Tenet SPOILER Discussion

Topic

Okay so I saw it today and here’s my review. WITH SOME SPOILERS PERHAPS.

I enjoyed it a lot. This is really well made movie, as you may expect from Nolan. Stylistically it shares a lot with Dunkirk, albeit with very different subject matter. The soundtrack is very intrusive (I was watching in a Dolby ATMOS screen to emphasise that), a strange electronica score that drive you through any increase in pace and jeopardy as in Dunkirk. It drops you right into it with a great set piece scene at a theatre.

The characters are all presented face value, with the exception of Elizabeth Debicki’s we know nothing about the background of any of them from start to finish. I sense this is deliberate as who can trust who is a core part of the narrative. The performances are still very strong and to me Pattinson the pick of them.

To the story – what struck me is overall this felt more Le Carre than sci-fi. Yes the time bits are all in there, moreso at the end, but especially with Debicki playing a mob boss’ wife it frequently reminded me most of The Night Manager TV series recently. It’s a lot more spy movie than the trailer suggests. For the timey wimey science stuff, I have to admit I found it a little confusing how ‘inversion’ works so I took the path of not thinking about it too much and going with the flow and overall that paid off, there are some very clever bits where they revisit scenes from earlier and also play simultaneously forwards and backwards. On the negative side it lost me a little in the final scene, the setup was delivered with a full military briefing of what they were doing with one troop moving forwards and the other backwards but I still felt I rather missed out on what ‘Neil’ was doing which blunted its effectiveness.

Overall I give it neither of the Guardian’s scores but a solid 4 because of the rather muddled ending which admittedly may be partly down to my limited brainpower.

 

Replies

That pretty much sums up my feelings. I gave up following plot details after an hour and just went with the flow (whichever way it flowed). There were a couple of plot tics at the end that made me wonder if Nolan had watched Moffat’s Dr Who.

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garjones

Yes it is quite reminiscent of some of that Dr Who stuff when they flit in and out of their earlier scenes.

It’s a pity Johnny Henning isn’t here any more, he has the kind of brain that could tell me if the whole ‘inversion’ concept is genius or bunkum (I suspect the latter as most time travel is in the end). At least it is a new take for me anyway that they are actually travelling backwards in time rather than just appearing there as you’d get on Doctor Who or Back To The Future or whatever.

Maybe as well the intrusive soundtrack didn’t always help with the explanations. Here every English film has Malay and Chinese subtitles which I have grown to forget are ever there but with my limited Malay found myself reading the odd one and translating, especially when a lot of scenes have them talking with masks on.

I think the intrusive soundtrack sometime obscuring the dialogue was a deliberate and interesting choice.

It’s hard for me to fully judge because they opened an Imax/ATMOS screen here maybe 3 years ago. I always go there now for big movies (it’s not the closest but close enough).

Dunkirk hit me viscerally through its soundtrack which was very dominant, the ticking clock motif raising the blood pressure. I can’t recall that being so large an element in Nolan’s films up to then but I watched pretty much all of them either at a normal screen or at home.

I can’t help but see it is a change of style to make it so dominant, it’s not something I noticed in stuff like The Prestige or the Batman films but I’m open to the idea that it’s my change of experience. Overall I like it and very happy to be aurally manipulated like that.

Definitely one I need to see again, but I enjoyed it. I’m glad Debicki got a movie star role. Hopefully more of those to come.

The action scenes were cool. Loved that reverse of the earlier fight near the end.

I did not recognise Aaron Taylor-Johnson at all.

I sense this is deliberate as who can trust who is a core part of the narrative

Yeah, the whole repeated meta-discussion about Washington’s character being “The Protagonist,” and that being his only name, definitely isn’t a coincidence, but I’m not sure what it is.

Biggest surprise: A Nolan movie in which no character has a dead wife.

US is still being stupid about the virus and theatres are still closed

paul f wrote:

I’m glad Debicki got a movie star role.

I liked they didn’t hide her height (she’s 6’3″). I’ve seen in other roles she’s done they shoot in certain ways to even her out with her co-stars, here they were happy for her to get a  pair of heels on and tower over all the blokes.

 

I enjoyed watching it, but I think I have to see it one more time to make sense of some of the stuff. (And probably another time backwards.) Some things I felt happened when I blinked or were explained in exposition drowned out by the mating call of a humpback whale. How did they suddenly have an army with equipment to send half the team backwards in time?

“Moffats Dr. No” is an appropriate description.

The small army was okay for me, they established Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s gang were somehow connected to the security services (although they don’t specify with all the British accents you’d assume MI6 or something).

What I couldn’t figure out is who they were fighting, a lot of explosions going off but I only saw Kenneth Branagh’s bald henchman in there.

I’ll rewatch it when it comes to Netflix as then you can turn subtitles on.

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Ben

I saw it yesterday and enjoyed it.

Right from the start I loved the score and sound design. It slaps you right in the face right from the beginning of the theatre shootout and it never really lets up for the whole movie.

I managed to follow most of the “inversion” trickery for the most part. But I did get a little lost during the ending battle. I feel like I understood the basic concept of having the two teams moving backwards and forwards in time simultaneously. But when it was actually happening my brain couldn’t quite keep it straight.

It’s Nolan, so the movie looks great. Plot wise I’d say is sags a little at times. I lost track of exactly what the protagonist was after at points. But I kind of just went with it and I had fun with it…..Its definitely a movie I need to see again though, just to nail down the finer points.

Saw it, and it was a pretty straightforward and highly entertaining action pastiche. No character arcs that I could make out, no deeper moral lessons, no pushing the limits of cinema, no real story (“destroy the universe”, really?), no proper science fiction. It’s a glorified piece of shit, which is also what I think of Nolan and some of his antics.

The social commentary is en pointe: The movie takes place in a not-too-distant future where men are to cool for names and like to wear masks and women are relegated to do the sex, then gestate, give birth to and care for kids. This is a master stroke of bringing real-world issues into the cinematic narrative dimension and elaborate with them as their success is measured in their ability to perform well in nah you’re right I’m not really doing this, I’m just fucking with you.

Not as much as Christopher Nolan is though. If Whedon makes a plot point on something about Black Widows ability to have children for an interrogation scene at SHIELD HQ there is immediate backlash and pushback. I don’t mind that. That’s fucking good. Call out the bullshit, ya know.

But Christopher Nolan affords his female characters and their character arcs as much effort as Rob Liefeld has put in to studying basic human anatomy and makes everyone forget by having cool framed shots rife with effects in a movie with the worlds second highest production value available (as long James Cameron is still alive). Call this idiot out.

TLDR: I really enjoyed watching this movie. It absolutely fucking sucked though. 5/5

We live in a twilight world.

And there are no friends at dusk.

It’s strange how I thought that I liked this film after the first viewing but knew that I really needed a repeat to be sure. So I’ve since watched it again (and read the screenplay) and I definitely like it. The score is great, the action is very good, I like the cast. Thinking about inversion for too long can hurt my head but I’d rather have a blockbuster that will let me think about it (if I want to), especially if it’s the only summer movie of the year.

I would guess that I only heard 80% of the dialogue on my first viewing. On my second I think that I heard more, but I wonder if my brain was correcting what I heard because I had read the script? It’s also possible that cinemas have fiddled with the sound settings now that the film has been out for a few weeks. Unfortunately my second viewing didn’t give me the punch in the gut that my first viewing had, I think that they were a notch too quiet. If they had been playing Dunkirk at that volume instead, I would have complained.

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garjones

Anonymous wrote:

No character arcs that I could make out, no deeper moral lessons, no pushing the limits of cinema, no real story (“destroy the universe”, really?), no proper science fiction.

As far as characters and plot are concerned, it’s basically a Bond movie. I’d say that’s a feature rather than a bug though, as it allows Nolan to focus on what really is interesting to him about this movie – the mechanics of inversion.

And I thought those were awesome and definitely did push the limits of cinema. Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like this before, and it was pretty mindblowing, especially stuff like the interrogation scene and the car chases leading up and down to it. When this is what a movie does, I really don’t need a good story as such. The premise of the future going to war with the present is so cool that I kinda wish he’d done more with it (same way I wished that Inception did more with the dream spy premise), but that’s not the way Nolan works, and at least when it comes to Tenet I can’t really argue with him. What he does here is just too damn impressive.

Just watched this… not sure I liked it all that much… hard to explain why though.

I guess I should start by saying that it’s a very ambitious movie (as usual), but I don’t think Nolan was able to deliver this time around… this might’ve been a bit more than he could chew.

First of all, the characters: None of them felt real, they all have this fictional movie quality where everyone says one-liners delivered too perfectly, you can feel they’re reciting a script, it doesn’t feel natural.

The pace was bad, and no, not because of the backwards/forwards thing, but rather because the movie keeps jumping from scene to scene in very abrupt ways that feel disjointed… like at the begining, in the opera house, you can’t really tell what’s going on, or what the main character is doing or even why… and that same choppy pace permeates throughout the movie.

Now, I got the whole inversion thing, and hey, it’s a nice little concept, however, it just doesn’t work and it keeps pulling me out of the movie… so you really need to turn off your brain for this one, and that kinda sucks since Nolan tends to be better at treating this type of far-out concepts and making them work…

The big battle at the end is messy, both conceptually and in terms of execution: you can’t follow up what’s happening, not because of the time shenanigans but because of the terrible choreography and editing… and then conceptually it just doesn’t make sense***… what’s the tactical advantage of having to teams going at it at the same time but in two time directions? Seems the only one who had something useful to do within that whole situation was Pattinson, the rest of it was just for the sake of showing off the inversion concept and having some people run forwards and some backwards and some people get killed by implosions and that kind of shit.

But it kinda doesn’t work in a battlefield because battlefields are chaotic in one single time direction as it is, so adding the other direction only creates more muddled chaos and the inversion doesn’t get to shine as much (explosion and implosion effects kinda get blurred very quickly) as it did  in the airport sequences for example, where, given the more confined nature of the scene, it works MUCH MUCH better and doesn’t create as many non-sensical situations.

So yeah, it’s a neat idea and all, but honestly Nolan got too ambitious and went too big when he should’ve kept it more personal and confined, because that’s when the whole concept works… This movie might be too self-indulgent and someone should’ve probably stepped in to say “this might be too much”, but I’m guessing Nolan gets to do whatever he wants these days, which I supposed is both a blessing and a curse.

*** when I say “it doesn’t make sense”, yes I’m aware it’s supposed to be confusing, but that’s not what I mean, what I mean is: for example… at several points we see civilians interacting with inverted people in some VERY blatant and overt ways, like at the airport or in the highway… is no one really noticing people or cars moving backwards? That’s the kinda crap that takes you out of the movie…  or for example, they make a point of showing you their car has a broken side mirror so you can later see how it happened, but are you telling me they just hopped into a car with a broken mirror? was that mirror always broken? when did it break? how does it work? Yeah… that kind of stuff…

It’s okay for a movie to explore a crazy concept, like Inception did, as long as you can keep it coherent… and this movie ultimately fails at keeping things coherent.

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Todd

Jon wrote:

Just watched this… not sure I liked it all that much… hard to explain why though.

I guess I should start by saying that it’s a very ambitious movie (as usual), but I don’t think Nolan was able to deliver this time around… this might’ve been a bit more than he could chew.

First of all, the characters: None of them felt real, they all have this fictional movie quality where everyone says one-liners delivered too perfectly, you can feel they’re reciting a script, it doesn’t feel natural.

[…]
So yeah, it’s a neat idea and all, but honestly Nolan got too ambitious and went too big when he should’ve kept it more personal and confined, because that’s when the whole concept works… This movie might be too self-indulgent and someone should’ve probably stepped in to say “this might be too much”, but I’m guessing Nolan gets to do whatever he wants these days, which I supposed is both a blessing and a curse.

That’s kinda how I often feel about Nolan’s movies, and certainly why Inception didn’t really work with me. With this one, I was able to relax into it more easily and just enjoy it for what it was.

Well, personally I found inception had both a coherent internal logic (or at least good enough) AND a more solid narrative structure, whereas this movie stumbles in these regards, imo, so it didn’t leave me with the same satisfaction when it was done.

It was visually very impressive, so my visual self was very happy with it in that sense, but the narrative was weak. I guess it’s the same issue people tend to have with directors of that like, be it Snyder or Scott, who tend to be very visual, except for me it was more pronounced on this one that it bothered me when usually I can look past those flaws.

Saw it yesterday, enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. For a 2 1/2 hour movie, I thought it went pretty quickly, even though I often didn’t have a clue what was happening, or why. I’m pretty sure Nolan has it all figured out to the Nth degree, though, and I’ve a feeling if I watched it again (which I’m actually inclined to do) it would probably make more sense. (Or maybe it wouldn’t, seeing as even Joker’s escape from the police station in Dark Knight doesn’t make any sense…)

It’s very strangely edited though, to the point where not only is there no fat on the bone, there’s almost no meat either. It’s a very odd choice, and one that makes it a very cold movie – the people are nothing more than cyphers, because NOTHING must get in the way of Nolan’s skilfully constructed plot engine.

As for the concept of inversion, it doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny (how does an inverted internal combustion engine work when they’ve already demonstrated that an inverted fire makes things cold?) so it’s best to just go with the flow.

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Steve Sensible wrote:

(how does an inverted internal combustion engine work when they’ve already demonstrated that an inverted fire makes things cold?)

That one’s easy, it’s simply that the inversion, uh, with the, uh, and then the vacuum of where there is no explosion creates…
Shit, you’re right.

Steve Sensible wrote:

As for the concept of inversion, it doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny (how does an inverted internal combustion engine work when they’ve already demonstrated that an inverted fire makes things cold?) so it’s best to just go with the flow.

The cars/engines aren’t inverted, people are… for some (odd) reason they feel cold instead of heat, but fire is fire. You’re right though, it doesn’t hold to scrutiny anyways… and I’m talking about the whole plot =P

Christian wrote:

The cars/engines aren’t inverted

Some of them are, the helicopters in the final battle scene, for example.

[Jon]

I don’t remember off the top of my head… that battle is hard to follow so I didn’t pay much attention, but it might be helicopters from forward-world as seen by inverted folks…

Edit: Oh wait, nevermind, you mean the helicopters carrying troops… yeah… maybe they have turnstiles for helicopters…

Anyways, yeah the movie keeps ignoring its own logic, that’s not good… reminds me of Looper =/

Edit2: No, nevermind, I just re-checked the scene, you only see vehicles moving backwards from the perspective of the inverted troops… so at least they didn’t fuck that up.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Jon.

Steve Sensible wrote:

It’s a very odd choice, and one that makes it a very cold movie – the people are nothing more than cyphers, because NOTHING must get in the way of Nolan’s skilfully constructed plot engine.

Its definitely a choice too, right down to Washington’s lead character not even having a name. I mean all his films are driven by plot over character, that’s the way his mind works, but this one is like he’s actively cutting it out so we know next to nothing about anyone on screen.

 

Jon wrote:

reminds me of Looper

Both these movies explicitly told the audience not to think about it too. And arguably, Looper did a better job telling us.

garjones wrote:

Its definitely a choice too, right down to Washington’s lead character not even having a name. I mean all his films are driven by plot over character, that’s the way his mind works, but this one is like he’s actively cutting it out so we know next to nothing about anyone on screen.

True. Kenneth Brannagh’s character is the only one that is slightly developed (and the only interesting one, too).

Inception really was the same. Leo’s character had one driving motivation and one inciting incident behind it and that was it; entirely flat character. And the others didn’t even have a motivation. Nolan knows his actors though and they always make it work – John David Washington and Robert Pattinson do a great job, and so did Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt with even less describable characters.

Nolan really is the anti-Mike Leigh who has all his actors construct entire detailed life stories for every character.

You are right though the actors do tend to make it work. I still manage to care what happens to them even if I know absolutely nothing about them.

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Christian

I tried listening to Ludwig Gorannsson’s score yesterday because I like listening to movie music while I work. It was a bit of a chore. Come back Hans Zimmer, all is forgiven.

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Todd

TENET is interesting in that it is the first time I’ve seen a very obvious concept used in a sci fi thriller. The idea that future generations would attack our present and blame us for their troubles fits in with the current spirit of our age. Sort of the same way robots and artificial intelligence was the obvious sci fi villain archetype of the 80’s and 90’s. I’m surprised there aren’t more stories where future generations use time travel and advanced tech to  seek revenge on their ancestors. Maybe I’ve missed them.

However, Tenet does make that simple concept very complicated in many ways.

Anonymous wrote:

I’m surprised there aren’t more stories where future generations use time travel and advanced tech to  seek revenge on their ancestors. Maybe I’ve missed them.

Yup, you’ve missed them… =P

I actually found that whole aspect of the story quite trite…

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Jon wrote:

Yup, you’ve missed them… =P I actually found that whole aspect of the story quite trite…

True – it wasn’t really used very well or very clearly. Similar to Interstellar were pretty much the opposite occurred with some vaguely future generation using time travel to help the present generation out of a catastrophe. Deus Ex Machina in one and Diabolus Ex Machina in the other.

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

True – it wasn’t really used very well or very clearly.

Nolan always has a very clear idea of what he’s interested in with these movies, and sometimes it’s a shame that he doesn’t want to explore certain other aspects of it. With Inception, I was disappointed that the dreams weren’t really like dreams at all and that the movie didn’t go more into dream logic and the absurdity of it. In Tenet, it’s the idea of the war of the future against the present that wasn’t fully explored.

Anonymous wrote:

I’m surprised there aren’t more stories where future generations use time travel and advanced tech to  seek revenge on their ancestors. Maybe I’ve missed them.

Well, there’s William Gibson’s The Peripheral, in which the future treats the past like an imperalist power colonising a third-world country.

Christian wrote:

Nolan always has a very clear idea of what he’s interested in with these movies, and sometimes it’s a shame that he doesn’t want to explore certain other aspects of it. With Inception, I was disappointed that the dreams weren’t really like dreams at all and that the movie didn’t go more into dream logic and the absurdity of it

Yeah, Inception was totally about how people perceive movies, not dreams, which was what Nolan was really interested in. Same for Memento, actually, as the condition in the movie was cinematic rather than psychological.

Nolan has always seemed fascinated by the passage of time and how movies allow people to change their perception of it. I think that is more important to him as far as his personal films than anything to do with plot or character.

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Christian

Anonymous wrote:

Christian wrote:

Nolan always has a very clear idea of what he’s interested in with these movies, and sometimes it’s a shame that he doesn’t want to explore certain other aspects of it. With Inception, I was disappointed that the dreams weren’t really like dreams at all and that the movie didn’t go more into dream logic and the absurdity of it

Yeah, Inception was totally about how people perceive movies, not dreams, which was what Nolan was really interested in. Same for Memento, actually, as the condition in the movie was cinematic rather than psychological.

Nolan has always seemed fascinated by the passage of time and how movies allow people to change their perception of it. I think that is more important to him as far as his personal films than anything to do with plot or character.

The Prestige is his commentary on practical FX versus CGI.

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Anonymous wrote:

True – it wasn’t really used very well or very clearly. Similar to Interstellar were pretty much the opposite occurred with some vaguely future generation using time travel to help the present generation out of a catastrophe. Deus Ex Machina in one and Diabolus Ex Machina in the other.

Well yes and no, because in Tenet the “bad guys” are indeed waging war against the past, but the main guy is also helping the past from the future… that’s the big twist at the end. So it’s both.

But you got movies like Looper for exemple, where the bad guys are also using the past to futher their own plans in the future, or a couple of TV shows, like Continuum where a future faction is trying to change the past and another faction is trying to keep it that way, or the 12 Monkeys TV show… there’s a few iterations of similar themes.

Anonymous wrote:

Yeah, Inception was totally about how people perceive movies, not dreams, which was what Nolan was really interested in. Same for Memento, actually, as the condition in the movie was cinematic rather than psychological.

Indeed, Inception is absolutely about the experience of watching movies and the relationship between the creators and their audience.

Todd wrote:

The Prestige is his commentary on practical FX versus CGI.

I think it’s also a commentary on cinema in general, but yeah, there might also be something there, maybe not about practical vs cgi, but maybe about theater vs movies? I dunno… could be both =P

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Jon wrote:

But you got movies like Looper for exemple, where the bad guys are also using the past to futher their own plans in the future, or a couple of TV shows, like Continuum where a future faction is trying to change the past and another faction is trying to keep it that way, or the 12 Monkeys TV show… there’s a few iterations of similar themes.

12 Monkeys is pretty good – I like that the past is unchangeable in that as well.

Still, you’d think there would be a few solid and definitive popular versions of “the Future vs the Present” concept similar to the way that Terminator and The Matrix movies crystalized the “Humans vs. Machines” concept. The Terminator also was a future vs the present, but future machines rather than future generations invading the past.

Seems like there was a story where time travelers escaped a dying Earth by going into the past, but I can’t remember that clearly. Maybe I’m thinking of the book and movie Millennium.

Christian wrote:

With Inception, I was disappointed that the dreams weren’t really like dreams at all and that the movie didn’t go more into dream logic and the absurdity of it.

They were more like lucid dreams though, hence the need for the architect. Nolan is too po-faced to do real absurdity.

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Christian, garjones

Anonymous wrote:

Seems like there was a story where time travelers escaped a dying Earth by going into the past, but I can’t remember that clearly. Maybe I’m thinking of the book and movie Millennium.

Ah yes, the name escapes me, I saw one season of that, pretty boring… Edit… I just spent too much time looking for the name of that… “The crossing”… it might not even be the one you’re talking about =P

There’s another one called Travelers with also agents from the future traveling back to prevent catastrophic events, that one is actually pretty good, but apprently it was cancelled, so not worth the time I suppose.

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Rocket

Jon wrote:

There’s another one called Travelers with also agents from the future traveling back to prevent catastrophic events, that one is actually pretty good, but apparently it was cancelled, so not worth the time I suppose.

Seems like there were a couple of shows like that. Another was Seven Days or something where the agents could only go back a week to prevent something – similar to the movie Deja Vu that had a 48 hour limit.

I think both shows used the conceit that when the agents returned to their present, no one thought they did anything because the changes they made was what the people who didn’t time travel remembered as the past. Source Code also does that.

I also recall a scene in some show where they recruit an African American scientist who absolutely does not want to time travel since there is no good time in the past to be a black man.

Ironically though, the real physicist most obsessed with time travel to the past is a black man. Spike Lee was trying to make a movie based on his life and work.

Anonymous wrote:

Nolan has always seemed fascinated by the passage of time and how movies allow people to change their perception of it. I think that is more important to him as far as his personal films than anything to do with plot or character.

Yup, Dunkirk too which has 3 narratives working along 3 different time spans.

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Anonymous wrote:

I also recall a scene in some show where they recruit an African American scientist who absolutely does not want to time travel since there is no good time in the past to be a black man.

It was Rufus in the TV show “Timeless”. the same actor also was in Preacher and The Boys. in The Boys, he is the marketing guy whose dick froze and fell off.

Jon wrote:

There’s another one called Travelers with also agents from the future traveling back to prevent catastrophic events, that one is actually pretty good, but apprently it was cancelled, so not worth the time I suppose.

I was watching and enjoying Travelers early this year. I like that there were two AIs fighting each other and each side had programmers working for them. I stopped watching because I hit the plague storyline right about the same time as the Lockdown. Maybe I should go back and finish it.

Rocket wrote:

in The Boys, he is the marketing guy whose dick froze and fell off.

Man, that show is so awesome. Just imagine saying that sentence about any TV show ten years ago.

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Rocket, Todd

Rocket wrote:

I was watching and enjoying Travelers early this year. I like that there were two AIs fighting each other and each side had programmers working for them. I stopped watching because I hit the plague storyline right about the same time as the Lockdown. Maybe I should go back and finish it.

I honestly don’t remember much anymore, but maybe it’s not worth it… it probably ended on a huge cliffhanger, and they got cancelled. Too bad though, it had some cool ideas.

Hell, Quantum Leap had Dr. Sam Beckett “putting things right, that once went wrong”.

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These are pretty funny – kinda like the everything wrong with videos. Don’t take it too seriously:

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Christian, Sean Robinson

I watched earlier this afternoon. Really enjoyed it, but in a turn my brain off way. I just dont think it could stand up to scrutiny. Enjoyable as all hell, but I can see if others don’t think so.

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Anonymous wrote:

These are pretty funny – kinda like the everything wrong with videos. Don’t take it too seriously:

The pitch meetings are muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch better than cinema sins and their ilk.

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Christian

Sean Robinson wrote:

I watched earlier this afternoon. Really enjoyed it, but in a turn my brain off way. I just dont think it could stand up to scrutiny.

It has an inverted plot. The more you explain it, the less sense it makes.

Ironically, though, it did seem like there was much more exposition and expository dialogue in this than any other Nolan film.

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Sean Robinson

[Sean Robinson]

So I can already count my brother in the negative, but he enjoyed it visually.

Kind of my fear, like I can’t get into another “Man of Steel” and I love Nolan and may have a biased view.
But…

The beginning of Dark Knight Rises is a very cool scene and you’re riveted in the theatre, but soneone here (I forgot, its been a while) pointed out, what was the purpose of that? and/or it made no sense. Never got better on a rewatch either.

Now here he’s got some damn good cool selection of scenes (and that music tells me to shut up, screw the neighbors, and rock ‘n’ effin’ roll), maybe the most out of his movies, and that freeway scene was awesome and gets you thinking (’cause how to pull off a move like that was plausible (one vehicle was a fire truck!) that this is a perfect ‘Heist’ movie scene).

But he’s almost writing “Inversion” style by making scenes and connecting them?
Doing a good job, better than most when critique applies.

Uh, I’m caught again trying to wrap up a post.
I’ve got multiple things in my head and just really got @anders post upthread.

Better to just stop talking and go back in time and have words with both Nolan and Snyder…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Sean Robinson.

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Christian

Meh… the movie doesn’t work but I respect it… as I always say: I’d rather watch a movie that swings and misses rather than a movie that plays it safe and bland. Tenet for me was a miss, but it was also a gigantic swing… so it’s okay. Let’s see what he comes up with next.

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Todd, garjones, Christian

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Jon wrote:

Meh… the movie doesn’t work but I respect it… as I always say: I’d rather watch a movie that swings and misses rather than a movie that plays it safe and bland. Tenet for me was a miss, but it was also a gigantic swing… so it’s okay. Let’s see what he comes up with next.

Very well put.

Well, this was a head fuck of a movie.  Does that mean it was bad? Far from it but if you asked how much I understood the whole inversion concept, I’d have to go with 50-50.

The biggest weakness is the sound mix – voices are too quiet, SFX and music too loud, so I was forever regularly tweaking the volume – and Nolan has previous form here.  Fortunately having subtitles active de-fanged the voice sound issues.,

I have to admit I was pretty agnostic on the news of Pattinson doing Batman, but having seen him here? He can certainly nail Bruce Wayne.

The other casting was very effective at making you care about a complex plot, one possibly too much so.  There’s some neat sidesteps on the nature of cause and effect in how the future war is set up.

Does it work? Mostly, but it does rely on you, as a viewer, just going with the flow.

It was also a rather interesting experiment of seeing what Ultra HD disc plays like.  The answer is pretty damn good, but it’s definitely a format to be very selective on what films you get on it, especially given the PS5’s ability to boost DVD and BRs.

I finally got around to watching this tonight and found it quite interesting as a film, but ultimately not satisfying, and maybe the first big disappointment from Nolan, whose films I’ve always enjoyed.

It almost feels like an abstraction of a sci-fi action movie, with very little in the way of tangible character or story but lots of flash and diversion and unnecessary complexity in terms of plot detail to fill the gaps (and the runtime).

I got the sense of Nolan being so keen on the time-reversal gimmick that it’s all hung off the flimsiest skeleton, seemingly intentionally (even down to all the mentions of the “protagonist” and “antagonists”). But it’s just not enough on its own to make for a good movie.

The time stuff was interesting for a little while but soon got repetitive, and ultimately didn’t really provide anything that’s new or novel for time-travel stories (other than doing it on a giant budget).

Red Dwarf famously did a “Backwards” episode that made use of reversed footage and the idea of objects and people travelling in opposite directions through time, more than 30 years ago, and a lot of this felt like a glossier take on that. And other elements of the story about the future sending back this tech to battle the past also felt derivative.

Ultimately it was all underdeveloped and vague, with no real reason for you to engage with any of the characters. (Branagh was the exception as his performance gave his character a sense of personality that pretty much all the others lacked.)

By the time the big final battle rolled around you got the sense that the director had lost the thread of his own story, or at least of how to present it in a way that meant anything to the audience. Basic elements of storytelling (who is doing what and why) were either ignored or so unclear as to be meaningless.

It all felt a bit emperor’s new clothes, trying to dazzle viewers with the gimmicks and action and daring them to point out that any sense of story had by that point fallen apart.

It’s unarguably well-made on a technical level but it’s a big, empty shell of a movie. And I say this as someone who likes Nolan’s movies a lot and was really looking forward to this one.

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Todd

Ben wrote:

The biggest weakness is the sound mix – voices are too quiet, SFX and music too loud, so I was forever regularly tweaking the volume – and Nolan has previous form here.

Yep, it’s a directorial quirk that seemingly exists mainly to irritate the audience.

Another quirk I noticed was the constantly changing aspect ratio. Presumably it’s the Imax thing again, as with some of his previous films, with the Imax scenes being in the squarer format and the others a more widescreen ratio. Distracting once you notice it.

Saw this recently and made me laugh.

Why Nolan should not be given the James Bond franchise

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Todd

I just finished watching it and all I could think of is Scotty’s line from Star Trek III:

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

The movie was just so unnecessarily complicated and so much didn’t make sense. I really have no desire to rewatch it multiple times to understand it.

The “inversions”, while visually stunning, doesn’t really work when you start thinking about it. The final battle was just a muddled mess. You don’t really see who the red and blue teams are fighting. Nolan’s audio tendencies don’t help either.

None of the characters have any depth. I really didn’t care about any of them.

Nolan has some brilliant ideas but it seems like he can’t help but to overcomplicate them. He really needs someone to rein him in.

I thought the movie was just okay at best.

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Dave

Todd wrote:

Nolan has some brilliant ideas but it seems like he can’t help but to overcomplicate them. He really needs someone to rein him in.

This movie was 90 minutes of exposition half of which you can’t frickin’ hear and then 30 minutes of action scenes you can’t understand… or vice versa.

 

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Rocket, Todd, Dave

Anonymous wrote:

Todd wrote:

Nolan has some brilliant ideas but it seems like he can’t help but to overcomplicate them. He really needs someone to rein him in.

This movie was 90 minutes of exposition half of which you can’t frickin’ hear and then 30 minutes of action scenes you can’t understand… or vice versa.

 

Nolan is an auteur director, which means we will get movies that are unlike anything else. But being an auteur also means that you don’t always have someone keeping you in check. You’re pretty much allowed to do what you want and no one is saying “no” to you. More often than not, some strategically placed no’s would have made a positive difference in the final product.

[Jason]

The whole premise of the movie just falls to pieces when you think about it.

How did the Saab uncrash itself? It was being driven by an inverted protagonist, but the car itself wasn’t inverted, was it? Does the inverted person have some kind of inversion field around them?

And we saw the broken mirror on the BMW get repaired when the Audi hit it. But where did the broken mirror come from? At some point before the chase, someone would have had to put a broken mirror in the car (an inverted repair).

And the building that gets blown up twice in the final battle, where it is blown up from two different temporal directions. It gets destroyed, reassembles itself, then gets destroyed again. It is only whole at the 5:00 mark at both directions, then it’s shown destroyed in both directions. So how was it built to begin with? At what point did it exist as a whole structure?

The bullets suffer from the same problem as the mirror. Especially the one at the opera house.

Imagine that I’m sitting at home with a gun staring at my wall. I fire the gun at the wall, the bullet lodges into the wall and puts a hole in sheetrock. A week later I pull the bullet out with a pair of pliers and plaster over the hole.

Now, with an inverted bullet, there’s a bullet hole in the wall, I aim the gun, pull the trigger, and the bullet jumps back into the gun and the wall repairs itself. Did the bullet hole exist in the wall when the house was built, or, at some point before pulling the trigger, did I jam the bullet in there with a pair of pliers?

There is also the matter of the protagonist shooting his inverted self in the arm. Once he’s inverted, the wound slowly begins to appear in his arm until he fights with his past self and the bullets gets sucked from his arm. This could possibly explain where the inverted bullet holes and broken mirror come from, though the walls and opera house floor that took the bullets, and the broken car mirror ,were never inverted themselves

It looks kind of cool, and they tried to handwave it away with some lines about time still mostly flows forward, but you’ll tear your hair out if think too hard about it…

 

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Jason.

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Todd

Yeah, Nolan’s personal movies are in some way all about the cinematic distortion of time and character. However, whereas Memento, Prestige and Inception were using that more metaphorically, in TENET the characters all seemed to only make sense if they existed only in a movie. As if they were set in a world like THE LAST ACTION HERO where the physics are entirely simulated for cinematic effect and the algorithm (that’s what it was called, right?) was actually simply literally reversing the film in some shots.

I did somewhat expect it to have some of the suspense elements of Memento as there is plenty of opportunity for the Protagonist to find himself at a point in the scene where he had to put together what’s already happened before experiencing it, but it never really had the same compelling tension because in Memento, and even in Inception, the drama of the situation was clear while in this you’re never quite sure what exactly is happening.

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Todd

Todd wrote:

Nolan is an auteur director, which means we will get movies that are unlike anything else. But being an auteur also means that you don’t always have someone keeping you in check.

Like Fincher in that regard and I think he’ll follow that route as well. I think his next movie will be more grounded, a biopic (he’s been trying to make a movie about Howard Hughes for decades) or based on a true story.

I can see why Nolan is insistent on his films being seen on the big screen.

When Tenet came out we were out of lockdown so saw it in the cinema at an IMAX. While the film didn’t make a whole lot of sense I have to admit I enjoyed the ride. The opening scene in the theatre was great and the overbearing soundtrack becomes more of an asset with Dolby ATMOS.

I didn’t wait for cable.

Todd wrote:

Nolan is an auteur director, which means we will get movies that are unlike anything else

Nah, there are plenty of directors who favour style over substance.

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Jason wrote:

The whole premise of the movie just falls to pieces when you think about it.

Yeah it does… worst thing about the reverse bullet explanation thing, is that, despite it not making any sense whatsoever, the establish a couple of seemingly important things that then get promptly ignored for the rest of the movie… I get the convenient laziness, but that’s just plain laziness…

But eh, still a fun ride warts and all, but I don’t think I’ll revisit it nearly as much I have revisited most of his other movies.

garjones wrote:

I didn’t wait for cable.

Considering theaters were closed here when it came out, I didn’t have a choice is this case. Otherwise, I would have seen it on the big screen.

Todd wrote:

I would have seen it on the big screen.

Todd, your account’s been hacked.

Dave wrote:

Todd wrote:

I would have seen it on the big screen.

Todd, your account’s been hacked.

Damn Russians.

Seriously, I really would have seen that one in the theaters. It looked like that it would be great to experience on the big screen. Unfortunately, I think I still would have been disappointed with the film.

Todd wrote:

Seriously, I really would have seen that one in the theaters. It looked like that it would be great to experience on the big screen. Unfortunately, I think I still would have been disappointed with the film.

I think seeing it on the big screen may be a big part of why I wasn’t.

Saw the weaknesses, didn’t mind them.

I think in a way, having the characters be that formulaic may also have helped as far as I am concerned, as all of the characters in Nolan’s movies fall flat for me, and when they have a lot of big emotional moments like in Interstellar that just doesn’t work. So beginning and ending with cyphers was actually kind of refreshing this time.

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garjones, Rocket

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Nah, there are plenty of directors who favour style over substance.

It is a growing problem for me. The dramatic heart of the characters gets more thin each film he makes. I would say it’s Brechtian, but it really isn’t.

Christian wrote:

I think in a way, having the characters be that formulaic may also have helped as far as I am concerned, as all of the characters in Nolan’s movies fall flat for me, and when they have a lot of big emotional moments like in Interstellar that just doesn’t work. So beginning and ending with cyphers was actually kind of refreshing this time.

On second viewing, this is the main difficulty I have with the movie. Unlike the general view, I usually find Nolan’s characters to be more compelling because they are generally flawed and dangerously selfish from the outset – from Following and Memento to Inception and even Bruce Wayne in the Batman movies. Even Cooper in INTERSTELLAR is a pretty selfish protagonist. Selfishness is a pretty consistent internal trait that Nolan heroes contend with in his movies.

In TENET, though, the protagonist starts the movie willing to die to save his team (and they are NPC’s in the movie’s story, so who cares?) so I was wondering, well, where does he go from here? Turns out – nowhere.

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Todd, Dave

That’s because it’s backwards. In this movie the characters end up even less developed than where they started.

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Christian, Todd, njerry

So… when they were inverted in the container for the trips all over the world, how do they eat and go to the bathroom? Do you pick regurgitated food out of your mouth and then put it on the plate where it eventually goes back into the container in the refrigerator? Do you suck urine back into your body and spit water into an empty glass that gets eventually sucked back into the tap or bottle?

Also, Sator’s dead man switch is a bit confusing. Sator on the boat at the end was actually the “future” Sator who put together the pieces of the algorithm. Then he and his surviving men inverted themselves so he could go back in time and get on the boat and commit suicide while his men buried the de-inverted algorithm for the future antagonists to find.

However, what this means is that there are two Sators at the end. The “future” Sator on the boat with “future” Kat and the “present” Sator – his past self who is on the mainland and performing the actions that we watched in the rest of the movie. So, if the Sator on the boat killed himself, how would it activate the dead man switch when his past version also still alive and running around? Besides, the dead man switch only works if the algorithm is at the location of the bomb, so why does he have it if he doesn’t have the algorithm yet?

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

So… when they were inverted in the container for the trips all over the world, how do they eat and go to the bathroom? Do you pick regurgitated food out of your mouth and then put it on the plate where it eventually goes back into the container in the refrigerator? Do you suck urine back into your body and spit water into an empty glass that gets eventually sucked back into the tap or bottle?

See, the Red Dwarf episode I mentioned actually explores all this stuff.

 

 

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Rocket, Todd

Yeah, it is weird. Like I’m pretty sure – I’d have to see it again – that Neil would put empty medical bags at the end of Kat’s IV  in exchange for the full ones. So if everything in the container is inverted, then did they have a refrigerator and would it heat cold things up?

In the end, we invert entropy every day in refrigerators and freezers and they aren’t going backwards in time. So obviously, entropy and the flow of time are not the same thing – so the whole premise of the movie gets a little stretched when they try to bring physics into it.

Also, the whole dead man switch thing is confusing because – again, if I understood the movie correctly, and that is not certain though I’ve seen it three times now and watched clips on it – the whole point of Sator’s plan is that his guy Volkov (the bald guy) needs to drop the algorithm down a big damn hole before the explosion goes off so the future antagonists (if they even exist*) know where to look for it.

Well, that means they could have had Kat kill Sator at any time before Volkov even gets there. The bomb would go off and then they could just run the pincer move on Volkov out in the open. Sator would still have learned of the explosion and thought he won. Also, the dead man switch would only be useful when the algorithm was in place. So it’s entirely pointless most of the time, at best, and a liability, at worse.

Still, my main disappointment with the movie wasn’t the intentionally confusing plot – which makes as much sense as any Bond movie – but the dialog was atrocious at points. The final phone conversation between Sator and the Protagonist was nonsense that didn’t tie to anything developed in the story and the whole “anger scars into despair” line from Sator was eyerolling topped only by “I’m not the woman you scarred on the inside. I’m the woman you scarred on the outside.”

*I think it is clear that the container Sator found and Volkov was using was actually sent back by the Protagonist to get Sator to find the pieces of the Algorithm for him so events would play out this way. So, there is a question if there are really any “bad guys” in the future or if this is all manipulated by the TENET organization led by the Protagonist from his position in the future.

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Todd