This article contains spoilers for Creed 3.
At the climax of Creed 3, director Michael B. Jordan takes us out of the realm of reality. The boxing ring where Adonis Creed (Jordan) and Damian Anderson (Jonathan Majors) have been sparring within fades away and is replaced by a pitch black void. A prison door springs up from the edge of the mat to replace the ropes. In another key moment, the two men look at each other from their respective corners and are met with how they looked as teenagers. None of this is real, but it's more truthful for it.
Creed 3, like its two immediate predecessors and the Rocky series before that, is built on the solid rock of formula. From the moment Damian is reintroduced, leaning on Creed's car outside the gym, we know that the two men will eventually face off in the ring. We know the obstacles standing in the way of this confrontation — that Creed is retired, that Damian has never boxed professionally — will eventually be overcome en route to the bout, and much of the satisfaction comes from watching those familiar pieces click into place.
The bedrock of formula allows for Jordan to push his film into more daring aesthetic territory. Throughout each fight, Jordan is working in the realm of expressionism, not the more grounded realism of the previous Creed films. Though most of the scenes outside the ring are rooted in that same realism, the final fight between Damian and Creed uses abstraction and visual metaphor to bring home the duel’s importance. Jordan has talked about being inspired by anime and this is clear from Adonis’ first fight, as Jordan represents Creed's split-second reactions through quick cuts to his eyes and to the part of his opponent’s body that he's targeting. In slowing the action down, the movie places us in Creed's head allowing us to see what it would be like to be an athlete at the top of his game from that athlete's point of view.
But the final showdown between Creed and Anderson is expressive in a different way, transporting the action from its concrete setting to an abstracted one that serves to represent the characters’ mental state more than their objective reality. To show that Creed and Damian are completely focused on each other, the people and noise of the crowded stadium fade away. When Jordan finally cuts back to a more direct representation of reality, a surprising number of rounds have passed. By locking us into this void, Jordan effectively puts the audience in the fighters' headspace.
The cell doors rising around them serve a distinct, but complementary purpose. Damian was in prison for nearly two decades for a crime that Creed was present for, but ran from. Creed escaped, but the police caught Damian and he lost years of his life in prison, while Creed rose to fame. The film explores the guilt that Creed feels and, by locking him in the ring with Damian, illustrates that he isn't just boxing, he's working through his guilt and exorcizing his demons in the ring.
Movies like Creed 3 and last year's Nope point to a future for Hollywood film that isn't only looking to similar American films for inspiration. Jordan Peele and Michael B. Jordan have both drawn from anime — Jordan more obviously uses the techniques of anime in his fight scenes, while Peele included an Akira slide in Nope's climax. Hollywood film has become, frustratingly, self-referential. The Marvel movies are, largely, referencing previous Marvel movies and Star Wars is often made by people who are primarily influenced by Star Wars.
Ironically, Peele and Jordan have more in common with Star Wars' creator. George Lucas looked to old sci-fi serials, westerns, the work of Akira Kurosawa, and other references to build something fresh and new that was still entirely classical. By rooting Creed 3 in formula while drawing from the Japanese art that he loves for the film's aesthetic, Jordan is doing the same.