction films, and in the narrative, more or less use the information deception generated by the interruption and flashback.
When using this kind of technique in works, the audience often agrees with the protagonist’s common-sense judgment. As the plot progresses and the narrative in different dimensions merges, the audience unconsciously falls into the trap set by the director. While shouting at the impossible, he couldn't help but be impressed by the director's whims and logical thinking. Compared with the simpler narrative structure of the above three parts, "The Man without a Surname" is based on the overall memory of the elderly and excellent editing skills, playing a gorgeous super multi-line narrative:
has the same protagonist. As a point of view, the story spanning five timelines is seamlessly self-contained. It seems complicated and difficult to understand, but there are three key nodes as the cornerstone.
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From the timeline, the story can be roughly divided into pre-birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.
Among them, the reason why the protagonist can know all the possibilities before birth is the pavement. The film says that everyone knows everything before birth, but at birth, the kiss of the forgetting angel cancels everyone’s ability , But Nemo was ignored.
This is the first key node and the beginning of everything. If the protagonist does not have this ability, he would not be able to see so many worlds. The second key point of
is that the three girls that Nemo encountered during childhood were Anna, Ellis and an Asian girl, Jean. According to Nemo's choice of life partners, his life also extends at least three different possible timelines. The third key point of
was before Nemo was 9 years old. His father failed to pull up the handbrake and caused a car accident. He has since been devastated, and his mother looked for someone else. Eventually the family was broken and the parents quarreled and divorced.
In the key point of the film, the recurring scene of the family of three being separated at the railway station, the mother got on the train and was about to go away, and the frustrated father shouted Nemo desperately behind him. At this time, the 9-year-old Nemo, the little boy began to feel lost. He loved his father and mother so much that he didn't know how to choose whether to stay or follow his mother who was about to leave. From here,
began to extend the two timelines of following the father and following the mother.
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Then we can see that, on the whole, at the first key node, the characters and the plot did not split, it just made a logical explanation for the protagonist's possibility of predicting the future.
So, if we try to understand the timeline of this work, the problem lies in the combination of the second and third nodes. In the
a movie, Nemo who chooses to leave with his mother meets Anna, and Nemo who chooses to leave with his father meets Ellis first, and in the timeline of Ellis, according to Nemo's different Choose, Gene will appear or not appear.
b If Nemo married Ellis, then there are two possibilities:
1) In a car accident on the day of their wedding, Nemo eventually became a scientist, settled on Mars and shed Ellis’ ashes on Mars to complete his vow of love;
2) The two formed a family, and Ellis was actually He didn't love Nemo, but became depressed all day long and suffered from depression, and eventually ran away from home. Nemo also entered a mental hospital and eventually became the last old man to die naturally on Mars.
c In fact, there is a final choice in the film, which is also a choice that reflects the director’s skill and thinking about life and makes the audience gratified. That is, the little boy did not make any of the above choices, but ran into the train station. A leaf was brought up along the path of Nemo, and this blown leaf facilitated the reunion of Nemo and Anna many years later.
By delineating and organizing the multiple timelines of the film in this way, it is not difficult for us to understand the story of the film, and we will see that the reason why the multidimensional and complex story of "The Man without a Surname" has complete logic and order is precisely Because the simplest "choice" or "divergence point" brings various extensions.
and this kind of placement on each timeline appears to be a very simple extension. The director has a wonderful grasp of the rhythm of the story, coupled with extremely creative shots and post-editing, in more than two hours, the production There is a kaleidoscope-like life story that is dizzying, all-encompassing, and endlessly changing.
And what this life story about "choice" reflects is exactly how each of us should look at life.
's profound philosophy of life is intriguing.
Regarding the proposition of "choice", the female number one Anna in the film said: "For the only meaningful life, abandon any other possibilities." This sentence of
has a small fresh style. His lines made Anna pay a considerable price for this. She doesn't do a fixed job, doesn't try to blend in with the crowd, loves with different suitors, and won't even settle in a fixed city, and all this is just to meet Nemo again. For Anna, his encounter with Nemo is the only meaning of her life.
Sometimes, the beautiful scenes and sad love in the film will give you the illusion that this is a French literary film and forget that it is a science fiction film. In a sense, it is really difficult to define the genre of the film.
But unfortunately, the meaning of life does not just stop at love.
When a scene in the film appears, the 9-year-old Nemo sits alone in an empty theater, watching his life and the lives of others being shown on the stage, and in fact, he can indeed see his life. All the possibilities. After
bombarded with theories such as the big bang theory, entropy, reality and illusion, the film tells us that he is just a 9-year-old boy who cannot make a choice.
Fortunately, at the end of the film, he finally made the choice not to make any choices.
This is because he found that every road is the same and has the same important meaning.
may be puzzling to say this, perhaps like greasy inspirational chicken soup, but if we explore the film itself, we will find that the story itself shows us this simple but extremely meaningful philosophy of life through an extremely complex script. .
In "The Man without a Surname", Nemo's predictability of the future in childhood was regarded by his mother as a sense of sight, but it was actually because Nemo had not been kissed by the forgotten angel.
"Forgotten Angels", this is the film's highly imaginative creative expression. Just like our self-confirmation and expectation of the future, it usually comes from our memory. We live in the present, and the present is constantly fading into the past, and at the same time constantly becoming the future. We will only remember the memory of the past, but know nothing about the future.
However, if we can see into the future of ourselves, what kind of attitude do we have towards the current life?
This is actually a serious but terrible question! When we cannot foresee the future and cause a certain result, we can say that it is unintentional. It is life that drives us to do this.
However, Nemo couldn't easily avoid this question because he could see the future.
And this is precisely the most fantastic and classic place for the film and the director. Together with Nemo, the director’s thoughts are in the form of movies, based on complex brain-burning stories, to think about the meaning of life. What is very interesting about
is that in the film, whether Nemo chooses to follow his father or mother, whether he chooses Anna or Ellis, he always seems to meet Anna again.
In the timeline when Ellis encountered the explosion on the wedding day, Nemo became a scientist. He studied Mars, time, and entropy, but eventually met Anna, even though Anna on that timeline just became a widow. There are children.
At the end of the film, 9-year-old Nemo ran into the trail, and the blowing leaves finally made Anna finally find Nemo who had been waiting for her many years later. This leaf is the "butterfly effect" in "The Man without a Surname".
And on another timeline, the elderly Nemo, who has finished telling everything, had an epiphany before his death, as if he was enlightened, while telling people that all roads are equally important, while whispering Anna’s name peacefully Death.
No matter what, Nemo has actually made his own choice, his only choice, the meaning of his life. For this reason, like Anna, he gave up all other possibilities.
At this point in the film, the philosophy of life that the director wanted to express is already clear, that is, whether it is Nemo, Anna, or Ellis and Jean who have run away from home, what they are actually looking for is Love, and this search for love is the meaning of life.
And no matter which timeline in the film, Anna will appear intentionally or unintentionally, and this is not to say that all roads are to meet Anna and put Anna's timeline above other experiences.
On the contrary, what the film wants to express is that there seem to be many alternative possibilities in our lives, and various future roads will be unfolded, but there will always be some indescribable existence in our lives to guide us. We are on the path of real life.
Because, what we really love, what we are really interested in, and what comes from the bottom of our hearts is the meaning of our lives. And at this point, we don’t need to know the future, what we need is to ask ourselves, just as Nemo knows everything in the film, but he can’t make a choice, and in the end he still has to explore his own heart.
is like the life growth stage that Nemo on every timeline goes through. Each of us will also experience birth, old age, sickness and death, but we can still have our own thoughts on our life. Before making many choices, at least we There is also an opportunity not to choose, you can listen to your heart first.
Because, after all, we have been kissed by the forgotten angel.
