I have said on another thread how disappointed I was with the script for Creed II. One of my gripes was that there's a lot of things in this movie that are really just check boxes for the Rocky franchise.

So all of the Rocky movies have some kind of training montage and each one has its own peculiar new training gimmicks. But they aren't just gimmicks. In the first two Rocky movies, he does what a poor guy does. He doesn't have an elite back up team like Apollo. He runs up the steps of public buildings. He punches meat carcasses. He runs marathons thru the dirty streets of his home town. All of which tells us something about who he is and the challenges he faces.

Rocky 3 he learns how to box like a black guy. So we get speedballs; hi speed skipping that looks like a dance routine; sprints on beautiful California beaches.

Rocky 4 sees Rocky pitted against a man-machine created by the communist state. So how does he train? He holes up at a remote farm and uses farm equipment to build his strength and stamina. He is literally the self made man versus the behemoth of the tyrant state. This also evokes the American pioneer spirit, of farmer settlers bravely going into the untamed wildness armed only with self belief and courage.

Nothing in Creed II makes a statement with the training gimmicks. If there's a symbolism to pounding the desert sand with a sledge hammer, boxing underwater etc, then it is all too arch for me to comprehend.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not looking at Creed II and expecting to find the sorts of symbolism you'd see in a Bergman movie. And I understand the primary purpose of the montages is supposed to be inspirational and energizing. But the earlier montages told a story beyond that. And those stories give support to the characters and the plot.

In Creed II it looks like someone decided they had to do a montage because it is expected, and dreamt up some new weird stuff, and it never even occurred to them to link it to the story in a meaningful way.