Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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colinr0380
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#276 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jan 03, 2021 6:19 am

I also wonder if audience responses might vary based on the 'coolness' of the premise. Of whether just travelling backwards in time (even if others are going forwards and clashing with them) is quite on the same level of awesomeness as nesting worlds within worlds inside someone's dreaming subconscious; or traveling and exploring distant worlds in other universes. Instead of slowed down Edith Piaf or the black hole sequence and splitting parallel though temporally dislocated action across the largest possible expanse of Interstellar; or seeing one particular event from three different timelines and perspectives in Dunkirk (things that mean that the action can only make coherent sense in the context of being a film, and would not work the same in any other form), here its just somebody jerkily dancing (or driving) backwards towards you before having a brief hand slap fight and a score that in that final sequence simply just reverses and then moves forward (in the manner of a DJ scratching a record!) to provide extra information about which shot is backwards or not.
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#277 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jan 04, 2021 11:52 am

On listening to the BBC's Front Row talk with Christopher Nolan from the 24th December, one interesting thing of note is that the director mentions that his fascination with M.C. Escher's Horseman (or Horsemen?) travelling around a Moebius strip helped in providing some of the inspiration for creating Tenet. Which makes a lot of sense for a film involving combatants facing off against themselves:
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#279 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jan 11, 2021 5:59 am

I do really like the line in that article that Nolan is an 'anti-body horror director'. Maybe that is why the almost all of the scariest moments in his films arise from externally imposed situations (even when it could be convincing argued as many of them internally arising, although likely many of the main characters would likely baulk at such a notion of their situations being self-created through the workings of their own psyches!) in which his characters behave suddenly and irrationally, often betraying others in their impulsive (compulsive) actions, because that's the point where the characters suddenly have the anarchic power at their fingertips at which to destroy the meticulously crafted worlds (which are often illusory, built on sand, or at least are confidence tricks existing on a wing and a prayer for their success) that the filmmaker (and sometimes the characters themselves) has meticulously created for them to inhabit. Nolan is less a 'body horror' director than a 'brain horror' one perhaps, since his characters are often so caught up in themselves and their take on the world that they almost compulsively act on their beliefs to begin to re-shape the world around them, even if that often just makes things worse.

Almost all of Nolan's characters seem to have aspects of both creator (the one who elaborates and obscures behind layers of complexity and sleights of hand illusions) and destroyer (the one who cathartically/cruelly powers through all of that, burning everything down to create simple binary conflicts again) seething away within them simultaneously. They have the power to dominate and re-shape the future of their worlds, and often wish to do so for the better, but in doing so often end up becoming the primary antagonists of their own stories, on top of remaining the protagonist most affected by their actions as well. I wonder what a Christopher Nolan version of Hamlet or Richard III would be like?

This does make me feel even more confident of thinking that Tenet is a film (like Hitchcock's Topaz still) about what happens when there is no particularly scary international cabal for your shadowy espionage organisation to fight any more outside of the one in your own cultural subconscious: you just create your own mirror image (based on past archetypes) to fight instead. The final battle is nothing more, or less, than the war machine eating its own tail.
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#280 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Jan 20, 2021 4:34 am

Dr Amicus wrote:
Thu Aug 13, 2020 5:30 am
Our local cinema here is prebooking tickets from the 26th - and marking the film as a 15. I'd be amazed if this wasn't a 12a and can't seen that the BBFC rating has been officially given out yet. The trailers and the IMAX preview were all 12a, has anyone seen anything to suggest that this will be a 15 in the UK?

Update: They've now amended the certificate to a 12a, so who knows. Admittedly they have such a poor record with accurate coming-soon information we take it with a pinch of salt, but the fact that they've change it suggests that either the distributor has let them know the (expected) rating or that they've checked the BBFC and are taking the ratings for the trailers. Or that they've let the intern loose...
A recent episode of the BBFC podcast addressed this and said that they were initially going to give the film a 15 for 'domestic violence' related issues but reduced it to a 12A after the belt whipping was reduced to just being more of a threatened implication.

I was just thinking, and the last couple of weeks of bad weather may have prompted this, but what may really have made that final battle scene click for me would have been if it was set in the snow! Then you could have had a battle which visually showed the movements of the two different groups of soldiers (or rather the same band of soldiers split into two oppositional forces) by the way that one was leaving tracks in the snow and the other 'picking them up', leaving fresh and untouched snow in their wake! You could have someone on the night before the battle pensively watching the snow beginning to fall and saying ominously that "this complicates things", and indeed it could be the thing that would interestingly complicate the entire final scene in the manner of the unplanned occurrence in Inception, whilst simultaneously acting as a kind of visual shorthand cue for an audience as well. Plus Nolan could maybe have homaged Kubrick again by maybe having a member of the team leave misleading footprints in the snow only to appear from a different direction, as in The Shining!

But that's all speculation to make an otherwise rather confusing sequence play better. I do not really know if it would be particularly plausible to have it snow in Estonia or wherever they were setting that battle scene anyway, although maybe that could have itself helped to beef up the climate change theme of the film a little more ("Oh my God, the backwards people from their ecologically devastated future are bringing their extreme weather conditions with them!!"). I also wonder if it would have played too much like the snowy section of Inception, though it potentially could have had a greater thematic impact here and been a nice linkage between the films.

Plus snow is often pretty looking and elegiac in nature, especially when it is falling over a battlefield!

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#281 Post by aox » Tue Feb 23, 2021 12:22 pm

I begrudgingly saw this last night and was pleasantly surprised. My apprehensions are based on the fact that outside of the Batman trilogy (which is also odd because I really dislike comic book movies/MCU/DC), I haven't liked any of Nolan's work, and I particularly dislike both Inception and Intersellar especially. I found this to be a nice piece of escapism that didn't bog the viewer down in needless exposition. I've read this thread, and there isn't much I can add to it. Even though I found this very enjoyable, I understand the criticism its detractors have brought to this thread. I understand the sound issues and sympathize. Luckily, I was able to watch at home on a 60" with subtitles. So, instead of rehashing all of that, I wanted to bring up a different aspect I have heard no one mention: the lighting.

For over the past decade, I have worked as a photographer and documentary filmmaker. I'm currently a DP on a docudrama being shot in upstate NY. I'm particularly observant when it comes to the lighting in the film. The cinematography here is typically Nolan and that isn't a bad thing. He keeps his camera moving which obviously creates a tense environment appropriate for the material he generally tackles. But the lighting and photography here is completely poor within the context of lighting people of color; specifically, African (American) skin. The first time this detail became openly and readily apparent for me (I'm a white male) was a few years ago when the topic was made front and center with the film Moonlight. Obviously, different skin tones requires different levels of attention and decision making, and Moonlight was praised in many circles for finally "getting it right". Since those debates/articles from the period surrounding Moonlight's release, I've become sensitive to them, and it has certainly affected my own work in both photography and cinematography. Generally, lighting on set or for a scene when it involves different skin tones is not a one-stop-shop. You can't just throw up blue and gold gels and call it a day. You have to be very meticulous when it comes to lighting your characters, and Nolan fails spectacularly here. Especially in the first hour when Washington is running around the world, and most egregiously in India. So many scenes are lit for white and brown skin tones, and as a result, Washington is left behind in the shadows. There is one scene with him and Pattinson sitting across from each other with a side of their faces almost completely blacked out. This works alright with Pattinson, but Washington is left only being a silhouette with just teeth and eyeballs. After 15 minutes, it became incredibly distracting to me. It becomes less of a problem in the last hour because much of the film is outside and reliant on natural light.

It's been a few years since this topic was openly talked about in the press and in journals, but I would have assumed in the years since Moonlight that most DPs around Hollywood would at least know of this issue or maybe see it for themselves and adjust accordingly. This is a $200 million movie and Nolan cast an African American lead. Did this not come up during the early meetings with the DP and their team? Did anyone else catch this? I know it was mostly the sound mix/volume that distracted, but I thought this was just as bad.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#282 Post by RIP Film » Fri May 07, 2021 9:37 pm

A little late here but caught this on HBO Max the other night, and made the mistake of not turning on subtitles. I found it interesting how little effort was paid to allowing the audience to follow along, almost resigning to the idea that you have to watch it multiple times. I also thought: well maybe Nolan is dispensing with the idea of a cohesive, digestible narrative, like how Tarantino forgoed linearity with Pulp Fiction-- in service of stringing together these scenes with sexy, smart people doing cool things and relying purely on cinema's ability to invoke things based on actors' eyes and sounds and images. You're just witnessing it all, you may not know what's going on but the characters do. But of course I would find out later this isn't the case, since it is betrayed by a very conventional, Hitchcockian plot (as others have pointed out). In fact, in retrospect it seems to rely on an understanding of its plot and premise for any sort of payoff, even in terms of action sequences.

Sound mixing wasn't the only confusing part, I don't think the editing did this film any favors. I've never been fond of Nolan's snappy, elliptical style of editing (which can no longer blamed on Lee Smith), where important dialog barely has time to land on you ears before cutting to a crane shot of a new location. The brisk rhythm just doesn't give you time to accept what's going on.

Do all the faults come down to technical issues? I'm not sure. Sometimes I feel like Nolan relies too much on characters to convey plot, so much so that they don't have time to be characters-- and this goes beyond exposition. It's to the point where when the dialog slows down and a character starts to open up and reveal their motivation, like the woman and her son, the effect is almost jarring. To Nolan characters are vehicles for many things, but rarely are they all that human. At times you get these almost focus-grouped, banal hooks for their motivations, which worked in Batman but less so here in a world that's trying to be grounded.

Speaking of the woman and frail motivations, I was perplexed as to why the protagonist suddenly gives a rat's ass about her. I can only guess his assumed guardianship was, once again, a requirement of the plot to lend any kind of human component to their struggle. By saving the woman and opposing the bad guy, surely the world is saved. The ending leaves you with some words about great sacrifices being unseen, which to me rang a bit hollow and pro-military given there was a real philosophical question posed that was quickly hammered down. Does Nolan want you to feel conflicted?

With all that said I do feel like it was a fascinating film, and will be keeping an eye out for John David Washington after this; but I run into the same dillema as I did with Inception: I want to watch it again to answer some of my questions, but I don't really want to watch it again.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#283 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sat May 08, 2021 9:15 am

Yeah, I certainly appreciate your frustration. The first and only time I watched it, I paused a few times to refer to the wikipedia plot summary. That's not a good sign.

But I do want to to watch it again. In thinking back, one thing I've liked about Nolan's last two movies is that they've leaned into the things he's good at (cool set pieces, clever plot construction) and have leaned away from his weaknesses (emotionally authentic drama, character-based storytelling). For me, his nadir was Interstellar, whose human drama was so overwrought and cringe-inducing [1] that, by it's end, I was pretty disengaged. His next movie, Dunkirk, really pulled back on the emotional stuff (without totally eschewing it) and seemed like a very clever film-maker just having fun. I appreciate Dunkirk more and more as time goes on.

Tenet seems to continue this trend. He seems like he's having more fun, and I am too. Though the Elizabeth Debicki stuff flirts with sentimentality [2], I appreciated that the movie's emotional climax [3] was handled with a swift and casual grace that, counterintuitively, makes it even more effective. I thought that moment in Tenet, for being reigned in, was more powerful than anything in Interstellar.

Footnotes are not really spoilers, but just to be safe...
SpoilerShow
[1] Hathaway's "love" monologue.
[2] "The world will end, and that includes my son" or something like that. Pretty hilarious and weird line.
[3] "I'll see you at the beginning."

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#284 Post by knives » Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:29 am

I really adored this and while it’s not one of Nolan’s best I think the way I went about watching lead to it being more emotionally resonant and engaging on all levels. I took it as a reverse JJ Abrams film wherein the puzzle is irrelevant beyond how it sets up these characters into the relationships that Nolan desired. I really couldn’t tell you the goal of the plot and don’t really care if I find out. The movers worked much better as a dance between Washington, Branagh, and Debicki in such a wonderful performance that if she’s not in everything soon that will be a massive disappointment. What’s interesting to me is how Washington works as an audience member trying to rescue a protagonist he’s learned to love over the course of the first hour of the film. In a sense this film deeply reminded me of Chabrol’s Cry of the Owl with the stiff introduction that Blus mentions sort of replicating the experience of developed empathy for fictional characters. That’s where the timey whimey stuff makes sense from a thematic level. Theoretically time can be undone with consequences gone, but the emotional experience of seeing a person in pain renders that fact irrelevant.

In a way this is a theme that Nolan has always dealt with. What are the emotional consequences of storytelling form. Where are our empathizes spread when we are shown a story non-linearly versus how the characters could have experienced it. The tragic hope of Inception is in how the status of fictional externalities don’t matter as much as internal realities. At the same time like with The Prestige Nolan’s asking the audience does stopping the trick before it’s finished really absolve the effect knowing the story has. Like, for me, I’ve always felt the last scene of The Dark Knight is pretty bad, but ending it with Ledger’s last scene doesn’t erase what the film actually is.

I think something that helps the film is how few of Nolan’s collaborators were involved here. This honestly might have the best editing of Nolan’s career with Lame providing a much needed slowness to both the drama and especially action which actually allows the film, contrary to reputation, to be much more coherent than many other Nolan films. Also the score is simply the best in any Nolan movie.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#285 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:51 pm

knives wrote:
Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:29 am
Theoretically time can be undone with consequences gone, but the emotional experience of seeing a person in pain renders that fact irrelevant.

In a way this is a theme that Nolan has always dealt with. What are the emotional consequences of storytelling form. Where are our empathizes spread when we are shown a story non-linearly versus how the characters could have experienced it. The tragic hope of Inception is in how the status of fictional externalities don’t matter as much as internal realities. At the same time like with The Prestige Nolan’s asking the audience does stopping the trick before it’s finished really absolve the effect knowing the story has. Like, for me, I’ve always felt the last scene of The Dark Knight is pretty bad, but ending it with Ledger’s last scene doesn’t erase what the film actually is.
As someone who loves The Dark Knight's ending, I suppose that -to use a version of this logic- regardless of whether one can diffuse responsibility given to chance or another's actions (the Dent death, Batman taking ownership), or accept the randomness of harm that exists in an unfair world (Batman's choice to reject this, the Joker's ethos; but also embrace its 'realist' cousin in his final actions to self-destructively take accountability), there are emotional consequences cyclically leading back into our impetuses for how we engage with these unemotional truths. Dent and Batman's actions in the end are wholly rooted in emotional logic, which must contend with the logic of nihilism because it's just so unbearable for Batman to accept, and life is just so unbearable for Dent not to. I've long felt that Nolan is a deeply emotional filmmaker burying his heart into cerebral ideas, because hey, that's where we hide them!

This may be the most thoughtful reading of Tenet I've come across yet, so thank you. I'm going to go revisit it tonight with this newly phrased, but affirmatively cosigned, perspective in mind.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#286 Post by knives » Tue Jul 06, 2021 5:26 pm

I was thinking about that cerebral descriptor and I think it’s more that Nolan’s cinema processes emotions differently giving the impression of intellectualism or cerebral understand probably aided by Nolan taking a number of cues from Mann. If anything these films are rather romantic taking emotion and intellect as one and the same wherein the ethical and moral is defined in emotional terms. That’s why good and evil is usually defined through relationships. The Batman films are a good example of this where Rachel gives emotional stability and happiness to all of our protagonist leaving them unstuck when she is not present. Selina in the third film is who allows Batman to actually become Bruce Wayne. That relationship reveals Nolan’s understanding of Wayne wherein the Batman always was about the emotional idea of revenge which Rachel was only able to direct in a potentially positive direction, but not heal.

For a Nolan male the females make them good. Interstellar is perhaps the most complex example of that where it is not the emotional of sexual love being the romantic ideal, but rather familiar love in his version of Rip van Winkle. Another oddity in his career is his use of Cotillard who plays the only negative female characters I can think of since Following. She both times is like a safety blanket of lies he protagonist wants to tell themselves. Nevertheless though, they remain relationships defined by and thematically used for emotional purposes.

These films might seem primarily cerebral because the genre dictates Nolan feels comfortable in tend to lack language for emotional express along melodramatic lines. In this Bond impression there’s not really the space for Washington to tell Debicki, “I love and respect you,” and instead the reader needs to understand that based on the acting. Washington really had his work cut out for him needing to balance being Bond and being defined by his empathy. That, at least for me, he succeeded so beautifully is indicative of Nolan’s dependence on strong collaboration with his actors to fulfill this vision of pure genre exercise for melodramatic purposes. That’s also what I think is pretty unique about him as I can’t think of another artist so dedicated to genre rules that are so completely opposed to his thematic concerns. It would be like if Cronenberg only made movies in the Madame Butterfly mode.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#287 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jul 06, 2021 10:05 pm

The Mann comparison is a good one, probably the closest auteurist affinity in terms of an aesthetic shield of formalism's relationship to deeper emotion, though as I've argued elsewhere I think the directors have wildly different philosophies regarding the relationship between the cerebral and intimate. Essentially, Mann views the superficial exteriors, pragmatic logic included, as cynically necessary to segregate/suppress emotion with psychological defenses out of preservation for internal stability, while Nolan yearns to join them as an ideal blending for internal stability. To be reductive, Mann leans pessimistic, believing the separation of mechanical/cerebral and emotion to be optimal, partially empowering in operating the best you can under tragic conditions, and partially tragic because the conditions inhibit a crucial part of us. Nolan also sees people as broken without the parts complementing one another, but leans optimistic believing people can become whole. The crucial difference, as you've laid out a bit, is that Mann lives in objective reality- hence the harsh pessimism, while Nolan validates the subjective experience as supremely vital- so important that it may as well be objective itself in its value to us as the existential experiencer. They are both mature enough to know that external forces intrusively violate our wholeness and that we must adapt to survive, but Nolan admires the power of the mind to make us a whole entity -that is elastic beyond the bounds of an insulated 'role' a la Mann- even if only within the small world of our mind.

I completely feel at home with Nolan's comprehension between emotion and cognitive linkage, because he's someone who seems to truly understand how intertwined they are- so while I definitely agree with the surface-level dissonance you lay out regarding Nolan's "dedication to genre rules that are so completely opposed to his thematic concerns," his films function to me like an externalization of the imaginative mind (well, duh, it's a movie, but I mean self-reflexively so) whereby intellectualizations and vulnerabilities don't only coexist but influence one another throughout 'our' narratives. That's partly why Inception is his best film, because it's both the best demonstration of Nolan's ethos, and of the human mind/heart functioning in a rhythm of symbiosis far more harmonic than most people realize. Plus it's the definition of cinema, reaching emotional, cerebral, creative, and spectacular heights, engaging the audience on every level that we need art to, in order to deconstruct the enigmas of our personal experiences and abstract desires to actualize fantasy.

Of course you bringing up the various women who influence Batman reminds me of Pfeiffer's Selina Kyle in Batman Returns, whose intimate chemistry of brokenness -prompting Mann-sublimating functionality that Wayne can identify with deeply- allows Wayne to emerge from his defensive 'role' of Batman and grasp onto a glimmer of hope to heal, as he instantly becomes willing to sacrifice everything to connect with her on a permanent emotional level. However, as that film cynically proposes, this is an unsustainable mirage for that healing is not something we can access through another tangible object, job, experience, or person. I think this is something that both Mann and Nolan also believe, but Mann thinks it's the best option and Nolan wonders out loud if we should just keep trying anyways, and perhaps focus our efforts on understanding the drive behind that desperation... wearing the therapist's hat rather than the pragmatic coach's.

Back to Tenet, while I don't want to exclude Washington's skills from the equation (which I think is easy to do in this role, if one misjudges his behavioral informative performance as only existing on the surface level), he is also an actor who naturally exudes a feeling of warmth. Even though he's far from my favorite character or actor in Nolan's canon, this is easily the most perfect use of casting Nolan has tapped into to create that nonverbal understanding of empathy through action you mention.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#288 Post by knives » Tue Jul 06, 2021 10:37 pm

I agree with basically all of that except Inception as his best. Interstellar and The Prestige are the ones that speak most strongly to me.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#289 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:05 pm

I get that, they've both grown on me a lot (especially Interstellar) and I enjoyed them both to begin with. The Dark Knight speaks to me the strongest on a philosophical level, forcing moral compromise in a manner that recognizes Mann's oppressive realism but wholly in the realm of Nolan's inescapable emotional drowning. Plus Ledger's Joker is the alien monster of confident nihilism, that which figuratively exists to prove that mass collective ideologic is a vulnerable illusion.


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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#291 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jan 05, 2024 6:09 pm

Those Peloton adverts are getting really specifically targeted now, aren't they!

(The irony of someone working out complaining of strenuously wasting their time is also not lost on me. The brain is a muscle too, lady!)

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