Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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Finch
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#251 Post by Finch » Fri Dec 18, 2020 10:45 pm

He lost me several films ago so for me it's kind of neither here nor there how good or bad Tenet is but I think he should at least pay attention to the complaints about the way his films are being mixed which go back to at least The Dark Knight Rises and were especially strong about Tenet. By his own admission, he's had fellow directors who like his stuff call him and complain about the sound. It's a bit ridiculous when people almost feel grateful they can at least rely on subs to follow dialogue, never mind crucial dialogue. I remember Bill Chambers writing in his Blu-ray review of Dunkirk that he almost got the impression that Nolan doesn't want people to hear his dialogue (Chambers's implication being Nolan knows dialogue isn't his strong suit and tries to hide it with overbearing music and sound effects; I will say though one of the very few things I like about The Dark Knight is Michael Caine's line, "Some people just want to watch the world burn").

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#252 Post by Monterey Jack » Fri Dec 18, 2020 11:54 pm

"If they can't hear the dialogue, it gives me the perfect out for people not understanding the mechanics of the plot...!"

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#253 Post by Big Ben » Sat Dec 19, 2020 12:25 am

He has caved on the sound/dialogue issue once, when he was implored to make Bane's voice clearer in TDKR which he did in fact end up doing. I honestly don't know what to make of him not understanding why people wouldn't want to hear Bane speak more clearly.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#254 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Dec 19, 2020 12:35 am

Bane's voice is the only time I've really noticed and been irritated by this accusation of alienating sound mixing, but I'm not about to deny these concerns even if I can't hear the dog whistle's pitch

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#255 Post by swo17 » Sat Dec 19, 2020 2:25 am

How many bands need to redo their songs so we can clearly understand all the lyrics?

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tenia
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#256 Post by tenia » Sat Dec 19, 2020 7:47 am

Finch wrote:
Fri Dec 18, 2020 10:45 pm
He lost me several films ago so for me it's kind of neither here nor there how good or bad Tenet is but I think he should at least pay attention to the complaints about the way his films are being mixed which go back to at least The Dark Knight Rises and were especially strong about Tenet. By his own admission, he's had fellow directors who like his stuff call him and complain about the sound. It's a bit ridiculous when people almost feel grateful they can at least rely on subs to follow dialogue, never mind crucial dialogue.
It'd be an interesting take if, then, he would embrace such a sound design by having a movie who doesn't rely on some lines to have its plot clearly understandable. Sadly, it isn't the case and indeed, a few lines that are hard to decipher are key to understand some of the plot, so here you go.
However, as I mentioned originally, at home on the Blu-ray disc, I wasn't so much taken aback by the dialogues mix than by just how freaking loud the WHOLE mix was. It felt like a poor mix overall, alternating excruciatingly loud sections brickwalled to death and sections way too quiet to be listened at the volume used to bear the rest of the movie. This isn't a dynamic track, but a bad one in this regard.
feihong wrote:
Thu Dec 17, 2020 12:50 am
Because this movie isn't as fun or funny as it thinks; it goes on seemingly forever, it feels convoluted as hell, and its themes just don't deliver any punch at all. It wants to be classy, cool and clever, and it misses each one of those marks, in turn. For instance, I would say that Roar's message about preserving and nurturing other animal species in an ideal habitat for them feels so much more heartfelt and passionate and meaningful than Tenet's murmured threats about environmental despoiling and another coming arms race––in spite of Roar's overwhelming convolution of its own, and its inability to clearly express its' thematic sentiments. What makes Roar a more effective communicator with its audience than Tenet, when both movies fail to articulate almost anything? Partly it's seeing the animals themselves in Roar, for extended periods of time. In order to empathize, we have to be able to see them. Which is why it's so interesting that many key characters remain offstage for the entirety of Tenet. The art forger, whom it is implied Debicki may have had an affair with, doesn't appear. The principal villains of the piece never arrive. Debicki's son, who is sometimes referenced as a source of some of her character motivation, shows up for, like one-and-a-half scenes. The structure of the international organization the Protagonist is working for never becomes apparent. And the characters we do spend time with remain cold and calculating, keeping their poker faces on until the end of the movie, at which point each of them explains themselves with prosaic completeness. Whereupon we learn, to no surprise, that they in fact have no real depth, at all. For my own part, I would rather watch lions and tigers tear the plot of the movie literally to shreds.
This sums up quite well why I ended up not caring much anymore at some point : because the emotional anchors and the motivational aspects of most of the main characters felt mostly off-screen, or incorporated in the movie as a very minor after-thought. The environmenal aspect for instance comes extremely late (I don't recall exactly when, but possibly in the last third of the movie) and is given as a purely informative matter-of-fact in-passing information. Just like the whole "reverse entropy" discovery at the beginning of the movie should be a "wow" kind of thing but actually barely registers a bleep on-screen, nobody in the movie reacts to the reasons behind the main villain's actions. It doesn't matter. So why should I ? But this seems like a very stupid movie-making decision to take, because it makes the central high-concept thing like a daily business one. It deflates how original the plot feels, making it look like it could be the usual "nuclear weapon threat from a Russian Cold War era villain" (which, in some ways, Tenet actually kind of is).

Same goes for many other things, as feihong described. Nolan maybe thinks it makes the movie smarter because, unlike other movies, Tenet doesn't give you these anchors explicitly, doesn't emphasize them, spends time about them but there are reasons for story-telling to work in some ways that may feel over-used but are very simply functional. In trading functionality for implicitness, Nolan loses moments to build emotion, characters and, well, interest for what is happening on-screen. That's why, on the contrary, Pattinson's character and relationship with Washington's work : because the movie takes a bit of time to give a few brush strokes about it, making the finale work between them, while Debicki's catharsis doesn't work.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#257 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Sat Dec 19, 2020 3:16 pm

tenia wrote:
Sat Dec 19, 2020 7:47 am
This sums up quite well why I ended up not caring much anymore at some point : because the emotional anchors and the motivational aspects of most of the main characters felt mostly off-screen, or incorporated in the movie as a very minor after-thought. The environmenal aspect for instance comes extremely late (I don't recall exactly when, but possibly in the last third of the movie) and is given as a purely informative matter-of-fact in-passing information. Just like the whole "reverse entropy" discovery at the beginning of the movie should be a "wow" kind of thing but actually barely registers a bleep on-screen, nobody in the movie reacts to the reasons behind the main villain's actions.
For my money this might've been the funniest moment in all of 2020 cinema, and given the usual caliber of the comic relief in Nolan films it was of course completely unintentional:
SpoilerShow
Protagonist or someone reveals that Sator intends to use his suicide as the trigger that will destroy everything that has ever existed and Kat's response is a very measured "Including my son." I understand the logic here—that Sator's possessiveness and self-absorption with regards to the things in his own life extends to everything else as well—but the difference between threatening to steal a kid and planetary genocide on a literally historic scale makes Kat's cool, calm, and collected reaction just comically disproportionate. Likewise the explanation of "inverted objects" during the opening-act exposition registers with zero impact because the never-again-seen scientist lays it out like she's reading a manual and Protagonist reacts with barely more excitement that that.
feihong wrote:
SpoilerShow
how awesome Protagonist turns out to be in the service of the temporal present. F*ck those future A-holes! Oh, wait. Nothing happens to them, anyway.
SpoilerShow
TBH I assume they all die along with the rest of the human race, given that future Earth is apparently so uninhabitable that the solution is to wipe out all of history and reverse entropy for the entire planet and maybe even the entire universe, which in anything but the most desperate and futile scenario would be using a nuclear bomb to hammer in a nail. But since the only one who expends even a moment's thought on the ethical conundrums is the film's villain, we're presumably not meant to take any of that seriously.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#258 Post by smccolgan » Sun Dec 20, 2020 1:46 am

Nolan always has an unintentional laugh line, and the one that got me the most was in Dunkirk after Cillian Murphy basically killed that kid and went “Is he ok?”

I might have been the only one laughing, but it’s stuck with me.

I watched this for the first time tonight, and while subtitles helped, it’s too long and explains too little. Show, don’t tell, and all but it helps if there’s anything actually there. So much is tossed off and so little of it adds up or coheres.

While Branagh was truly the worst part of this, Pattinson was fantastic. I’m excited to see him in The Batman, I’d love to see him as James Bond. Glad he’s getting a chance to shine.

Caine only agreed to this if he got fed, huh?

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#259 Post by Finch » Sun Dec 20, 2020 2:59 am

I wonder if anyone at Warners quietly thinks to themselves, this was the worst possible time for Nolan to have misfired?

I mean it's unfair to some extent to expect one single film to shoulder this much responsibility but it's also not like Nolan didn't to some degree posit himself as the savior of mainstream cinema and theaters during the summer. How anyone at the studio and in Nolan's circle thought, something as confusing as this was the ideal escapist fare to risk exposure to Covid for continues to puzzle me. On the plus side, the failure of Tenet at the box office should leave theater owners a lot more open to screening Netflix films theatrically. The Old Guard was not innovative storytelling by any stretch of the imagination but it does what it set out to do extremely well, and 2019's Dolemite is my Name is one of the most joyous and infectious films I've seen lately.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#260 Post by tenia » Sun Dec 20, 2020 7:19 am

Finch wrote:
Sun Dec 20, 2020 2:59 am
The Old Guard was not innovative storytelling by any stretch of the imagination but it does what it set out to do extremely well
I didn't like Tenet but The Old Guard is without a doubt the worst new movie I've seen this year. It's just so poorly scripted (some kind of a paint-by-numbers 1000 times already done 2hrs exposition movie whose sole interest seems to be jump-start a franchise), acted (all the cast seems to play under Tranxene) and most of all shot and edited overall (the action either seems to happen off-screen or might just ax well because it's a whole mess on-screen anyway), it reminded me of things like The Transporter 3 and Taken 2, 2 movies directed by Olivier Megaton whose career probably could be summed up in this sentence written for a review of (IIRC) Taken 3 : "Olivier Megaton shouldn't be allowed to approach a camera".

The Old Guard even pained me for someone like Matthias Schoenaerts, a quite gifted actor that doesn't show it at all in here.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#261 Post by Persona » Sun Dec 20, 2020 12:04 pm

Brian C wrote:
Fri Dec 18, 2020 7:50 pm
I think feihong’s post is one of the best pieces of film criticism I’ve read and I really appreciate his taking the time to write it.
I do have to applaud it, even if I wouldn't have minded a few more paragraph breaks, heh.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#262 Post by barryconvex » Fri Dec 25, 2020 7:44 pm

tenia wrote:
Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:20 pm
To be honest, at this point, I stopped caring about the details considering how the whole movie gave me the opportunity early on not to care about those.
The point I stopped caring about the Primer levels of complexity and who's doing what and why was pretty early on as well but I really enjoyed this. As someone who always watches at home with the subtitles on regardless of onscreen language none of the complaints about the sound mix affected me much, although I would agree that the noisy parts were insanely noisy. Pattinson all but steals the movie from Washington who seems a little out of his depth, underplaying just about everything. I got a kick out of Branagh and liked Debicki even though her part is little more than damsel in distress cliches. It's not even close to Inception but overall I applaud Nolan for trying to do something this complicated..

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#263 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Dec 29, 2020 12:04 am

This was a fun one! Mostly because the plot seemed somewhat straightforward to me, maybe because I have a metal plate in my head that nobody has told me about (Have I not gotten it yet? Makes you think!) or maybe because it's all just an excuse to have some fun with explosions. In a sense, I preferred not having to hear 2.5 hours of exposition as opposed to Inception, when that's pretty much all we're getting down to the last syllable.

The film looks fantastic (so much incredible bright light in dark scenes... cannot imagine the lenses were cheap), the not-so-complicated reverse time mechanic (down to literally representing it as a red team and a blue team at one point) is a blast, and it makes just enough sense within the snow globe of this movie for it to be far more interesting than the typical comic book explanations we get for action films playing fast and loose with the laws of physics.

Debicki's character is the reason the film isn't perfect - not by any fault of her own, but because Nolan is, as we know, somewhat incapable of experiencing emotion through the eyes of another person. He nailed this formula with Interstellar, because I'm guessing McConaughey's character there was more than a little autobiographical - but in Tenet, all we get to know about Debicki is that she has a little treat boy who is always going to school who she seems to like quite a bit for reasons unknown. Beyond that, though? Great experience!

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#264 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Dec 29, 2020 1:35 am

Feihong's film criticism-as-epic poem was indeed as great as advertised, and somehow made me appreciate this film more, not less. Maybe I am indeed headed in the reverse direction somehow.

Anyway, off to watch a giantess see her urchin off to school from a legally acceptable distance.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#265 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jan 01, 2021 7:38 am

Major spoilers:

Sadly I don't think that I liked Tenet that much (it is still just above Insomina remake though! And it was really nice to see Martin Donovan briefly back for another Nolan role here after Insomnia as another 'instigating figure' on the boat at the beginning! EDIT: Actually in thinking about it more over the last few months it is growing in my estimations) but it is interesting to discuss. It is definitely a Christopher Nolan film with its characteristic obsession with time, and perhaps more importantly how the use of the medium of film allows for time distortion tricks. This feels like a mix of the double-crossing partner thriller and dopplegangers of Following (which the beaten wife wanting their partner dead also seems similar to), the reverse action moments (and the hero doing the most damage to his own sense of self) of Memento and all that stuff about needing to see estranged children again (who only appear in subliminal flashes and obscured long shots) of Inception.

Also, I am getting a little concerned that the archetypal female character in a Christopher Nolan film of often a rather one note, driven figure who cannot keep their emotions in check and who end up needlessly endangering and complicating what should be a (relatively) straightforward mission is getting a bit overused now. I don't think we have had a completely sensible acting female lead character since Ellen Page in Inception and even there Marion Cotillard's Mal was the more dominant and hotheaded figure entirely defined by her relationship woes.

My biggest worry with the film is that despite his love of time stamps (or stamping on time) that Nolan does not really understand how backwards physics works, or rather does not set up the rules of the world coherently enough, to then be able to properly complicate things even further with simultaneous parallel action in both directions. None of the action scenes feel edited in such a way as to feel thrilling and as if they are building to something, probably because we only get half the context and half the perspective at a time, at least until that final assault sequence that tries to do both perspectives at once, with mixed results. Even if Nolan truly does know everything about the subject of time travel and paradoxes, perhaps even more damning is that as a viewer I never really felt safe enough in his hands to let him get on with his story. In Inception (even Interstellar) there felt as if there was a stripped back confidence on display that powered through the complicated structural stuff, and a lot of that metaphysical/pseudo-scientific stuff was expressed at its best through the imagery rather than dialogue, whereas here it is almost all about the dialogue (like a big budget version of Primer, even with a shipping container to 'hide out' in!) with the imagery feeling rather weak, leaving the time paradox antics feeling more as if everything was being made up as needed as the ultimate form of Bill & Ted-style "we'll just have to remember to come back here afterwards and leave the keys behind the bush!" retrofitting. That may be intentional due to the shift in the main character from someone all powerful and confident like Cobb in Inception (until his personal issues get involved. In a way Kenneth Branagh is the equivalent of the DiCaprio Cobb character here, still having to deal with a nutty wife), to someone new in their role pretending to be that and mostly pulling it off but with an obvious sense that he is (albeit skillfully) improvising in the moment. Which is probably the reason for the otherwise inessential only-in-there-for-the-mandatory-cameo scene with Michael Caine, who gently chides about the main character's expensive looking off the peg suit still not being high class enough for the circles that he is attempting to infiltrate and offering the address of a bespoke tailor!

So maybe that sense that Nolan is all at sea with the parallel timeline stuff but trying to put across an air of confidence that he knows what he is doing is reflecting the main character's turmoil as well! Professional and rehearsed but something's just off, which is most likely tied in with the final revelation of the film:
SpoilerShow
that the whole timeframe that the film encompasses, running forward almost exactly to the half-way point and then reversing and travelling back through time again so the film ends almost at the very second that it began, is just a small element of a much larger temporal situation and our main character himself has been the shadowy figure running all of these special op missions from the future. If thinking about it in Terminator terms he is both the Kyle Reese character (in the person we have been following) and the John Connor of the situation simultaneously!

(It is also something that one of the recent Doctor Who series did to an obnoxious degree with the River Song character popping up to enigmatically say that our heroes don't have any agency because "you are just at the start of your journey and we have actually been lovers for decades after meeting one hundred years in what you would term the future", "Don't worry, it will all make sense... in time" *wink*, and so on)
That actually gets me to my next criticism, which is that everything is played so obscure, being both verbose and mumbly simultaneously, that the moments when I could pick up on what was happening - which should normally be the heightening stakes moments of "oh wow, now I get it! So that's how everything fits together", and actually were in many previous Nolan films, especially Inception - instead became the moments that paradoxically left me more concerned about whether the rest of the film was as smart as it was pretending to be. When late in the film the characters start to talk to each other for apparently the first time ever about the Grandfather paradox, and it seems to be both the first time that another character has heard about the term and then they immediately handwave it away as an irrelevance, I was left rather agog. Although maybe that is another example of certain characters existing 'outside of the timeframe of the film' and, as with climate change, they are either so casually dismissive about it because they do not care or things are so screwed up already from the very first instance of time travel becoming a possibility that there is no point in worrying about it any more!

The other moment that kind of drove me crazy was during that highway heist turned car chase where neither of our main characters appear to notice that there is a pre-existing bullet hole in their wing mirror whilst it gets shown prominently enough to pre-warn the audience about a backwards gunfight sequence being about to occur at some point in the future! And then they act surprised to see a car quickly backwards-driving towards them! At the very least a line noting that something was about to go down and they should prepare themselves for an upcoming inevitable fight would have been nice to see. But I did like the implication that the baddie throws the McGuffin object back into the hero's car in order for them to get involved in a highly choreographed heist sequence to put it back safe and sound into an armoured van!

I think what may have been great to have seen, and the film does hint at this a couple of times, would have been a completely devastated room where it looks as if bullets were flying in all directions and then have that Hitchcockian "when will the bomb go off?" thriller tension of our heroes (or even better our female lead) getting inexorably dragged into that environment knowing what is about to occur but being unable to prevent it and trying to survive (although they already will have?) the bullets and enemies flying at them. It could also finally have put the regular Nolan feature of expanding the image out in IMAX moments to some effective use in heightening the tension for the audience, as if things started to stealthily expand out of the 2.35:1 ratio (in the manner of Xavier Dolan's Mommy!), or everything looked calm but was suddenly in that giant format, it could be the cue to the audience that the action is about to happen. Then rather than the IMAX moments being purely about heightening the spectacle just that format shift could have us subliminally start fearing for the safety of our characters, not wanting them to be in danger.

Instead of that the film becomes rather anti-dramatic (despite the pounding score) because everything has already happened (many layers deep even!) and rather than premonitory action the fascination here appears to be more related to mirror images. Characters witnessing themselves from a remove or at a distance (or in the case with the female lead at a different stage in her life as everything comes down to a particular nexus moment of her relationship where she suddenly has agency again to make an alternative choice) and then desperately trying to live up to their future selves, almost as if they are constantly wishing they were the versions of themselves that they see in the mirror, suddenly (looking as if they are) acting with purpose and confidence through all of the noisy, messy incoherence that surrounds them.

Suddenly you don't have to worry about whether you have to shoot that person or not because you already know that action has occurred, and you just have to go back in time and pull the trigger without any concerns about whether that action is correct or not. It just is, and always will be, so morality and agency of individual action is dispensed with (which weirdly reminds me of the remake of Insomnia having a conveniently already dead dog to shoot rather than having to wrestle with having to kill one to fabricate the ballistic evidence). In that sense the central shooting inside the mirroring rooms at the exact mid-point of Tenet strikes me as being extremely similar to Leonard Shelby's (over) confidence in his notes confirming that he is finally killing the person he has been looking for in Memento. There is care taken in both Tenet and Memento that we never particularly deal with where the shooter goes from that point on, because that would be too psychologically complicated (and psyche destroying) and would immediately muddy and undermine the purity of purpose and supreme moment of fulfilling one's predestined course that is on display there. And specifically in Tenet because that is when the film definitively starts on its own backward, reflective trajectory rather than continuing on into the unknown future.

The characters don't want to be who they are in the present (either through backwards looking nostalgia or determinedly forward-gazing ambition) but at the same time they are at the mercy of the future. At first this is just the future in general but with the reversal and doubling-back our characters are now suddenly the antagonists wrecking the timeline (or rather making it work for their current needs) rather than the 'victims' being ruined by inexplicable happenings. As that happens the tone of the film seems to shift away from a nebulous fear of the future to actually having names and faces to put to the villains. Who do not need to be obvious Russian baddies but just your own actions being weaponised back against you. Is the main character from the future a hero or villain, and does it matter when the consequences for those affected by his actions are much the same either way?

But whilst everything is identifiably in the Nolan-verse so many other things came to mind, and not entirely in a complimentary way. Primer, Doctor Who, Edge of Tomorrow (even a bit of Stalker in the magic backwards metal being found in the irradiated 'non-towns' of the former Soviet Union and people being able to 'telepathically' move objects at will), and particularly that Red Dwarf episode Backwards which frankly dealt with this material in a much more coherent manner (especially the important question of how bar brawls work and that it is unwise to use the toilet in a backwards running timeline! Of course someone has inevitably done a mash up to the Tenet trailer!)

But mostly I could not escape the sense that this is Christoper Nolan's Topaz, i.e. its pretty lacklustre action without context until the halfway mark when suddenly the plot starts and begins to belatedly fill in the gaps! Also Topaz involves nebulous initially completely oppositional yet eventually philosophically interchangeable cabals working behind the scenes of civilised society. And Topaz in the sense that whilst it is not a complete disaster and there are certainly things to like about the film coming at it from an auteurist perspective, it is probably never going to be the Christopher Nolan film that people will immediately gravitate towards as their favourite. But every filmmaker should be allowed a couple of average entries that make their best films shine all the brighter in comparison.

Anyway this all makes me want to travel back in time to prevent Denzel Washington from making Déjà Vu and then maybe all of this may never have happened!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu May 12, 2022 2:28 pm, edited 15 times in total.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#266 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jan 02, 2021 6:35 am

Reading feihong's post on the previous page I would have to agree with most of what is said, though I like most of Nolan's previous work other than Insomnia (which strangely appears to miss the crucially central point of its conceit in a similar way to Tenet). I certainly agree on the James Bond comparisons that were made too, especially regarding John David Washington's main character. In a sense we are seeing him at the start of his career and 'growing into his role' in the way that Daniel Craig did in Casino Royale and that is probably the best specific Bond film to compare Tenet to, especially when the belt whipping starts getting threatened towards certain characters! But Washington does not have too much to work with to build a character beyond that (all I really know about the character as a person is that he likes doing shirtless pull ups in dangerous locations), probably because of the backwards approach to narrative that feihong talks about, where we get explanations at the end of the film that suddenly create a character. Or rather create a more interesting Protagonist that we never see.
feihong wrote:Conversely, Pattinson manages to make more of less here; he seems to have read and really understood the script, and figured out a compelling emotional through line for his character, which he delivers in spite of exploding aircraft, inverted bazookas, firetruck auto sieges, and other actors staring at him like they don't know what's going on. The thoroughness with which Pattinson approaches the role means he can modulate his performance very adroitly throughout the proceedings. So when the story gets excessively serious, Pattinson seems to be taking things more lightly to compensate. When the story is at its most convoluted and silly, Pattinson seems serious, underlining that there are, in fact, meant to be stakes to this comedy of errors and overemphasis. But no one else in the movie brings that level of clear-headedness. Part of this speaks to the enormous ambition Nolan brings to this movie, to make a film about reverse entropy in which the elements you need to put the film together arrive in reverse order. And it's probably the right time to talk about that now.
I would fully agree that Robert Pattinson pretty much carries a lot of the characterisation of the film. Even that moment during the 'first' painting heist when he panics in the air sealing corridor when the lockpick breaks and tries to escape from another door before the more focused Washington drags him back through the door they were working on, is a moment of humanity that was much needed. Someone who has a sense of self preservation about them! Which then develops into a sense of preserving the lives of others, which nobody else seems to have a sense of. I guess a lot of that is the freedom he has with the character to add those little physical or vocally exclamatory elements to the performance (the abused wife character probably couldn't really get involved in such antics!) because otherwise all of his dialogue is much the same as that of every other character in that its fast paced, terse and expository and pretty much never modulates in pace or content (which is the aspect that most put me in mind of Primer, where you cannot as a viewer use the tone of the performances or dialogue as a shorthand guide to which bits are actually important to pay attention to!)

It may also be because Pattinson's character eventually reveals himself to be:
SpoilerShow
a traveller from further in the future with a pre-existing relationship with the future Protagonist. And then goes off to do a couple of extra unseen overlayers of action across the events that we have witnessed to smooth out his role in proceedings. So he is probably intentionally meant to be a more developed and 'human' feeling figure than our just starting out main character.

(Is there also an implication that Pattinson is the son of the main female lead, and that is why he appears to feel some sort of, albeit unstated, connection to this particular moment and the man who changed his fate fundamentally? And in leaving at the end to do 'another pass' across the timeframe of events does that make him a kind of Leonard Shelby character too, forever stuck in a moment of the past that he does not want to, or is unable to, move on from? Which will only get even more complicated and muddier as more and more versions of himself clutter up this limited significant timeframe and obscure his attempts at being able to live in the 'pure' moment any more, the same way that Leonard is trapped in forever avenging a crime he solved long beforehand.

It certainly fits in with my overarching theory that Christopher Nolan is deeply suspicious regarding feelings of rose-tinted nostalgia and attempts at living in the past!)
But I would disagree slightly in that I quite liked Kenneth Branagh's acting in this. Or at least despite the Russian accent he was the only character that I was able to completely understand when they spoke! The main problem there is that it is the ultimate generic Russian bad guy antagonist that makes the film feel a lot more standard than it should. Although that itself does play into my suspicions that the wife may have just been making up that "he wants to take the world with him when he dies with a dead man's trigger attached to his FitBit" thing just to get away with murder, knowing that such Bond villain antics would play into what our James Bond-aspirational Protagonist might be wanting to hear! Or maybe she was projecting too much in applying the "If I can't have you, no one can" comment to the entire world and not just relating to his hold over her. Maybe it is another self-aggrandising moment of elevating her personal relationship troubles into world-threatening ones, to match Inception! After all from her perspective if she dies the world ends too. Whatever the case we only seem to have her word regarding this aspect which escalates things to that final extent - the word of the same person who then has no compunction about killing their husband before the job gets completed anyway! She reminds me a lot of the main female character in Nolan's first film Following in that sense.

The time travelling stuff and some of the straight faced readings of the lines about the world being about to be destroyed by people coming back from the future was strange but I think I only really had the laugh out loud moment at the very end scene when the various parts of the McGuffin device have been brought together and we have characters standing around with a bizarre looking Excalibur-style staff weapon that felt very high fantasy for a film that has been almost entirely garbed in deadly serious espionage thriller stylings up to this point, no matter how nutty some of the dialogue concepts have been. Thankfully they almost immediately break it apart again into its component parts, as if aware of how silly it looks when put together!

Though something that I will never forgive feihong's otherwise excellent post for is searing the string of words "Caine old man parts" into my brain now!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Tue Apr 27, 2021 3:59 pm, edited 10 times in total.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#267 Post by tenia » Sat Jan 02, 2021 8:49 am

colinr0380 wrote:
Sat Jan 02, 2021 6:35 am
I certainly agree on the James Bond comparisons that were made too, especially regarding John David Washington's main character. In a sense we are seeing him at the start of his career and 'growing into his role' in the way that Daniel Craig did in Casino Royale
I kind of get where you're getting at there, but I don't agree. When Craig did Casino Royale, he already was 10 years into his career, with major acts in Obsession, Hotel Splendide, Sylvia, Munich and Layer Cake (plus smaller roles in Tomb Raider and Road to Perdition). He also already had major acts on TV in Sword of Honour, Copenhagen, Archangel and Love Is the Devil.
Washington ? He started with Ballers in 2015 and otherwise only had 2 main credits before Tenet (Monsters and Men and BlacKkKlansman).

To me, Craig was already quite established when he made Casino Royale, while Washington is a much newer actor.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#268 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jan 02, 2021 8:59 am

Sorry, I worded it poorly. Rather than the actors themselves I intended the comparison more in the sense that the particular James Bond as shown in Casino Royale perhaps bears a similarity to the main character in Tenet being new to the role and therefore new to the high culture circles he is now moving in with this first official assignment.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#269 Post by tenia » Sat Jan 02, 2021 12:38 pm

My bad, I indeed understood it as Washington's career, not the character's.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#270 Post by feihong » Sat Jan 02, 2021 8:21 pm

Something I didn't address in my more free-associative previous complaint is that I think this film really forces the viewer to question the value of convolution in storytelling. If I had to pick one thing I disliked most about seeing Tenet it would be the narrative convolution. It is, amongst other things, the source of most of the unintended humor of the film. But it's also a lot of what makes the film less fun to watch than it ought to be. This narrative convolution breaks two ways in the film: 1) the premise of the film takes a long time to explain, and takes more time than the movie already allows to appreciate. The main effect of reverse entropy in the field throughout the film is to disorient combatants––which in human terms is as easily accomplished by piercing noises, or radiation, or a host of other things. The larger implications of reverse entropy––which seemingly will allow the evil terrorists from the future to walk backwards into the past––are not satisfactorily explained at all. 2) The heist-upon-heist-upon-heist structure of the movie, independent of the sci-fi premise, is already about 2 heists too many to follow. The time spent detailing and executing these heists means that the characters are left with only the simplest motivations, and the implications of events in the film can't be properly considered throughout the film. The Himesh Patel character and his disturbing "business" faking terror attacks is a fitting subject for a whole film, but Tenet dismisses this character and his implications with a tiny shrug. Debicki's character's bizarre marriage trap is enough subject for a whole film as well, but it is treated as background fodder, motivation for heists. It is not treated as a meaningful story thread unto itself, and that makes it peculiarly weightless in the middle of this movie. I think in a sense the inadequate character development is a direct casualty of the narrative convolution, and people's complaints about the solely expository nature of the dialogue is another result of this extraordinary narrative convolution and story compression.

Barryconvex's comparison to Primer has really cleared this up for me, because when you compare the two films, they work in quite different ways. For most of Primer, the narrative is actually pretty simple. These characters make and invention, they don't know what its' implications are, and the story follows them trying to figure out as engineers what it is they've done and what it could mean. Eventually they disagree over what the most beneficial applications of their invention are, and they fall out as partners and friends. The convolution in Primer is for the large part of the movie, verbal; these characters talk like engineers, and so the lay-viewer has to work hard to determine what's going on. What's helping the viewer is that the actual plot is fairly light, and it's not moving at a fast pace––so more attention can be given to unpacking the verbal complexity of the movie. When the time travel shenanigans get complicated at the end, the character motivations and the real-world implications of what the characters are doing are still very clear, because we know what these characters want, and because the level of convolution presented to us is always delivered in terms we can intellectualize as the movie moves forward. So as a viewer, you can take all the complicated jargon being thrown around in the movie and compartmentalize it separately from the characters and the basic plot.

In Tenet, the premise and the plot are wound up in an undifferentiated spiral, along with the inadequate character development and all the other stuff I was complaining about last time. It's not just that you have to work through a complicated premise––one which has no parallel in the natural world (unlike Primer, where engineers are real people and sometimes they really do talk like the characters in the movie)––but you have to do it while the characters are pulling heist after heist after heist. The structure of the movie as written is to show the increasing potential and stakes for inversion––but the plot of the movie brings up and follows a whole different set of concerns. In my last post I said it was about 4 movies worth of material. In this one I tried to pull apart the Himesh Patel section and the Debicki section of the movie, suggesting you could make full movies about either plot. I think either film would have been more interesting than the massive, undifferentiated glut of material we got in Tenet. What if inversion where introduced as a concept, implied to have larger applications than we see, and then the focus of the story was just prying this inversion tool out of Sator's hands, by working Debicki's disastrous marriage angle? That is technically the plot of Tenet, but we also have all these other competing concerns––painting heist, end-of-the-world Fitbit, villains from the future. If the movie presented itself as "here's a new technology. We have to figure out how to use it," and then the upshot was that they used it in a clever way to heist this control rod out of Sator's hands and free Debicki of her stupid marriage, then we could really get into the marriage, and we could see the applications of inversion on a more microscopic and easier-to-understand level. If Tenet had intimate stakes rather than world-ending ones, I think this all could have been blended together in a more satisfactory way. Though something in the back of my head makes me less than certain; a little instinct that tells me that maybe this inversion isn't a good enough idea in the first place to hang a movie around it? Whatever the case, the marriage, the airport heist, the fire trucks, the war in the secret city––all of these things are so individually complicated in different ways, that they pull against that main point, distracting us from the idea that this new technology needs to be mastered. It feels instead like the movie just needs to go away; our real-world concerns really trump the need to be worried about a future time-travel arms race.

So I think it comes back to the value of convolution in a narrative. If the convolution serves, as it does in Primer, to bring us into a world and its set of values (in the case of Primer it's the world of professional engineers), then the convolution is generally useful. A similar movie in this regard with no sci-fi premise would be a film like Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, which uses a huge cast of characters to take us into the hothouse excitement of the WPA artists. There's a lot to keep track of in the movie––different sets of characters with their differentiated plots––but the film is gathered around a simple idea and the events that spring out of it. In the case of the Robbins film, we see artists trying to stretch and integrate their political commitments into their work, and we see the powers that be push back against that. The culminating action is the artists coming together in a street protest. Not all of them join the protest––the Diego Rivera vs. Nelson Rockefeller segment pointedly is presented as one man against a monied empire, where the lone artist's work is destroyed––this is poignant because the "Cradle will Rock" musical of the title does get performed, because of the collective action the artists take. So with all the various characters (at least 30 of which leave an impression), Robbins is able to create both a vivid sense of mood and setting and a plot that we can follow at the same time. Primer, I think, does this pretty well, also. Tenet seems more committed to convolution for its own sake, or convolution as the point––the end result of a big-tech arms race. But the result is awfully hard to process, and the undisciplined approach Nolan brings to his narrative convolution means that lots of the effects he means to have land wrong for a big majority of the audience. Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy who thinks of The Passenger as a more-than-complex-enough thriller about identity––one that could actually sustain a protagonist named Protagonist––but with this movie I think Nolan is trying to cram so much into it that the defects are spewing out the edges in every direction.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#271 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sat Jan 02, 2021 11:53 pm

That's like the Godfather: Part Two of follow-up posts.
feihong wrote:
Sat Jan 02, 2021 8:21 pm
In my last post I said it was about 4 movies worth of material. In this one I tried to pull apart the Himesh Patel section and the Debicki section of the movie, suggesting you could make full movies about either plot. I think either film would have been more interesting than the massive, undifferentiated glut of material we got in Tenet. What if inversion where introduced as a concept, implied to have larger applications than we see, and then the focus of the story was just prying this inversion tool out of Sator's hands, by working Debicki's disastrous marriage angle? That is technically the plot of Tenet, but we also have all these other competing concerns––painting heist, end-of-the-world Fitbit, villains from the future. If the movie presented itself as "here's a new technology. We have to figure out how to use it," and then the upshot was that they used it in a clever way to heist this control rod out of Sator's hands and free Debicki of her stupid marriage, then we could really get into the marriage, and we could see the applications of inversion on a more microscopic and easier-to-understand level.
I think it's pretty obvious that Christopher Nolan comes up with the concept first, then comes up with a list neat-o things to with that concept, and then thinks of characters and plot that will allow him to do all those neat-o things.
SpoilerShow
Like: "Okay, I want some people and things to go backwards in time so I can have a guy fight himself, and a car chase in which one of the cars is in reverse, and a battle scene with some armies going backwards and some going forward. I want people to go back in time to revisit earlier action scenes in the movie to see it reversed."
And etc. And then he crafts a plot, one that of course ends up being convoluted and ridiculous, that will get to all those moments. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#272 Post by feihong » Sun Jan 03, 2021 1:25 am

That makes 100% sense. How would you sell this movie to Hollywood execs? "It's god a plane crashing into a hanger! A guy fights himself! Armies fighting backwards armies! It's got everything!" "Does it have romance?" "Romance? Sure! A little." "Good! We don't want to put in any more of that than we have to. Does it have a protagonist?" "Better! His ACTUAL NAME is 'Protagonist!'" "Whoa! Nolan, you're blowing my mind!" And Warner Bros was somehow sold.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#273 Post by Big Ben » Sun Jan 03, 2021 1:32 am

Honestly I imagine it's far more simple and whatever he proposes just gets greenlit.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#274 Post by Brian C » Sun Jan 03, 2021 1:58 am

NOLAN: "It's a heist movie that messes around with time. Sorta like Inception."

STUDIO EXECS: "Whew, thank god! Say no more - we were afraid you were gonna want to do another artsy-fartsy WWII movie."

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#275 Post by cdnchris » Sun Jan 03, 2021 2:37 am

Spoilers probably follow and this may be more stream of conscious but...

The most frustrating and convoluted thing about this movie was the use of the fake Goya drawing as a plot device to get the protagonist and Neill to the storage facility with the inverter. That was needlessly "overplotted" and added an unnecessarily complicated aspect to a film that was already asking a lot, only to not come up again, except as Sator's hold over his wife. It also seemed to be there just so they could fit in some "reverse" words (the forger's name was Arepo, the reverse of "opera" and the firm's name was Rotas, the reverse of "Sator"). It's such a small aspect of the film but we spend all this time with something that was, in the end, the excuse to get them to where that inverter was and to introduce the Kat character and nothing more.

I didn't think the time travel stuff was that bad and once you can work out that you have to watch it only taking into account the current point of view it made sense. I got stuck on the red/blue interrogation rooms scene at one key moment but realized later I was just watching it wrong when the POV changes. The whole chase scene is also pretty "heavy" but then just had to remember the villain (and the key problem for the good guys) can just go back and repeat until he gets it right, which is what was happening during that chase. I liked that the hero was thinking too "linearly" at first, putting him in the same boat as us the first time around. That sort of reminded me of how Nolan put us right there with Lenny in Memento by making sure we only knew as much of what came before as he did (nothing).

At any rate, I did like this a lot. There's some wild visuals in this (a building that explodes in one section and rebuilds in another) but I most liked that Nolan took his experimenting with narratives to the next level by having a movie that can play forward and in reverse at the same time, even rewinding the movie at one point and having it go forward again. Though I got confused by the interrogation scene at first when the POV changed, I still thought it was pretty brilliant.

I also enjoyed that this was also pretty much a Bond movie in spirit, though the villain's motivation needed some work, and I rolled my eyes at the idea that the fate of the world came down to an iFit. I actually would have preferred a focus on the motivations of the "future" villains that were bankrolling everything: I picked up they wanted to reverse things because the future was so bleak, but it's sort of glossed over.

There are the typical plot issues you find in time travel movies: everything is obviously going to work out because if it didn't there'd be no future and certain things wouldn't happen and yada yada yada. But I liked that the film actually addresses this when the Protagonist questions Neill on whether a certain action needs to be performed.

So yeah, I liked it.

But the sound really does suck.

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